It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/

Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.

In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.

I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.

I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.

But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.

Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media

Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".

I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...

> Why This Matters

Come on guys at least try.

I think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.