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You're asking the wrong question. How do you guys without aphantasia manage to read when there's pictures whizzing around your head all the time??
Mechanically, whenever I read about someone's or someplace's introduction and it describes their appearance, I'll just skip that section. If it's more than a sentence-long description I'll often unconsciously just move on to the next paragraph - it's literally meaningless to me.
I read a lot when I'm not stressed. This week, I've read the whole of the Robots series by Isaac Asimov (four books, around 1500 pages total). Several times, I've read entire books in one sitting without even moving.
I can't really tell you if it affects my ability to enjoy books, because I don't know how I'm "supposed" to enjoy a book. So instead I'll just talk about why I like to read.
Robots and Empire spoiler
When Daniel and Giskard decide to be friends and shake hands, symbolically becoming people rather than just machines, made me cry. It's so meaningful.World-building This is something that I think Alastair Reynolds is really good at. He writes science fiction books that are grounded in reality, and being able to see what he imagines. Another good example is old science fiction where there's the dichotomy between humanity having conquered space thousands of years ago and yet the cutting edge of technology developed a few years ago is recieving the news on a paper ticker tape! Seeing what what the authors imagined vs things we take for granted today but was so advanced it never even occurred to them, like the Internet.
Mystery / plot There's a certain beauty to seeing the web that's been built up over the course of a story all coming together at the end. A good example would be Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time where all the threads come together and the resolution at the end wasn't what I expected but, in hindsight, nothing else would have done it justice.
Character growth Gravity Dreams by LE Modesitt is my favourite book and I don't know why. I think it's just that the journey the main character goes through really speaks to me and gets me thinking about my own philosophy and life.
In summary, I'll say that you don't have to see something to comprehend what is happening and to be touched emotionally. As for your other question, I also watch film and TV but I definitely prefer animated over live. I can get easily confused between different actors which doesn't happen with animation for me. I find that TV or film takes less effort to enjoy, but also that I don't enjoy it as much as a book.
For me, the book and my surroundings completely disappear, the whole thing turns into a dream-like movie experience. I don't see letters or words at all, it becomes an unconscious process that keeps feeding the dream and it looks similar to fuzzy AI videos.
Sometimes the process of getting pulled out into reality again can be brutal: suddenly it's 3h later and I have to look around and take a moment to settle back. If you dream while you sleep, it's like when you suddenly wake up while you were in an intense dream, takes a moment to process. I'm really completely gone in another world the whole time.
That's what I've heard other people say, and it just sounds insane. You're in a world of fantasy literally seeing things that aren't there and somehow that's normal behaviour. Crazy!
But I guess it seems weird to you how I can do anything without seeing things. I've had someone online get very angry with me for saying I have no visual imagination, because how can I even read and recognise letters if I can't see them in my head?
Humans are very weird sometimes! It's nice that there are so many different ways to exist :)
I think I'm kind of on the other extreme, I day dream a lot. It's like I can experience anything I've experienced before on demand and replay it. Sometimes it's annoying, it's like someone left 3 TVs and 2 radios on in my head and I can't turn it off.
I didn't know that was a thing until today, but also totally unsurprised, the brain is super weird.
I don't struggle to picture it though, that only works for me if the book is interesting. When it's boring (ie. forced to read it and there's a test), I think my brain falls back to how you read books.
That sounds pretty wild.
You both seem nuts to me. I can conceptually imagine, but obviously cannot see things in my head because I'm not schizo, my surroundings don't disappear but it doesn't mean I don't appreciate descriptions and conjure concepts from them, just not imagery.
I think all this aphantasia stuff is just trappings of the English language and having "imagine" have the word "image" as a root, which is wrong, because imagination is more about concepts, it's a unique data structure that's not related to jpegs or photons and doesn't involve them. But some people conflate the two because their language doesn't allow them to think otherwise so they assume concepts are literal images in their head, and others with enough self-awareness to know they don't actually "see" anything in their head assume they have an issue/divergence. It's so bizarre to watch.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you can't relate to mental images existing in a visual sense you probably have some degree of aphantasia.
Some research indicates that it may be a spectrum from complete lack of imagery to full five-sense detail, which might be why it's hard to relate to either extreme. At any rate most people fall in the category of seeing an image, to the point that hyperphantasia is even more common than aphantasia.
I have it*, but not as severe as others. Imagining an apple starts as a very abstract concept, I can't visualize it without concentrated effort. Other people might be able go on to describe the stem, the leaves, the shade of red, the glossy wax exterior, etc... I can't automatically build to any of that, even if I subconsciously default to a red apple the "image" may just as well be green.
*edit: checked the vviq test and discovered the label is hypophantasic
I'm not going along with this tiktok diagnosis shit when the way I see it I have extremely fundamental problems with the plausibility of the entire concept.