My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

Speaking personally: my hand just moves. A top hat is roughly an elliptical base with a smaller cylinder affixed to it on-center, maybe a colored band or a bow wrapped around the bottom. The band is another cylinder w/ less height circumscribed into the larger one. The bow is maybe two triangles connected w/ a circle. Add some squigglies and shading to make the bow look like fabric. All this has to be skewed by perspective, which is going to be some lines I lay down w/ a straight edge. I like pencil, because I make lots of mistakes. I hated art-class as a kid because markers, crayons, colored pencils, etc. were torture to me, I had no idea how someone could commit to permanence w/ the first stroke. (Obviously had no idea what aphantasia was, then, but I do remember thinking pretty early on how _weird_ guided meditation sessions were. The backs of my eyelids are pretty uninteresting.)

>Do the coordinates of the vertices appear in your head or instructions about how to move your hand?

I don't see anything except what is on the paper. I probably use more guidelines than most, and my (admittedly amateurish) art looks very "sketch-y" _because it is._ I use lots of thin strokes or draw guidelines and erase ones that don't seem right. I'm very bad at "rendering" final scenes, I essentially have to just trace my own work very deliberately. (Though I'm slowly learning to lean on tracing via layers in digital tools to help with that.)

The facts of the "scene" are just present in my mind. My muscle memory acts on them. I am usually repulsed by what's on the paper and refine it. It's maybe akin to an internal monologue; closest thing I can think of is if someone was reading me a recipe over the phone: but instead of ingredients it was simple shapes "draw this, then that on top of it, but erase this line here at the bottom." Though it's not really a voice, exactly, unless I choose to vocalize or sub-vocalize it.

I don't really know how to describe it, I don't "see" the facts, or "hear" the facts, they're just _there._ If you ask me about my car, it's a blue Subaru. I didn't envision their emblem, or see the color blue, or the outline of the car, or anything like that. I just know it's a Subaru, and it's regal blue pearl - 35J. (Ironically I'm fucking terrible at trivia games.)

Also - if you ask me to draw with my eyes closed - you're probably going to get a bunch of disjoint strokes. It took a long time for me to figure out how to effectively use a digital tablet. (I'm still not sure I love it, but digital authoring fills too many other gaps for me to give up on it.)

Decades of research have proven that people cannot be trusted to describe how their own minds work. We are unreliable narrators of our own experience even in the best conditions, and having a zeitgeisty, quirky trait like aphantasia to wear as a badge will obviously skew the results even further.

Personally, I don't believe for a second that there are a significant number of sighted, otherwise typical human beings out there who have zero ability to visualize anything. Of course, people get better at things with practice, so I buy that some people might be better at it than others. I couldn't recall melodies very well before studying music for several years. But if you know what an apple looks like, and you can describe that or draw it, even crudely, then you have some inner representation of what an apple looks like. Whatever words you use to convey your internal experience of recalling or assembling the relevant information are inconsequential.

For example, I am very adept at art, particularly color and shading, yet I struggle to consciously imagine color or shading. I can consciously imagine 3-dimensional shapes and rotate them, but I struggle with any other visual data.

And yet I demonstrably CAN generate other visual data because I can draw and paint things, even things I have never seen before.

Clearly my brain is actually doing that work, even if I am just not conscious of it, thus I don't ascribe aphantasia to myself. My brain is perfectly functional in this area.