I also have it.

Dreaming: Normal, and I see stuff. This is apparently normal, but also why I thought I don’t have aphantasia. I even have lucid dreams.

Recalling: Similar to imagining things, I usually describe it as a not seeing something, but having the memory of having seen something.

Recalling media: Same as other recall. I might be able to still describe parts of it, but I see nothing.

Imagining: A memory of those things, very, very rough. More like recalling a dream that is already fading. If I try to imagine a landscape, it would be like a memory of having seen a child’s water painting: 2 mountains, blue water, round sun, roughly.

Reading: I love reading, very avid reader. I could never get into Lord of the Rings, and this is apparently somewhat common for people with aphantasia. All those detailed descriptions? They are just that for me, descriptions. I can’t see any of it. Now descriptions of things happening, I can totally get into that. But I don’t see anything.

For most of my life I thought people were being metaphorical when they said "imagine X in your mind". I didn’t realize anyone would actually see something.

There is also a fantasy writer, Mark Lawrence, who has aphantasia and wrote about it: http://www.marklawrence.buzz/story/aphantasia/

For the record, I love Lord of the Rings. But yes, there is something about detailed description of objects in books that rarely lands for me. The words have to in and of themselves convey a kind of conceptual beauty, or call upon a great metaphor or the like, otherwise they will bore me since I see very little and will mostly just get annoyed trying to keep all the details in my head.

I haven't been formally diagnosed but I'm definitely on the very low end of visualization. But I'll answer for myself:

While I'm dreaming and unaware that I'm dreaming, it's like I'm in real life. As soon as I start to wake up at all, everything fades to black almost instantly. I recall the experience as if I lived it though dreams are strange so it's far less consistent than a normal narrative.

What kind of memories? I often completely fail to encode and remember highly visual details - like what color hair someone has, what shirt they were wearing, and so on. But I could recall the name of the building in which my college showed the Matrix in the fall of 1999 because I could remember which way I walked there.

I recall audio strongly and can hear the voices of various characters in my head. I can do passable impressions of quite a few characters. I can tell you the story in detail, but if something hinges on a visual cue I will completely fail there.

I mostly talk to myself in my head. It's a running narrative. If you'd like a specific example, give me something more meaningful than "imagining".

If I want to read something and retain it well, I will hear it in my head in my internal voice as I'm reading.

Not the OP but..

Recalling memories for me has the detail of a short journal entry. It's not first person, I don't relive the emotions I felt at the time, and compared to my others the detail isn't there.

For example, when discussing my graduation with my father, I could recall the building, the general layout of the room, and parts of the ceremony's sequence. However, I can't recall walking across the stage, even though I know it happened. In contrast, my father could describe where he was seated and even what people in front of him were wearing.

Media I remember the concepts of what was covered and images or videos are familiar when I see them again, but I can't rewatch a moment in my mind.

Likewise for reading, I remember as a child not understanding what people meant when they said Daniel Radcliffe didn't match up to the Harry Potter they imagined.

Imagining is all about the idea, best explainer would be: https://aphantasia.com/wp-content/uploads/Imagine-a-horse.pn...

> What is your experience of reading like?

This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.

The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never thought it could be any different for other people.

I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to learn for people.

I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember via other means are more effective.

I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical locations.

I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.

I’m a prolific consumer of fiction. For me reading isn’t about the scenery so much as the ideas and messages within a work. I can appreciate character growth without the visual imagery involved. I hate fluffy details added to books. I don’t need an item by item run down of their entire wardrobe or the place settings on the table. That’s mostly just noise to me and books that feature those details prominently are a slog.

“He was all jowls and scowls”

Is infinitely better for me than writing out a list of visual characteristics that so many authors seem to lean on.

It's always stuck with me reading reviews of Greg Egan's novels.

In many of his novels characters are either non-human, post-humans, or AIs.

Many folks criticize the character development, etc. My only assumption that that Greg's writing style strips out all the cruft that I find a slog.

Because it doesn't have the cruft and focuses on ideas and messages, I love it.

I read a lot and have aphantasia.

Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to describing what people are wearing). I often even visually skip over section of text that express visual descriptions.

All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent of me thinking about something.

Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as some entity "space station" next to some other entity "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without any associated form.

If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere", "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations would look like geometrically (expressed as relations between shapes, angles, etc).

If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute the tags "clouds."

Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is directing my attention in this manner.

There's just no rich visual experience.

I will lightly defend a lot of this description in American Psycho.

I agree that I generally gloss over that sort of description, but in the case of this one book I felt like the obsessively-materialist descriptions in it did a great job of helping communicate the vacuuous frivolity of the culture the novel's picking at, if that makes sense?

That is to say, when I feel like the descriptions are ~fungible I'm probably right there with you in skipping over them, but they were one of my favorite parts of American Psycho.

Not op, but I wouldn't call it boring.

