I would like to talk about Aphantasia today because it is something that lives in the back of a lot of people's minds like a virus, I would like to attack that virus head on
Firstly, aphantasia is incredibly rare, in all likelihood you do not have it, even if you think you do.
Oh no, how could I say that?
Well, the research on aphantasia actually supports this, but in a very weird way to ensure that the people researching it continue to receive national funding, this is the politics of academia
Aphantasia means 'Without' or 'Lacking' in 'Phantasia' which is mental imagery. It was first used by Aristotle in De Anima III and it means "Imagination". That means that in the classical meaning of the term, for someone to qualify as having aphantasia they must literally lack the ability for visualization. This means, and older literature repeatedly mentions this, that they -do not dream at all-, and that this lack of dreaming is not due to other factors like poor REM
Aristotle's framework treats it as foundational to -all- cognition; cognition memory and dreaming. Later mister Alexander of Aphroditsias in the 3rd century thought looking at things in your mind's eye left a slime on thing that reactivated which causes images and memories and dreams, meaning without this sense one could not do any of those things. The vast majority of people who claim to have aphantasia claim to be able to dream just fine.
The old researchers thus, are quite clear about this; for someone to have aphantasia they would have to essentially be mentally retarded. Yet, if you say this today, you'll find a whole gaggle of people who -claim- to have -self diagnosed- themselves with Aphantasia, likely hearing the word first on tumblr where it reached its initial first popularity in the mid 2010s on "Cool Word" tumblr pages (remember petrichor? saudade? saunder? limerance). The word 'Aphantasia' was frequently brought up on these pages, and eventually it became a viral hit. Technically 'aphantasia' itself was coined in a 2015 paper (I wrote this earlier here is the source Zeman et al.), though the concept of "imagers vs non-imagers" (coined in the late 1800s by Galton) was well established and discussed even in Usenet circles.
This meme would evolve and take shape for years, when eventually 4chan users would popularize the "Apple Test", which would only cause even more confusion
The problem here, is that almost none of these people claiming to have aphantasia actually had it. Studies in the past 15 years have shown that people with aphantasia (remember, this is self reported) do not do any worse than people "without" aphantasia, in fact, they actually report doing -slightly better- than people without aphantasia. (Pounder et al., 2018 found aphantasics had higher mental rotation accuracy than normal imagers; Keogh et al., 2021 found equivalent visual working memory accuracy using different strategies; Marks, 1972 found no significant difference between vivid and non-vivid imagers on associative memory tasks)
Now if you're not thinking critically about this you might think, "Wow that is so cool, people with aphantasia actually can visualize, just not in ways we understand"--NO
That makes no sense! Yet, the researchers of these studies come to a similar conclusion "Our understandings and assumptions of Aphantasia continues to be challenged, more work is needed" (paraphrase), this for those of you don't know is academic jargon for "Please give me more money to keep researching this"(I found Blomkvist & Marks, 2023 which says there is no consensus on whether aphantasia should even be described as a real condition, no "battery of psychometric instrument to diagnose it, and that only self diagnosis tools depart from validated measures in ways like to impact validity and accuracy" plain English: this shit is not real) yet these studies then made their way to pop science articles trying to cash in on the aphantasia meme which then trickle down to people on the rest of the internet to the point where 'having Aphantasia' is considered a quirky thing instead of an extremely serious form of mental retardation that even most non-human animals appear to have the capacity for
Now you've run into an issue. There is an 'aphantasia' community, a subreddmit, forums, discord communities. All centered around their shared communion in something that they almost certainly do not have who now have it as a vested part of their personality that must be taken seriously (last study I sourced also talks about how people who self diagnose with this give themselves anxiety, distress, feel stigma, and are more likely to have generalized health anxiety lol)
"No matter that I am an artist, no matter that I am a writer, no matter that I dream, no matter that I recall the faces of my friends and family, and the sights of my youth, no I'm actually very special, I don't -literally- hallucinate a 3d image onto my eyesight like -everyone else- I just [explains the mind's eye in a really concrete literal way], totally different from mental visualization!"
Remember how I mentioned that people who self-diagnosed with aphantasia tended to actually, broadly, do better on visualization tests? This is exactly what we would predict of people who are above average intelligence (110-130), (Another study Milton 2021 confirmed this actually, new to me, self diagnosed aphantasics reported their average IQ at 115 vs 110 for the general population, these are not disabled people) this is discussed on the old internet as 'Clever Sillies', the term eventually morphed into what many of you use 'Midwit' to mean, though that term itself has degraded to mean 'Stupid', when once it meant 'So smart that you're stupid but not smart enough to be smart'. If you look at discussion on the slightly above average intelligence, the clever sillies, they have overrationalization in common, they do not trust their senses or their intuitions.
One particularly sharp observation from one of the original essays on 'Clever Sillies' (Charlton, 2009, Medical Hypotheses, I don't have to source this, but honestly as a child one of my favorite activities was reading the Medical Hypotheses journal before it went away, so I'd like to bring attention to it, if nothing else) was that these people can be convinced of anything if it sounds logical enough. This is especially true if it relates to something that makes them feel special or distinct, their capacity for rationalization was so good in fact, you could convince them that 'normal people' are hallucinating 24/7. If it sounds convincing enough, you could convince them to ban water.
This is the plight of the slightly above average. (For reference to their 'Tyranny' see the original essay by Charleton on Clever Sillies) A plight that has convinced myriads of these people that they have aphantasia BUT actually can still do good on visualization because "actually its just a non-conscious part of my brain that isn't visual like my eyes doing the visualization", like buddy you've just described the Mind's Eye, but they don't teach you about the senses in school anymore so even the 4.0 kids are confused.
People are attached to the idea of having aphantasia, it makes them feel unique and special, it makes them feel as if they have a 'silent struggle' but when you actually point out that 'real aphantasia' isn't a silent struggle but akin to something like actual retardation they get very upset, why? Because they do not actually have aphantasia, a person with aphantasia (and there are actual studies that have identified people with neurologically REAL aphantasia, Zemen's Patient MX lost all visualization after a coronary angioplasty) would not be very happy, and would feel the lack in every day life, they would basically be disabled.
I know what you're saying, "Okay that's all find and dandy, but aphantasia doesn't actually mean an inability to visualize, it means an inability to -consciously- visualize"
I will concede this point with a major caveat: this is what the definition means -now-, after the research done in the 2010s and now in the 2020s, after the popularization of the term, and after the mass of people who self identify as having it. In one of the original studies on visualization 10% of people claimed to have aphantasia when told what it is, however when actually testing for it with visualization challenges that number plummeted to 1%. (Fact checking this now, I was recalling Beran et al 2023, which found 8.9% of a 5k US sample self reported aphantasia, but only 1.5 scored in the aphantasic range on the validated imagery questions. Another older one I found, Faw 2009 saw a similar inflation, 2.1% reported no image but 10% reported "vague and dim")
You should be able to see the thread I am weaving here: A large amount of people who are above average intelligence and educated took the classical definition of 'Aphantasia' too literally due to lack of a basic understanding of qualia, but a certain level of confidence in their own understanding of what they read and believe what they have read to have said (clever silly trap), turned it into a meme, created a whole new school of research that requires a mass of people who believe they have it to acquire funding, and the result is you have a bunch of people cosplaying like they are actually mentally disabled.