alt Hacker NewsI'd be curious to know how people with aphantasia come up with ideas, or what they call that process if not imagination. The author has written books. Books have stories. Somehow she comes up with them. If that's not imagination, then what is it. I have a hard time visualizing things myself, and I'm a lousy painter, but is _that_ what aphantasia is?
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Best way I can describe it is as a different sense.
I have a sense of how things relate, like a graph I can follow. So in my room I know the couch is in the corner of the room by the window and there is a desk taking up the space on the other side, with a gap between.
I can’t “see” it, like a drawing or picture, I can just sense the spatial relationships.
I recently did a little fun series of photos with my daughter at a Halloween event and came up with the idea as a series of frames and what I was trying to convey.
The end result was a complete surprise to me, because I only imagined the story and spatial relationships. The photographer said it was the most creative sequence anyone did that night.
Although it’s on my fridge that I open multiple times per day, I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, only logically. For example I have to remember the costumes we wore, I can’t see them in my head, to remember what we looked like. So visualization ability is not necessary for creativity, I believe.
People without aphantasia see images in their head. If you don't see images, you have aphantasia. I don't see images. It took until I was in my 40's to realised that this wasn't most peoples experience.
I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.