this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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For what its worth, I definitely do not have aphantasia, but that first description of closing your eyes and non seeing vivid imagery is nonsense. If I close my eyes, I don't just randomly start seeing things. I only "see" mental images if I think about what things look like. Unless there's music playing (that I enjoy). If I close my eyes while listening to good music I frequently get all sorts of mental images. However, they don't start as what I'd call vivid. Instead, they're faint at first, but get stronger the longer I keep my eyes closed and the music keeps playing.
As a side note, I have prosopagnosia (face blindness), so even though I can visual a tree, or an apple, or even a person, I almost never can visual a face. Like right now, I cannot picture my wife's face, or my son's. Sometimes I can, but I'd say that its rare, and I have no idea why sometimes it works and other times it doesn't.
So yeah, those are terrible descriptions of aphantasia (and to be clear, I'm agreeing with your overall point).
This is part of the confusion. There are posts and threads where people say that they can see images when they close their eyes. There are other posts where people describe what you have, that they see mental images if they concentrate.
Others, like me, don't see images, but we know what people and things look like. It's hard to explain, but I don't get any sort of picture of my wife, for example, but I can remember her face.
I honestly don't know if that's just people not being specific with their words. I mean, "I can see images when I close my eyes" is still an accurate statement for me, even if the images don't appear unprompted. The idea of unprompted images forming every time I close my eyes is frankly rather terrifying. Closing my eyes is part of my strategy for dealing with over stimulation; if I didn't have calming dark when I closed my eyes, I think I'd freak the hell out.