> There's no way someone can't picture their mom in their head.
No matter how limited your thinking of other's experiences, I don't consciously see an image of anyone or anything at anytime while awake, in mind. Period. I know exactly what my mom looks like, but I still love her with all my heart. She is aware that I can't see her in mind and has said that she always knew I was different, but loves me just the same! I guess she "makes up" for my lack of this ability, given she can take herself back anywhere at anytime and see anyone that was there in that place in excruciating detail. It's a bit odd, but she has reported she can't see people in mind she doesn't love. I view this as a "tag" on which she is able to recall the images...
Consider the lobotomy procedure, for instance.
I literally can't imagine what it's like to have a vivid imagination because to me my perception of reality and whatever I can "imagine" are as obviously different as black is from white. I could never confuse one for the other, and I don't know how they can even be compared.
This gets back a bit to what alar44 was saying:
>> I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining something is a hallucination.
Having a vivid imagination is not the same as hallucinating. There is no confusion in my mind between what is real and what is imagined (visual or auditory imaginations, I can also imagine smell and taste, but to a much lesser extent). I don't "see" my mental images through my eyes, in the sense that if I want to imagine what a chair would look like in the corner of my loft, I see the real scene (loft without the chair) and imagine (in my mind) a separate scene, the same (to the accuracy of the imagination) but with the chair.
But it very much is an image in my head. It's not an abstract sense of what it would be like to have the chair there, it is the same as recalling a scene from the past to me. But deliberately altered, rather than accidentally altered based on faulty memory. In the same way, I can recall the visual image of pages I have read (this ability has declined with age) and read the words off that recalled image.
I get more of a picture than `chousuke, but it's certainly not a scene or an image. The best way I can think of describing it is a very low-res/blurry/faded image. Like I sorta can picture my mom's hairstyle and sorta put it on top of a face and pull in a few other details from specific memories here and there. But things like color of eyes, or size of certain facial features vs other? No way.