My sister has #5 and I can ask her to make a response if you want OP.

Last we talked about it she said if she tried really hard she can see come colors and shapes but that's about it.

The best conversation about it we ever had went something like this (keep in mind were both autistic and when together dont always communicate like neurotypical people do):

*while driving*
her: "get in that turn lane to the right"
*i do the 👆hand tricks and turn*

her: "when I don't want to do that I always think in my head 'never eat soggy waffles' and remember that east is left and right is west"

me: "that's not even correct,, but like WHY would you do that??"

her: "to remember how to turn"

me: "why wouldn't you just do the hand things?"
me: "like imagine them in your head and-"

her: "MUST BE NICE HUH?"
*we both explode in laughter*

she didn't even mean to make a joke about it, that's just genuinely the way she remembers lefts and rights

also this meme has become a common occurrence whenever the topic is brought up

Also a pretty interesting thing I remembered while writing this is a clip on TV (can't remember what show it was) where they asked a room of people to draw a bicycle then they made it IRL by welding it and told them to ride it a block or two and back. Only 1 of ~15 did it correctly, one girl got it exactly but forgot the peddles. Pretty interesting how they could all imagine a bike but couldn't draw it correctly

This one is a cluster fuck for me... I can visualize an object in my head and even to the point of placing it in real space in my hand and being able to rotate it. I cannot however, see your face in my mind after you have just left the room.

Don't really know how that fits in.

I never know how to interpret this scale. I can think of objects and describe what I'm thinking about, but I don't see anything in the same way my eyes do. Or rather, I see a black void, and if I try to picture an apple it's like a black object on a black background, but I know it's there.

I also get better at it the longer I do it; if I read a book for a long while, the ideas get sharper in my head and can be in color, but I'm still not "seeing" in the same way my eyes do.

am I the only one like this?

Some people really are out there living their lives with aphantasia. I can’t imagine that.

being a 1 with ADHD is crazy, like I can be in the middle of a class and zone out and start visualising myself walking around the campus in incredible detail, or FPV droning inside a friend's house, or really anything I can think of, although that said it takes a fair bit of effort to keep it going beyond a certain amount of time.

This reminded me of a sort of similar topic, and curiously enough it's about reading, and might provide some insight into your question.

Some years ago, I happened on a thread in which the OP asked people whose voice they "heard" when they read.

I couldn't even make sense of that question. The only time I "hear" voices when I read is when a character speaks. The rest of the time, I not only don't "hear" the words - I'm not even really aware of them. My eyes follow the lines while my brain instantly translates the words I'm seeing into images and concepts and the like. And yes - it's like a movie playing out inside my brain, and yes, I'm a #1 on this chart.

But apparently there's a not insignificant number of people who "hear" a book inside their heads just as if someone else was reading it out loud. Instead of visualizing things, they remain focused only on the words - the representations - and somehow glean from them alone the necessary details.

I wouldn't be surprised if those people are also generally #5 or thereabouts on this chart, and again what it is is that their brains don't directly envision things but instead rely on descriptive representations.

I don't get how it works either, but self-evidently it does.

Too fun and interesting to be a shitpost. Half my family are 1 the other half are 5. Woo!

Oh wait can people really imagine something with that amount of detail in their heads??(#1) I (#3) always thought the idea of sonething is enough

I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 I think. If I try to imagine a detail, I can't see the rest of the thing. If I want to see the whole thing, it's all very vague and shadowy.

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

I'm a 5.

Probably why I prefer graphic novels and was not really into textual books that much. I wish I could play a whole movie in my head while reading a book. I'm so jealous.

My dreams are super vivid though, and lucid dream often. And I remember my dreams in heavy detail. My dreams are like a 1 or 2.

I’m probably about a 4, maybe 3.5, on this scale. It kinda sucks not having any idea what it’s like to actually be able to visualize things, so I don’t even really know what I’m missing.

There are times I can be "sucked into" a book. I'm in there, seeing the story like its real. I forget about everything else momentarily. Very jarring when my concentration is broken, and suddenly I remember who/where I am.

Also once had the classic "dreaming in code" when stuck on a programming project in school. Words can't properly describe the experience, besides I was dreaming in code. I shot out of bed and immediately typed up the working solution to the problem I was stuck on.

I'm somewhere between 5 and 4 if I'm really trying. Never felt like a handicap or anything before

One time I had a dream about the ascii game I played. I dreamed it both IN TEXT, and my brain produced images of the people, places, and things at the same time as I usually imagined them.

While we're at it, when I start falling asleep reading a novel, it just keeps going in my head, like a movie. And believe it or not, the plot is usually a logical progression from where I left off. Stephan King is perfect for this, but that may be because I've read his books so many times. May also be because his prose flows so smoothly for me that I can just roll with it.

!aphantasia@lemmy.world !aphantasie@jlai.lu