Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious about aphantasia - if I asked you to draw a floorplan of your home/office etc. would you not be able to do it? If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are connected together? Or would do it some other way? (I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I think that would be a majorly debiliating condition rather than just some a…
Yes, in fact my ability to draw from memory places I've seen is, if anything, from experience, substantially above average. However, when I draw from memory, my drawings do tend to be more stylized. I can "imagine" what a building looks like, but I can't see it. Even our language makes this hard to describe, and the reason why I didn't realise that this isn't how other people do it, because most of our language for r…
As a molecular biologist I often deal with minute quantities of substances in small containers, but I just picture them there, the molecules, what happens to them as I dilute a sample or add some enzyme. Reading a book is like watching it play out.
I have a colleague who is also much more text oriented. I really wondered how she can function without seeing all the departments in an overview and the connections between them, and how governance structures overlap with those departments, etc. For me it's a lot to hold in, overwhelming at times. But she's absolutely great in these types of things, just masterful, very structured as well. Her mind must be very alien to me, I always wonder what her experience of life looks like (or not "looks like", apparently... But how it is to her...)