I used to ask people about this a lot because I was curious about a related hypothesis: that aphantasia correlated with being good at mental math.
Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.)
Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).
Sample size of one. I have aphantasia and cannot picture images at all. I had a “natural” affinity for math and would often zone out extrapolating mathematical patterns in my head during school. Like the trick with multiplying 9s where you hold your fingers up. I remember spending days of class time working on a more generic rule to allow me to multiply any number by 9 in my head. This came to a crashing halt for calculus as I was not able to develop a mental model for it at all during high school. Everything that had been easy and interesting before just disappeared when it came to memorizing formulas with no rhyme or reason.
> Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well.
Instead of visualizing written numbers on paper, visualize doing the problem with an abacus [1].
Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.)
Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).