People love to talk about this stuff because it's the same concept as "what if the red I see isn't the red you see?" but dressed up in more complicated language and with frankly depressing overtones of fixed intrinsic capabilities or genetic luck of the draw. Everything I know tells me that most people, because they seem capable of doing the same things everyone else can do, all have extremely similar minds and don't differ in major ways like this, at least not in terms of potential.<p>IMO, the only caveat here, and it may be a big one, is that of perception and imagination shaped by experience. I started learning music in my late 20s. Now, in my mid 30s, I can understand lyrics to songs when I couldn't before, identify chord progressions (a concept I had no knowledge of beforehand) and imagine entire arranged songs in my head. It's not that I didn't have a "mind's ear" before, it's just that I hadn't built a bunch of useful skills and conceptual frameworks to work with. Whether my music education developed new neural networks that might be detected or analyzed is another question.<p>This has to be the same way it works for visual artists. Obviously a skilled illustrator, painter or sculptor is going to be better at visualizing imagery than someone who doesn't do those things. If that's the case, just thinking about images a lot makes you better at visualizing images. Ultimately, that's not much of a shocker and isn't very interesting.
If I try to imagine a room I have never been in or a landscape I have never seen before it comes out looking like in a fever dream. No proportions make sense, it's shifting around, etc. I don't know if that's worse than having none at all. :P<p>> On the other hand, people with aphantasia don’t do as well as others at remembering details of their own lives. It’s possible that recalling our own experiences — known as episodic memory — depends more on the mind’s eye than does remembering facts about the world.<p>This is true for me as well. I know that I've been to Italy several times from ages 10 to 15 with my family, but I couldn't tell you much more than fragments or how often that was, etc.
I wonder if this is a skill that must be learned before a certain age, something like what happens for learning a language [0] and possibly learning the natural numbers [1]. It is also interesting that they have learned to be able to solve problems that require mentally rotating shapes.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/</a>
[1] <a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.2157&rep=rep1&type=pdf" rel="nofollow">https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...</a>
I played a little bit of Disco Elysium, which is a super interesting detective who-has-lost-their-memories, & wakes-up-in-a-run-down-city game, and one thing that just blew me away right away was picking skills as I was building my character.<p>One of the example skills that blew me away, that put a pin on a set of ideas & thoughts that were floating about but un-named, was "Inland Empire". I struggle to describe it, but it's kind of the inner reserve of imagination, resounds very much with the hyperphantasia extreme described in this article. The game's full skill set is semi-viewable from here[1], & Inland Empire is a psyche skill on it. There's a lot of other fun amazing good skills, most a bit more classic in nature, but Inland Empire shored up & defined how I think of the Mind's Eye in a big way.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-character-creation-intellect-psyche-physique-motorics-and-the-24-skills-explained" rel="nofollow">https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-charac...</a>
My girlfriend is one of those. And I’m one of the opposite.<p>I can visualize building an engine in my head step by step. Even going to get the parts if I want to.
My girlfriend can’t even visualize the car. Or the garage, or anything. She thinks in concepts, and understanding stuff like abstract things is much easier for her than for me.<p>If I don’t see the process or make some visual analogy, it’s hard for me to get it.