This is the line in the article that gets confusing for me. Like, are some people actually seeing an actual image of an apple, as if they were wearing VR goggles or something?
Another fun thing is imagining things but not fully. The brain will fill in the spots but not throw you all the info at once. For example I didn't really think of the monsters nose, but now that I did, it has a huge nose piercing like a cow ring. This is great for creation because instead of creating with your foreground brain, you can create for free with your background brain. I'm pretty sure every person can do this (barring <0.01% population health issues).
I use this extensively when I code too. I can see the lines of code, to the degree I can read them, and I've not found a limit to how much code I can have in my head and visualize at a reading level. I can do this with every single line of code from an animated ray tracer I wrote in C back in '85. Any code that I personally felt proud to have created, given about 5 minutes to recall the details, I can write the code out from memory.
Beyond seeing the lines of code, I see functions and objects and data structures as geometric shapes, and their interactions vary between images of little machines, like airplanes, traveling between them to complex bridge structures like freeways with lot's of traffic.
I'm also a lucid dreamer. I can tell when I'm dreaming with a test: if I say "apple" with my hand held on front of me, palms up and an apple appears which I can then grasp and hold, then I'm dreaming. I'll often wake at that moment, but when I don't I start taking advantage and fly like Neo. Often I'll fly into something, and the jolt wakes me. I wake laughing too.
It's funny for me, because I can "visualize" something in a non-visual way. I can transform it and imagine it fitting together with another object, or whatever. However, this is entirely non-visual. I see zero of this in my visual field, it's purely a sensation of seeing it without actually seeing it.
I also have nearly zero dream recall. I know I do dream, because occasionally I will wake up in the right part of my sleep cycle to literally feel the dream dissipating. Sometimes I can remember parts of it as it dissipates, but most of the time I have no clue what I dream after the fact.
The imaginary apple doesn't seem fully comparable to a real apple unless I'm in a very focused and compelling daydream, and even then real but not real at the same time, if that makes sense. But even now if I was to conjure an image of a faint, ethereal apple in front of this computer screen, I can do it easily.
The major difference is VR goggles are fully vivid, and remain so when I'm not willing them to be, and tangible in some sense I'm sure is indefinable with people to aphantasia. The VR goggles are real in the same way things that aren't dreams are real.
I don't personally have such a vivid visual imagination, but there are moments when it can feel like that — I won't know what I was physically looking at because I was so concentrated on a visual(-ish) mental image that obscured my awareness of the real world, to a degree.
Like the guy above, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle.
> obscured my awareness of the real world
Yes - because these are the same symptoms as someone who drives drunk and kills someone - "didn't see anybody walking there" (= unable to tell what you're looking at) "just a little buzzed" (= obscured awareness of reality) "I don't know what happened" (same)
Just to clear some things up, in case anyone cares:
(1) It is largely voluntary, what I tried to describe. Just like choosing to focus on your phone or the kids in the back seat while driving is voluntary. All of those are, of course, bad things to do. A good driver controls themselves — imagination included.
I wouldn't especially trust a driver's reaction time in "deep concentration" mode whether or not they were making pictures in their head, so I guess I don't see (ha) a big distinction.
Though actually, for me I find it harder to do mental visualization when there's a lot of real eyball visuals going on, as when driving. I have an easier time with a static background. Perhaps other people are different.
(2) I find that day-dreaming is somewhat voluntary, too. It can happen on its own, but it can also be a choice, like choosing to meditate. I don't understand your point about how someone else's ability to interrupt you makes it non-voluntary.
(3) I didn't mean to say I "see images in front of me." They are actually distinctly not in front of me — not outside my body. They live in a different space, if you will.
Isn’t it distracting? Seeing stuff in front of you when you should be looking at the road?
For example if asked to visualize a green banana, and you can only see vague, unclear, faint outlines of a banana, that's hypophantasia. If you cannot see an image at all, it's aphantasia. Some might see vivid details of the banana, like the matte skin and subtle green gradient, they fall under hyperphantasia. Others who lack the details but are still clear considered phantasia.
This also applies to all other senses, like being able to imagine a sound or smell.
It was cool. Sort of like a hazy projection over the visual field. Normally when I visualize something with my minds eye it is on a black background. When the visualization ends my visual field snaps back to reality.