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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.