I don’t think many programmers have this issue, I haven’t met another in real life. I certainly don’t think it’s an advantage for software development in general, many of the best developers I’ve worked with over the years have been extremely visual in their thinking (one guy would close his eyes whenever you were describing how something should work so that he could translate to visual, another would only describe things with whiteboard marker in hand, drawing pictures as he went). In fact, I’m very grateful for having been taught by them to design visually early on in my career. I’m mid 40s, and a core part of the value I deliver in my current role is drawing pictures.
I realised my brain worked differently when I was about 21 and went to see a psychologist. He asked me to close my eyes and picture my mothers face. I couldn’t do it, and he then asked me to picture some other things and I couldn’t do any of it. There was no name for this condition back then, and both he and I were surprised. I was surprised he was asking me to do things that were obviously impossible, and he was surprised I couldn’t do something that everyone can obviously do. Since then I’ve talked to many people about the “minds eye” and how they perceive things. I’ve never met another like me, but there seems to be a large degree of variance in how detailed or vivid this mental imagery is for individuals.
I married very young (25), and my wife is the other extreme. It turned out that she has ASD, and thinks mostly in pictures. She always had auditory processing delay, and part of the reason for that is that words all create images in her head. The delay is partly because there is an automatic translation between words to images going on. She can see images in her head with incredible vividness and detail, and can dial up the detail as needed. She also can’t do algebra to save her life; if she can’t picture it she can’t think about it. We watched a talk from Temple Grandin a few years ago (an autistic PHD), and she described a very similar experience. I really do think there is wide variance in how brains work.
The lack of auto-biographical memory is something that seems to be commonly associated with my condition, and this part is clearly mostly downside. I still have semantic memory, so I can remember all the facts about things that have happened. They just don’t have visual or emotional content. But semantic memory needs to be consciously created, by which I mean that I have to be trying to remember as I go if anything is to be committed to long term memory. So most of what has happened in my life is irretrievably lost to me. I’m fortunate that I married young, because my wife remembers everything in vivid detail, and I love to hear the stories about things we’ve done together. Answering some of your questions:
> Does it mean that a person is unable, even with a lot of training, to form any visual images in their heads?
I have tried the training designed to help with forming mental imagery. This involves doing things like looking at something bright and then closing your eyes so that you have the “after image” and then trying to keep it around. So far I haven’t had any luck, but I do hope that I might still have success one day. I’ve read of other people with my condition being able to learn mental imagery this way, so it must work for some people at least.
> This would seem either unlikely, or related to memory problems, such as you describe.
I’m not sure why you think this is unlikely, to me this is obviously as normal as can be. As I said before, there is a clear association with the lack of auto-biographical memory based on what I read online. It could be some form of brain-damage I experience, but I don’t think this is the case. I think there is just a huge amount of variation in how peoples minds work!