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I sometimes wonder if there's not some sort of miscommunication about what it means to visualize something in your head.
I don't have aphantasia, but hearing some people try to describe what it's like to imagine something I think some people could get the idea that it's like a voluntary hallucination, literally seeing a thing that isn't there that you can conjure up and dismiss at your pleasure.
And that's certainly not my experience (though it's possible people have different experiences with it, I can of course only speak for myself)
The things I imagine don't actually exist in my vision. It's definitely getting processed through the visual parts of my brain, there's a sort of visual mental model with all of the dimensions and color information and such, but it's sort like a video game with the monitor turned off, except since my brain is the computer so I can just keep playing the game, I know where everything is, what it looks like, what it's doing, all of the physics and such still work, it's just not ending up on my brain's screen.
This is what I have. basically not aphantasia (we can still manipulate visual imagery in our brains) but it's also not prophantasia which is essentially just seeing, but with thoughts.
Thank you for teaching me the word prophantasia.
The way I've seen a lot of people try to describe normal mental visualization (phantasia I suppose?) can end up sounding like they're sort of projecting a mental object into their actual vision, which seems to be more of a prophantasia thing.
I can mentally design an object, have a very clear mental picture of what that object looks like, and I can look around me and I can know what that object would look like if it existed in the same space I'm in, but I cannot actually see that object in the room with me. I can also mentally build a copy of the space I'm in and visualize that, I could put that mental object in that space and mentally look at it, manipulate it etc. but that's still a different experience than actually seeing it with my eyes.
Right. "prophantasia" is a word used to refer to that "it's like you're actually seeing it", whereas visualization for me isn't like that and it's more like what you described, a sort of mental idea, like I can think of and mentally understand imagery, but it's not like I'm actually looking at it with my eyes (like when I see things or am in a lucid dream).
It seems some people with visualization do this "minds eye" kinda thing, and the some have that "it's like you're seeing" type.
I know exactly what you mean. To my, my form of internal visualization has always been more what some people consider to be their "mind's eye", but even that has a wide-ranging definition depending on who you ask. I like your explanation quite a bit more than just "mind's eye" though!
I can't "visualize" a full blown table, the example used in the article I linked, but I can imagine a very abstract form of a table. More like, if you were to take a modeling or 3D drawing program like Microsoft's Vizio and created a table in it, that's more what I can visualize. Or if someone asks me to imagine the sun, I can imagine a clip-art version of the sun, but I can't imagine vibrant brightness with it (another example used in the article).
Anything much more than that, and I'm no longer visually seeing it, but doing something more that you describe. As a random example, if you asked me to visualize a white neutron star, I can't literally see one in front of me - but it does make me recall memories of seeing one in the game "Elite: Dangerous".
I've heard theories (I don't know the accuracy of said theory) that when you're dreaming, your brain can't come up with something that's never existed - so when you see people, even random people, they're just random people you've encountered in your life but don't have any connection to. It's a sound theory for me, because that's how my form of mental imagery works, you could describe some totally fictional dragon as accurately and detailed as possible, but I won't be able to visualize it past a really abstract level. So if someone describes a purple dragon but gets really descriptive, I could visualize a generic animated dragon that is purple - probably would look more like Barney to me but... yeah.
Edit: Although that being said, I've noticed I'm a lot better at visualizing text. When I'm asked "How do you spell $some_word_here" I often find that I'm spelling it out-loud by reading out each individual letter. With programming, I find that when recalling something along the lines of "How do you make a function that does...", I'm using a combination of looking at a block of code I remember, and inferring the missing pieces.
I guess my brain is just weird...
That sounds a lot like aphantasia. I have friends who can strongly visualise and they claim it's like an inner TV that they can control & manipulate.
I think that you're falling into the same trap like many others here. Not saying you don't have aphantasia, but e.g. the subreddit is full of people deluding themselves into believing they suffer from aphantasia. Because their experience is similar to what Fondots said.
I have the same exact experience. But I can still rotate 3D images, paint scenes, draw maps, watch spaceships or compare color palettes in my mind.
Every questionnaire is kinda based on "do you see it like in real life or nah?". Depending on your definition of "seeing", imo people with the same level of visualisation might choose opposite ends of the spectrum.
