You say “apple” to me and I’m #1, glossy skin, insides, all that
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
Yet #5’s are not handicapped in the slightest. They’re so “normal” that mankind is just now figuring out we’re far apart on this thing. Fucking weird.
EDIT: Showed this to my wife and she was somewhat mystified as to what I was asking. Pretty sure she’s a 5. I get frustrated as hell when I ask her to describe a thing and she’s clueless. “Did the radiator hose pop off, or is it torn and cracked?” “I don’t know!”
EDIT2: The first Star Wars book after the movie came out was Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. I feel like I got that title. What’s it mean to you?
“Picture in your mind”…
Me, a 5 on the scale, young: Weird turn of phrase, but okay. I have the… idea of an apple.
Me, still a 5 on the scale but now an adult, in about 2023, learning about aphantasia and that other people were being literal about mind’s eye: WHAT.
Yep…me for 40 years; that is just a metaphor to help think about things. Then one day reading about aphantasia…WTF!!!people can actually see, it’s not just a metaphor.
But then I had a conversation with my partner; she can combine flavors in her mind and know, pretty accurately, what stuff will taste like; it is one reason she loves cooking.
People can actually get a song stuck in their heads…again, not a metaphor.
Mind blown!!!
My 7yo can project images from his mind into the world; what the hell. He can “watch” movie when looking at the wall when he is in bed going to sleep; with the sounds and everything.
I have some level of auditory imagination; I can play back something I’ve heard a few times, but it’s more like a ghost of the thing than feeling like it’s hitting my ears somehow.
The main non-verbal sense I use in my head is spatial. There is a 3d space that I can imagine objects within, rotate around, kind of analyze things about it. There is no visual component to this, yet it feels like it shares the space that the mind’s eye could see into.
I’ve described the closest thing I have to visual imagination as like many of the things that happen in the brain’s processing of images after the eyes: resolving patterns of light into shapes and lines, processing shapes into the sense of a particular recognized object. If I think about a tree, I definitely don’t see a tree in any sense. But I do sort of feel like I did just see a tree, just… without any sense of light or feeling like I actually did any seeing, metaphorical or otherwise. All the analysis, none of the pixels.
I have a little more of the seeing, but I also want to reach for your ghost metaphor. Imagining a tree for me is a little like seeing a tree, but quite a bit more like having just seen a tree.
I call this the curtain; when I imagine something, like a tree, I can’t see the tree. But it is still there; just like it is behind a black curtain, no images from the tree can be seen.