Yes - I feel the grief of another. The extent of the grief would depend on my connection with the primary griever and/or the amount of grief they were feeling. I doubt very much if my grief is near as great as the primary griever, but if the primary griever is someone I love, it can be pretty intense. And even if they are just another fellow human in pain, I can cry along with them and share their pain .
I am a multisensory aphantasic in that I can not have a mind's eye,or ear, or sense of taste, or smell and if you asked me to feel the feeling of being burned - I could not conjure it up. I can’t even remember ever being burned (even though I have burn scars) as I have very little autobiographical memory. But, I have a deep knowing of pain, and joy, and love, and hate, and anger, and happiness and depression, and thus can feel a very deep empathy. I don’t know where this knowing comes from, I just know I am very good at feeling the joys and pains of others on a visceral level and responding to them.
I believe that differences on whether or not people with aphantasia are good at tasks that most people rely on their ability to visualize to accomplish is whether their minds developed successful work arounds to accomplish those tasks. Like I am very very good at finding my way, but I do so by relying on my unconscious to maneuver my body (or my car) in space. If I try to think about where I am going, if someone ask me how to get somewhere I go to every day, I can’t tell them because I have no mechanism to translate my very good unconscious ability to find my way to my consciousness. Yet if I do not think about how to get to where I am going I inevitably find my way there. If I have to explain this it is something like I will study at a map and and get a knowing that the part of my mind that does this now has it, then I will get in my car and it will drive me there while my conscious mind is occupied with other task, I could not redraw the map or even describe the map that I have programmed into my unconscious, but is there and will be unconsciously remembered and integrated into all the other unconscious maps my mind has integrated so I am left with the ability to find my way between any two points in these maps without picturing anything. If you ask me why my mind developed the ability to find my way without a mind's eye while other aphantasics might not have, I can only theorize that I grew up in an extremely chaotic ever changing environments where my ability to find my way was crucial to my survival.
I am aphantasic also with absolutely no ability to visualize while awake , but my dreams are very visual and vivid. I feel they are real when they are happening and have. on occasion remembered things I believed happened in reality, only to realized latter they never happened I had only dreamed them. I am coming to understand from reading over the post from others with aphantasia that it is not the same for everyone.
I have discovered I am an aphantasic at 70, I really did not know I was quite as cut off from what is typical. I had no pseudo-hallucinations with Ganzflicker. But reading about it and taking the test reminded me of my misspent youth as a hippy in San Francisco in the late 60's and 70's. I did quite a lot of LSD, but never had any hallucinations, though I tryed very hard to by taking massive amounts, more then any of my friends who were hallucinating up a storm. And now I wonder if being aphantasic prevents someone from having visual hallucinations period?
I am 70 years old and just discovering I am a multisensory apthanasic. I learned a couple of years ago about visual aphantasia and thought it strange that people were not just being metaphorical when talking about seeing; and now I am finding they can literally experience all other senses at will. Damn I feel so deprived. I remember watching a Steven Pinker lecture a few years ago, where he was refluting a claim that words came before thought, and brought out how that was logically impossible. And I followed his logic and it was sound, but I know, that for me, I cannot think without words. I don’t hear the words I am thinking, but all of my thoughts come to me in word structure. I feel strangely at a loss here. I did not know I was such an alien.