Dana Seccombe

I first discovered that I "had" aphantasia when talking with my gf--who has the opposite problem. She sees images so vividly that the images interrupt her train of thought, and thus her speech.  Sometimes she has difficulty finishing a sentence because of images evoked from some related thought.  She and her sons have very strong visual MEMORY, too.  They can look at text, graphics, or even files, and describe days later what they saw. It finally "snapped" for me that others really DO see images, whereas I see NOTHING, just blue-black when I close my eyes.  Like others, I'd assumed that when people say "imagine" or "visualize", they were using a figure of speech.  There have been a very few exceptions when I dream.  Maybe 5 times in my life I've had dreams where, for a very brief few seconds I do see a complete, color, detailed image.  Then it disappears, never to reappear. All through school I had trouble with long descriptive passages (think Dickens) because they essentially meant nothing to me.  To grasp a fiction  work I'd tend to reduce it to it's elements--essentially an outline. I'm pretty hopeless when it comes to drawing or painting in part because I have no visual reference. Retired now, I was once an engineer, engineering manager, and later executive.  I was excellent in math--but, unlike some other engineers, or talented scientists, could not visualize formulas or their physical consequences.  I'd have to reduce, in my mind, all engineering concepts to logic--which is manipulated by me using internal language.  This constant referral to logic caused some to refer to me as "Spock", at least partly because I'd default to logic to solve problems, whereas others might default to experience or  emotions.  I also use logic (as mentioned above) as a crutch for poor memory.  Logic can be used to "compress" knowledge so one doesn't need to remember as many facts One possible benefit of the inability to "see" mental images is less distraction, which can be helpful in certain situations. Those who DO have good visual images (phantasia?) can use the images to code memory (as in impressive magic tricks) by remembering a visual image of a room, with everything in it, and using the names of those objects in sequence to tell a story--thus remembering the story.  If the encoded items also correspond to numbers, the magician could remember thousands of digits easily.  I once tried this, but wasn't able to use the technique, because I didn't have the visual memory (but didn't realize that others do).