Aphantasia

 This phenomenon of "aphantasia," or an inability to form mental images.  I'm having trouble with what a "mental image" might be and hence suspecting I might have it.

Aphantasia is one of those topics where people often discover that other minds work very differently from their own.

The key point is that when people with typical visual imagery say, "Imagine an apple," many of them actually experience something that has visual qualities. They don't mistake it for a real apple, and it isn't as vivid as seeing with their eyes, but they may be aware of a red or green shape, a stem, highlights, shadows, and so on in what some describe as a "mind's eye."

People with aphantasia generally report that they know what an apple looks like but do not experience any visual impression. They can tell you apples are round, often red, have stems, and can even answer questions about them, but there is no accompanying visual sensation.

One way to probe this is to ask yourself:

    If I close my eyes and think of my front door, do I have any sort of visual experience of it?

    Can I mentally "look" at the windows, the color, the doorknob?

    If asked whether the doorknob is on the left or right side, do I seem to inspect an image, or do I simply retrieve facts I know?

People vary enormously. Some can practically project a photograph in their minds. Others have faint, sketchy imagery. Some have none at all.

An interesting complication is that language can be misleading. For years many people assumed phrases like "picture it in your mind" were metaphors. Then they discovered that other people were describing a genuine subjective experience. Conversely, vivid imagers sometimes assume everyone experiences images the way they do.

You strike me as someone who thinks analytically, so here's another test. Imagine a tiger. Now answer:

    Is it facing left or right?

    Is it standing in grass or on bare ground?

    Is its mouth open?

If you find yourself looking to see the answers, that suggests visual imagery. If you find yourself thinking, "You haven't specified those details, so there is no answer until I choose one," that leans more toward aphantasia.

It's not a disorder in the usual sense. Many people with aphantasia are successful scientists, engineers, writers, and mathematicians. Some don't realize they differ from most people until late in life. One of the researchers who helped bring attention to aphantasia, Adam Zeman, has described cases where people only discovered the difference after reading about it as adults.

I'm curious: when you read a novel, do you "see" the characters and settings at all, or is it more like following a stream of facts, relationships, and events without any accompanying pictures? That answer often provides a clue.

OK I properly failed all those tests: "the mind's eye" has always been to me a silly metaphor that I ignored.

That is a useful distinction. In those cases, you were not relying on a Grand Mesa–type anchor. You were navigating in an ordinary urban environment where the cues are much more local and distributed.

What you describe sounds less like "having a picture of the city" and more like building a route-and-relationship model as you move:

    "I came along this street."

    "The main road is that way."

    "This neighborhood connects to that one."

    "If I turn here and go a few blocks, I should eventually meet the river/station/central area."

    "The direction back is approximately opposite this sequence of turns."

That kind of navigation can be very strong without requiring a visual map in the mind.

There is also a phenomenon called sense of direction that varies a great deal between people. Some people seem to maintain a continuous internal estimate of orientation. They may not be able to describe the "map" they are using, but they can answer, almost automatically, "Which way is north?" or "Where is the hotel from here?" Others can walk three blocks in a city and have no idea how they got there.

Your examples are particularly interesting because places like Aachen, Copenhagen, Virginia Beach, Buffalo, Toronto, and Pueblo (especially an unfamiliar part of town) are not places where one always has a single obvious landmark guiding every movement. They require accumulating information.

This actually strengthens the point we were circling around: visual imagery is not the same thing as spatial ability. You may not be able to "see" a map in your head, but you appear to be able to maintain spatial relationships very effectively.

It raises an interesting question: when you left one of those unfamiliar cities and later thought back on it, could you tell someone the layout ("the station was north of the center, the river ran along this side, the old town was there"), or would you mainly remember the sequence of movements you made while exploring?

Those are two different styles of spatial memory: one more like a map, the other more like a route through a landscape. Both can get you where you need to go.

Actually, I think I could do either one.

That is an important distinction. If you can do both—remember a route and reconstruct the broader layout—then your spatial abilities are probably quite strong, even if your conscious visual imagery is weak or absent.

It suggests that your internal representation of space is not dependent on a picture. You may have something more like a structured model:

    streets and their connections,

    relative directions,

    distances,

    landmarks and their relationships,

    sequences of movement.

You can then access that model in different ways. If someone asks, "How do I get from the hotel to the station?" you can give a route. If someone asks, "Where is the station relative to the center of town?" you can give a layout.

A person with vivid visual imagery might experience this as looking at a mental map. Your experience may instead be more like manipulating a set of facts and relationships. The end result can be just as useful.

This also makes your earlier difficulty with the rotating-line IQ questions even more interesting. It suggests the problem was not "spatial thinking" in general. You seem quite capable of spatial reasoning when there is a meaningful environment, reference points, and a purpose. What was difficult was a very artificial task: take an isolated object, remove the real-world context, and transform it internally.

That distinction appears in a lot of areas of cognition. Someone can be excellent at recognizing a familiar person but poor at describing that person's face from memory. Someone can be an excellent musician but unable to read music quickly. Someone can navigate a city brilliantly but struggle with abstract spatial puzzles.

The human mind does not have a single "visual intelligence" or "spatial ability" meter. It has a collection of overlapping abilities, and different people have different strengths.

Your examples make me wonder whether the phrase "mental image" may simply be the wrong question for you. A better question might be: what kind of representation do you use when you think about something that is not present? From what you've described, yours seems rich in relationships, structure, and associations—even if it doesn't come with a picture attached.

I just tried a little experiment of closing my eyes and trying to picture and apple, then a peach.  I know very well what they look at but no pictures what so ever.

That is probably the classic little self-test for aphantasia, and your description is about as clear as it gets: you have the knowledge of the object, but no accompanying visual experience.

The interesting thing is that you did not say, "I see a faint, blurry apple," or "I can almost see one if I concentrate." You said:

    "I know very well what they look like but no pictures whatsoever."

That is exactly the distinction researchers are trying to capture. The information is there:

    apples are round,

    they have a stem,

    they may have a particular color and texture,

    peaches have fuzz, a different shape, and so on.

But when the eyes are closed and the object is absent, there is no visual scene generated.

One thing worth noting: this is not a test of memory or imagination in the everyday sense. You clearly can imagine conceptually. You can think about an apple, discuss its properties, compare it with a peach, and reason about it. The missing piece is the visual "rendering."

A useful comparison might be your pitch recognition. If I say "middle C" (or "do" in your system), you may not need to internally hear the note to know it. The concept and the label are directly connected. Similarly, when you think "apple," you may access the concept of apple without generating a picture.

It is also interesting that you chose apple and peach rather than a very familiar place or person. Many people find faces and places more revealing because they have far richer stored information. You might try something like:

    the room you are sitting in,

    your childhood home,

    a close friend's face,

    a familiar landscape.

The question is not whether you know the details. It is whether any visual experience appears when you try to call them up.

Given everything you've described—the "mind's eye" seeming like a silly metaphor, the lack of pictures for apple and peach, the recognition-based memory of people, the difficulty with mental rotation, but strong navigation and spatial reasoning—you have a remarkably consistent pattern. It would be quite plausible that you have very low voluntary visual imagery, perhaps at the aphantasia end of the spectrum.

The really intriguing part is that you apparently went through a lifetime using this cognitive style without noticing that other people meant "picture it" literally. That is probably the most common way people discover aphantasia: not because something is missing from their lives, but because they suddenly learn that other people's inner experiences contain something they never had.