I must respectfully challenge this interpretation on phenomenological grounds.
To presume knowledge of another's mind's eye is to commit a fundamental epistemic error. Having conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of subjects, I've discovered that visualization manifests along a vast spectrum of human experience, each with its own unique phenomenology and nomenclature. For some, the mind's eye is void; for others, it blazes with such intensity that it eclipses physical sight itself.
The bicycle-drawing analogy fundamentally misconstrues the relationship between mental representation and motor expression. These are orthogonal cognitive faculties—one need not be a sculptor to possess perfect proprioceptive knowledge of one's own face.
The eyewitness testimony example actually undermines the original argument. The critical factor isn't visual recall but temporal-causal sequencing—the who, what, and when of events. My research suggests that aphantasics demonstrate superior accuracy in reconstructing factual sequences, unencumbered by the distortions of visual reconstruction. Indeed, one might argue that the ideal witness would be someone who processes experience without the intermediary of visualization.
This points to a deeper truth about cognitive diversity: what some dismiss as deficit may in fact represent an alternative—and in certain contexts, superior—mode of engaging with reality. The visualizer's mind performs an act of creation with each recall, reconstructing and thereby potentially corrupting the original experience. The aphantasic mind, conversely, may preserve information in a more pristine, unrendered state—accessing facts without the degradation inherent in repeated mental imaging.
This is not merely a neurological curiosity but a profound philosophical distinction: between those who remember through representation and those who remember through direct apprehension. Each mode carries its own epistemic advantages, and our insistence on privileging the visual may blind us to entirely different ways of knowing.