I think the "mind's eye" is also partly a "skill" thing.
I remember distinctly as a child doing a great deal of "work" developing my mind's eye. I didn't have TV at home, so I read a lot, and that necessitated me being able to take text on paper and make mind's-eye models of what the things on the page might actually look like (often without any visual references at all)...and I recall the early ones were definitely vague and fuzzy.
As I got older and did this more, and was exposed to more visual images of different things, my ability to visualize (and "hear") with detail got better, as with any skill.
I suspect folks who have the ability to use their mind's eye, but who haven't been pushed into (or interested in) developing it might not realize what a "trained" mind's eye can do because they haven't developed that skill.
But I do think there are some people with legit aphantasia who don't even have the weak, untrained mind's eye that most people start out with.
Sorry I'm well late replying to this! For some reason I didn't get the notification.
I've been trying really hard to boost my visualisation skills. The best I can do is a vague suggestion of an image, it's like made out of mist and dissipates instantly.
I think there's probably like you said, a lot of people who think not being able to conjure a distinct internal image = aphantasia. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm aphantasic as I score extremely poorly on any tasks that require mental image projection (eg manipulation of 3D objects, spatial reasoning etc). Iirc last time I did an IQ test which broke down IQ into various regions, I scored 17% on that part. And there's practically nothing there when I shut my eyes and concentrate.
I would wager that without having done halucinogens a number of times, that score / my ability would be even lower.
Since how I'm describing things seems to be ringing at least partially true to you, I feel like that kind of reinforces my point, because I would absolutely not say that I have aphantasia. I think we may be having very similar experiences, and we're just finding very different ways to describe it because the right words to describe it don't really exist, at least not in English at the level we're able to converse at (maybe there are better words that are in common use in psychological or neurological circles, but to most of us would just be meaningless jargon.)
The inner TV thing is not a bad way of putting how I experience it(personally I tend to think of it as more of a 3d animation program, because I have far more freedom to move things around, change "camera" angles, sizes, shapes, etc.) but it's also not not totally accurate to what I experience either. I could describe it as a full-on audio, video, smell, taste, touch, temperature, etc. experience happenening in my head, but it's also different sort of experience than actually experiencing those sensory inputs in the real world. It happens in parallel to my real world experience, and is equivalent, occasionally even overlaps with it, but is still a separate and different experience.
I think of it sort of like how hot (temperature) food and hot (spicy) food activate very similar sorts of pain receptors in your brain but are still very distinct sensations. I'm pretty confident that if you found people who have absolutely no experience or knowledge of hot peppers and fed them a habanero, then asked them to describe the sensation of eating it, that most of them would probably come up with descriptors like "hot" or "burning," and we can all understand that, there is something in common between those two sensations that is hard to describe, but they're not exactly the same, you're not going to eat a ghost pepper and think that your tongue is actually on fire.
For me, the relationship between visualizing something in your mind and actually seeing something with your eyes is a lot like that, and probably even more similar.
And if someone lands on different words to describe spicy food, like maybe "tingling" or "itching" they're not wrong, even if we disagree with their word choice, nor are they experiencing something totally different than we are, their personal experiences have just led them to choosing different words to describe the same thing. What I'm describing as seeing or visualizing, or as an inner TV or 3D modeling program, you might might be experiencing the exact same thing but finding different words to describe, and we're both using our words in ways that don't make sense to each other.
There may also be sort of a skill component, some people have a knack for visualizing, and others have to actually develop that skill in some way, and maybe not everyone has the right opportunities or desire/motivation to develop that skill. You say you've somehow built yourself up from a 0 to a 2, so who's to say you haven't been doing it sort of subconsciously your whole life and you've just grown to have more conscious control and/or awareness of it? And maybe with the right training (and I don't know what sort of training that would be) you could continue to develop that.
And even with that increased skill, you may still find different words to describe how you're experiencing it.
Mental images are how I spot typos and misspellings. The way a word is spelled on a page looks wrong to me because it contradicts the visual memory I have for that word. I recently saw spicy misspelled as "spicey" and I knew it was wrong because it looks different than my mental image of the word spelled correctly.