It's a lot like thinking, I guess. (Much of my thinking is already roughly abstract-lingual, so reading feels of-a-piece. I would characterize myself as having a running interior narrative, but this isn't a voice I "hear" as I gather it is for some.)

I generally prefer reading to listening since it's easier to back up and re-read if my attention has wandered.

I can have trouble staying ~oriented when there are lots of characters because I have no strong sense of what they look or sound like. (TBH I think this is an asset when it comes to adaptations. I may notice plot divergences, but I'm rarely bothered by the specifics of a place or character.)

A fair fraction of the enjoyment I get out of reading is about wordplay and language aesthetics, and much of the rest is about ~ideas and personalities.

Reading tends to drive a lot of synthesis/connection between divergent concepts for me. Some of my most intellectually-fertile (generative) time centers around reading.

I generally can't count on any kind of eidetic memory (unlike those I know who can, say, picture a page or replay a conversation to extract information from it). Instead, I generally lean more on deep conceptual synthesis. I am much more likely to retain some picky detail when it's integrated into my broader understanding than if it's effectively an arbitrary fact. I am the person who would rather take an essay exam centered on understanding than a picky multiple choice that hinges on arbitrary details like dates.

Likewise, I don't really vibe with arch/infra/service maps as much as narrative documentation. (This is not to say that they aren't sometimes helpful for understanding, but I do find them hard to ~grasp in isolation and not the first resource I reach for.)

Not the person you're replying to, but I would call myself "near aphantasic" and the answer to all these is that they are almost entirely conceptual rather than visual. What little visual impression I can form is extremely fleeting, incomplete, low fidelity, and in short nothing like actually seeing something. At some level I can tell my visual system gets activated, but it's completely different from truly seeing something.

I'll add another data point as I believe I'm on the extreme end of complete aphantasia:

Dreaming: Hard to describe without using words that imply too much here. It's the same as my imagination when reading. Meaning, I am aware of the plot, I can "feel" the place setting, recognize the actors involved, and sometimes even feel/understand the internal motivations of other actors in my dreams. It's hard to describe what I mean by "feeling," but maybe it is similar to how you "feel" your emotions. None of this is visual, even in my dreams. I rarely remember my dreams.

Recalling memories: As the article mentions, I have very weak autobiographical and episodic memories, to the point where my wife and friends are often surprised at how much more clearly they remember the events of my own life. I really do not recall, with any clarity, any events more than 10 years old. At the same time, my memory of "causal facts" is very strong. Meaning I have the ability to remember why things happened basically forever. For example, when taking calculus, I had a very hard time memorizing trigonometric identities, but if I was taught the origin, the "why" I would remember how recreate the identity on the fly for test. Plotlines are similar. I remember the motivation of the characters, the motivating details of the plotline itself, and then subsequent detail is attached to those logical threads of memory. Recall seems very tied to useful purpose. Meaning, I can't just remember something in detail at request. But if I take 15-30 minutes to start working on something, I am flooded with memories regarding that subject. And of course, none of these memories have a visual component. It's all more of an abstract collection of "stuff" that has a real mental substance and mass, for lack of better words, but not imagery.

Recalling visual media: Similar to above. The media is decomposed into chains of cause/effect. Again, hard to describe. I cannot "replay" a movie in any meaningful sense, but if we sit down to watch a movie I've already seen, I will immediately remember basically the entire plotline within a few minutes. I don't really enjoy rewatching movies, or even replaying video games unless there is something novel (watching with someone new/extra content). Reading books is different. I regularly reread books I enjoyed, maybe because there is a much higher amount of content from a logical plotline/story point of view.

Imagination: I "feel" things? Again, mostly centered around arranging lines of causal detail. When I was younger I used to put myself to sleep by making up stories in my head. This is very easy for me, but it's like an audio book (without visualization). This happens, then this happens. Alice says this, and that made Bob believe that, implying feelings. Miscommunication! Etc. Outside of imaginary storytelling I spent most of my time as a kid imagining what I could do/build, and this is the main activity of my adult imagination: imagining things I could make, things I could do with my family, etc.

Maybe another example, I'm not face-blind. I recognize faces, even in my imagination, but I don't "see" them in any literal fashion. For example I can imagine, now, what Viggo M. cast as Aragorn looks like, through the different emotional exclusions of the character, but I "feel" it. I don't see his face visually. I've had the experience of reading a book, watching a movie adaptation, and disliking the casting choice because it didn't match the "picture" in my head. Only there is no literal picture. The actors face "feels" wrong for the character. After seeing the actor I could tell you why their face was wrong for the role, but I could not tell you ahead-of-time what the character "looks like" in my imagination. I tend not to remember details of an author's physical description of their characters. I can't tell you, even now, if Aragorn has blue or brown eyes in the books. I think Viggo M. haa blue eyes, but that's a fact I'm remembering, not a mental image I'm consulting.

Reading: not much to add I haven't touched on already.