Yep, I've had it all my life. When I was more into spiritual communities I'd get so pissed because I knew they were seeing the images in guided meditations and I didn't. After I left all of that I found out that it was a thing that other people had too and the term for it. It's really funny because I'm an artist and designer and people just assume that I see images in my head. I can draw fairly accurate floor plans for most any home I've spent much time in and even some commercial spaces. I think my visual memory is actually spatial relationships and order, not seeing it in my minds eye. Fascinating!

My partner and fellow Agnostic.com member @polyananda is like this as well.

I can't make a visual representation of anything without a model, but I can copy quite well. Also problems with Executive Functioning and other issues. I'm Autistic with Epilepsy.

Wait... You also don't have visual memories of places? Do you not pull up an image in your head of a particularly scenic place where you camped, or a vista from a mountain top that you climbed or something like that?

I clearly have the hyper version, although I've never heard of it. I remember when I was a kid, 7-8 years old, I would lay in bed every night, visualizing an ongoing "story". Even then I had trouble falling asleep early. Until your posting, I never considered that everyone didn't "see" things in their minds in the same way.

It is interesting how we often assume our experience is universal. Then sometimes we have that epiphany where we realize that is not the case. I realized when I was almost 40 that I might have ADD/ADHD. I had thought for a while that my son has it, based on the struggles he was having in school. While attending a seminar on ADD, hoping to help my son, I listened to the presenter talk about symptoms. He explained how people with ADD often think the inability to "screen" events/activities around them in order to focus is "normal".

Total shock to me! Me, who for the first year of working in an office setting, had a lamp on my desk so I could leave the overhead florescent lights off. The incessant hum of those lights was nerve wracking. It was a big lesson for me on how we each experience the world and even the same events, differently.

I have it

I have aphantasia. I think I realized it via the same article you mentioned. I have talked to a couple friends about it. One was kind of hurt that I couldn't picture a happy time with her, because that was pretty much the entire takeaway there. The other tried to coach me into visualizing (also did not help).

I would be at a loss on many occasions if I could not form mental images.

That's pretty cool. I actually have never heard about that

I was gonna ask if there's an opposite to it because my head makes everything into movies or graphs.

Wow I didn't know either