I'm really not sure, I identify with people on all sides of this in different ways. If I try to picture an apple, I get something - vague, fleeting, not in my actual field of view - that tells me something what it feels like to look at an apple. It's not a vivid image, but it's not nothing.
But this contrasts sharply to music for example, most of the time if I think about a song I can "hear" it; not like I'm actually hearing it, I hear actual reality around me. But the fidelity of the song can be quite sharp, I can hear all the little details as if I actually had it playing.
But then again people talk about having trouble manipulating images in their mind to solve spatial puzzles and the like, and that's no issue for me; I'm quite good at those. And on the other hand, dreaming for me is not like watching a movie. Sometimes there is rough imagery, like what I get when I try to picture an apple, but mostly they're purely abstract: thoughts, words, ideas, not video.
I suspect it all comes down to quirks of how consciousness works for different people, and how we communicate about them, rather than being a hard binary thing you have or don't have.
I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.
My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.
Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.
So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.
I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct. Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
Note that being hyperphantasic can also be an advantage because you can create much more complex visual models to aid thinking in similar ways.
I think the bigger takeaway is not to think that having a particular sort of richness of any kind of mental imagery (regardless of the sense modality) is somehow automatically better or worse. The mind is malleable and an intelligent mind can find clever ways to exploit what it has most richly, and there are surely disadvantages to imagery of some sensory modalities being too rich or real (e.g. schizophrenia).
Play blindfold chess. Once you get used to that, you "see" the state of the chessboard from beginning to end of a game, ply by ply, forwards and backwards, total recall 12 hours after.
I'm really not sure, I identify with people on all sides of this in different ways. If I try to picture an apple, I get something - vague, fleeting, not in my actual field of view - that tells me something what it feels like to look at an apple. It's not a vivid image, but it's not nothing.
But this contrasts sharply to music for example, most of the time if I think about a song I can "hear" it; not like I'm actually hearing it, I hear actual reality around me. But the fidelity of the song can be quite sharp, I can hear all the little details as if I actually had it playing.
But then again people talk about having trouble manipulating images in their mind to solve spatial puzzles and the like, and that's no issue for me; I'm quite good at those. And on the other hand, dreaming for me is not like watching a movie. Sometimes there is rough imagery, like what I get when I try to picture an apple, but mostly they're purely abstract: thoughts, words, ideas, not video.
I suspect it all comes down to quirks of how consciousness works for different people, and how we communicate about them, rather than being a hard binary thing you have or don't have.
I’ve written about this before …
I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.
My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.
Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.
So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.
I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct. Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
Note that being hyperphantasic can also be an advantage because you can create much more complex visual models to aid thinking in similar ways.
I think the bigger takeaway is not to think that having a particular sort of richness of any kind of mental imagery (regardless of the sense modality) is somehow automatically better or worse. The mind is malleable and an intelligent mind can find clever ways to exploit what it has most richly, and there are surely disadvantages to imagery of some sensory modalities being too rich or real (e.g. schizophrenia).
Play blindfold chess. Once you get used to that, you "see" the state of the chessboard from beginning to end of a game, ply by ply, forwards and backwards, total recall 12 hours after.
I see it in my mind, not in my field of vision.
So you would be "No, I cannot, and I don't think I have aphantasia" -- that's where I am too
I had to read the phrasing several times. It is, I suppose, possible for me to do but takes effort and no distraction.