You guys are gonna lose your shit when you find out some people don't have an inner monologue.

Isn't 5 is called Aphantasia ? To be unable to visualize something in the mind?

I'm a #5 on that scale.

And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.

I won't say I'm not jealous of people who're #1s. However, to directly answer your question, it's not like our heads are empty. You think apple and (apparently) 'see' an apple. I think apple and it's like thinking of how you'd describe an apple. It's red, it's round. It has a stem. It's juicy. It tastes good... but I can't see it. Or anything else. They're just thoughts.

I have a very difficult time with facial recognition, presumably as a result of this. If I'm watching a movie where there's a lot of characters that are shown but not named, I have a difficult time following that. I need to be able to assign names to them to keep them straight in my head, and often-times if a character isn't named but they're important, I'll assign them a name myself just to have something to track them with. I can recognize people I interact with a lot obviously but if you asked me to describe what someone looks like who I'm not currently interacting with, that's very difficult for me to do, beyond very surface-level stuff, like their gender or their build. If I had to describe someone for a police sketch, I'd be useless at that. Remembering facial features is like remembering a list of words; I can't just call up an image of them to describe... if I haven't already committed that description to memory, I can't describe the person.

It's funny, honestly, because I never realized this wasn't how everyone is until I saw the image you linked some years back. I actually called up my mother immediately after and asked her what she could see. The conversation went something like:

"When you think of an apple, can you see the apple?"

"Yes..."

"Yeah, but like... you can actually see it, though?"

"...yes...?"

"Yeah but I mean like... you can see it, as if you're looking at it?"

"...yes, what is this about?"

My sister has #5 and I can ask her to make a response if you want OP.

Last we talked about it she said if she tried really hard she can see come colors and shapes but that's about it.

The best conversation about it we ever had went something like this (keep in mind were both autistic and when together dont always communicate like neurotypical people do):

*while driving*
her: "get in that turn lane to the right"
*i do the 👆hand tricks and turn*

her: "when I don't want to do that I always think in my head 'never eat soggy waffles' and remember that east is left and right is west"

me: "that's not even correct,, but like WHY would you do that??"

her: "to remember how to turn"

me: "why wouldn't you just do the hand things?"
me: "like imagine them in your head and-"

her: "MUST BE NICE HUH?"
*we both explode in laughter*

she didn't even mean to make a joke about it, that's just genuinely the way she remembers lefts and rights

also this meme has become a common occurrence whenever the topic is brought up

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Also a pretty interesting thing I remembered while writing this is a clip on TV (can't remember what show it was) where they asked a room of people to draw a bicycle then they made it IRL by welding it and told them to ride it a block or two and back. Only 1 of ~15 did it correctly, one girl got it exactly but forgot the peddles. Pretty interesting how they could all imagine a bike but couldn't draw it correctly

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For those who are a 4 or 5 on this diagram: What are your dreams like?

I'm not as puzzled about the concept of aphantasia (or the opposite) as much as the fact that people here, and two I know IRL, always self report as either 1s or 5s, with a handful of exceptions (ATTOW).

Is there a selection bias, where anyone in-between doesn't relate to either extreme enough to comment, or do said extremes conflate the ability to "picture" fine details with the ability to remember them in the first place?

My brain is like a vector database, it stores the "feelings" of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?

I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptoms and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.

Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. ...Or yes, but it'll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.

For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and ...something about them, but I couldn't explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.

When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.

I've read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.

It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.

Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I’d get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain.

I never know how to interpret this scale. I can think of objects and describe what I'm thinking about, but I don't see anything in the same way my eyes do. Or rather, I see a black void, and if I try to picture an apple it's like a black object on a black background, but I know it's there.

I also get better at it the longer I do it; if I read a book for a long while, the ideas get sharper in my head and can be in color, but I'm still not "seeing" in the same way my eyes do.

Your mind has an active visual cortex. Other folks think more using their audio cortex. Some more with somatic awareness (feeling tone).

Mathameticians can visualize math.

Everyone is wired a bit different.

I'm a two or a four on the scale, depending on how much weed I consume. As heavy weed use dulls the minds eye. Though irregular use can enhance it.

And after years working in kitchens, I can think in smells. I.e.mix spices in my mind and smell them in my head before adding to a dish.

Some people really are out there living their lives with aphantasia. I can’t imagine that.

being a 1 with ADHD is crazy, like I can be in the middle of a class and zone out and start visualising myself walking around the campus in incredible detail, or FPV droning inside a friend's house, or really anything I can think of, although that said it takes a fair bit of effort to keep it going beyond a certain amount of time.

I’m a 5, yet I can have extremely vivid dreams that are exactly like I am in that world. I can perfectly picture peoples faces from the past too while dreaming. So the ability is in there somewhere. 🤷‍♂️

3 or 4

I can "picture" with images but it's not top accuracy. It's mostly imagining a thing existing

This one is a cluster fuck for me... I can visualize an object in my head and even to the point of placing it in real space in my hand and being able to rotate it. I cannot however, see your face in my mind after you have just left the room.

Don't really know how that fits in.

For individual objects it is difficult to impossible for me to create the exact image.

For directions however, I can do a visual "fly" over the roads which I believe I should be going down, to make sure I'm going the right place. The roads are clear images, but not to the same effect of watching a video of someone driving along said roads.

I'm coming to think there is a lot more nuance to this than the 5 images let on.

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

I can't actually see the image with my eyes, I don't believed people actually can but I suppose it can be. I can see flashes of black and white stills in my mind but that's it. My dreams are the same just with weirdly numb feelings. Like when you are in vr and someone touches you, you have the feeling in your mind but don't feel anything physical.

I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 I think. If I try to imagine a detail, I can't see the rest of the thing. If I want to see the whole thing, it's all very vague and shadowy.

@KoboldCoterie you can still be an artist. You'll just have to rely more on references but it's possible. There's one person that made a video about it that I saw some time ago. https://youtu.be/ewsGmhAjjjI

This reminded me of a sort of similar topic, and curiously enough it's about reading, and might provide some insight into your question.

Some years ago, I happened on a thread in which the OP asked people whose voice they "heard" when they read.

I couldn't even make sense of that question. The only time I "hear" voices when I read is when a character speaks. The rest of the time, I not only don't "hear" the words - I'm not even really aware of them. My eyes follow the lines while my brain instantly translates the words I'm seeing into images and concepts and the like. And yes - it's like a movie playing out inside my brain, and yes, I'm a #1 on this chart.

But apparently there's a not insignificant number of people who "hear" a book inside their heads just as if someone else was reading it out loud. Instead of visualizing things, they remain focused only on the words - the representations - and somehow glean from them alone the necessary details.

I wouldn't be surprised if those people are also generally #5 or thereabouts on this chart, and again what it is is that their brains don't directly envision things but instead rely on descriptive representations.

I don't get how it works either, but self-evidently it does.