Not all of us are "jealous" of course, but a memory palace seems like an incredibly useful technique if you can master it. I wind up just taking a lot of notes and relying on a Reminders app.
It does not feel the same as normal "seeing", so if I were asked that question I would probably say I still see a black wall.
Due to the confusion of language as well as the testimonies of some rare people with incredibly vivid mental images that are on par with actual physical sight, I thought I might have aphantasia for a period of time, but after reading up on it, I feel like aphantasia is a much stronger condition than most people on the internet think it is. "Just seeing black" when you try to visualize something isn't enough - it seems like that's just a sign of being a person with a fairly typical brain who's using the word "see" in its literal sense.
For example, in the star test (https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...), if I was a person who understood "see" in the first sense, I'd say that I was a 1. If I instead switch to using the second sense of the word, I'd easily be a 6.
It feels like any test that asks you to rate the vividness of the item you "see" in your mind's eye will fall prey to this problem. I saw a comment on HN where the commenter suggested asking someone to visualize an elephant in profile, and then ask them which way the trunk is facing to see if they're aphantasic or not. I'd also suggest that if you ever imagined a person running beside your car while you were taking a road trip as a child, you also probably don't have aphantasia.
If so, you're imaging the sense of sound. Visualization is just doing the same thing with sight. You can still tell that "internal sight" is different from real "external" sight.
Also I believe visualization is a skill that can be improved with practice. It's just a form of 2D working memory and it's known that working memory can be improved with practice.
I expect if you practiced that frequently, and gradually (over days or weeks) tried to add more details or colors etc you would find it improves over time.
But whether that's actually a worthwhile investment of time is another question :-)
Apparently so. That's how my wife describes it. She scores an easy 6 on the "star test" - https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a.... Myself, I normally score 2-3 on it.
> Close your eyes and imagine a red star. Which image do you see? I see 2, but most people see 5 or 6.
It seems some people are (a) reporting what they actually see with their eyes closed, i.e. mostly nothing, a 1. Others are (b) imagining a star and reporting what that looks like in their mind's eye.
I didn't think that aphantasia meant the (a)-type literal seeing, so I just read up on it again, and the descriptions seem to refer to (b)-type imagining/visualization, like imagining a giraffe then being able to describe what you see in your imagination. It doesn't mean you can actually see it, with open or closed eyes.
It seems this test convinced a lot of people they have aphantasia, as it seems most people are a 1. And I suspect most of those who say 6 are talking about what they imagine, not what they physically see. I'm a 1 in sense (a), but in sense (b) a 6, well, I can imagine any kind of red star, like most people, I believe.
I am 2-3 on (a) and (b). My wife is 6 on (a) and (b). She reports that she does actually see stuff as if it was there. Conversely, I only barely see the things, and at the same time, I can barely "imagine" them in the sense of (b). E.g. my process of "imagining a star and reporting what that looks like" consists of keeping the words, the tokens "red star", repeated by my inner voice on a loop, and then exploring the graph of associations. It's a non-visual process. I don't "see" it, but I can tell you all about it because I know how stars look like and what properties they have.
What I find interesting is that every single one of us is somewhere on that scale, and we don't quite understand the perspective of someone who is on a different place on the scale. Your own question highlights that ("Is it actually possible to see anything else?").
We are all trained from birth to deal with our senses and mental capabilities as they come, barring an injury. What each of us perceives is the de-facto normal. Learning that others don't have senses just like ours is something of an eye-opener.
I have tried to use memory palaces. The result is that now I have to remember two things rather than one (the memory palace location and the thing I'm trying to remember).
To be fair, I also seem to have Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) and that will impact personal memory recovery quite a bit. SDAM is common in conjunction with Aphantasia, and perhaps the two combined are conspiring against me in this instance.