Aphantasia - not having the "mind's eye"

[Ai]

I think poses and actions are the correct way to go there (and ultimately more important for reaching a satisfactory result than anatomy or even construction skills). Personally I think that the clarity is deceptive -- that overlaying concepts rather than real visual content, is what is mainly happening, and so you can't draw it because what you really have is only a strong -impression-, and what you need is a step-by-step deconstruction.

[DracoDragon42]

I think its kind of weird, but for me it seems like I can imagine feelings better than I can imagine visual stuff. For example, I can imagine that I am falling, and I can feel like I'm falling, or I can imagine that I'm floating and it will feel like I actually am floating certain times. So, I wonder if different people are better with imagining different senses.

[ptoing]

If I lie down, best on my back, and close my eyes, I can most of the times make my body feel like it is spinning or tilting. But I can only make this go up to a certain angle, like not feeling like I am doing a 360 on any axis, or even a 180. More like about 30 or so degrees in either direction. and mostly sideways, or better, rotation around the Y axis.

[surt]

Personally I think that the clarity is deceptive -- that overlaying concepts rather than real visual content, is what is mainly happening, and so you can't draw it because what you really have is only a strong -impression-, and what you need is a step-by-step deconstruction.

That's sounding more and more like my non-visual imagining.

I do wonder if maybe it's something to do with thought development. Typically when humans first learn to speak a language they begin to think with language. Maybe with a few of us the new thought mechanism completely replaces the old, while most others retain access to the old pre-lingual thought mechanisms.

[Helm]

Fascinating thread.

Personal experience, I can concentrate and catch glimpses of forms (even complex forms like human beings doing stuff) but they're fleeting. In my 20s I would sometimes train my visualization by focusing in the dark into capturing a simpler object (a brush or a phone) in the darkness, rotate it, assign color to it and the such. It's very difficult (for me) but possible. It helped me with drawing volumes more correctly.

Also sideways, I later realized this is a very basic step in many schools of magical practice. So if some of you feel different anxieties or light limbs or other internal effects happening during visualization, keep part of your mind out that you're doing something to yourself that isn't necessarily 'normal'. As with mediation, too much can lead to trouble.

[Hagane]

This is very interesting. If I had aphantasia I would have to radically alter the way I draw and design, as I always visualize things like designs and animations in my head before I get to a paper or pen. Very often when I travel to work I use that dead time to visually imagine designs, moves my characters could do and stuff like that. Imagining something I'm drawing and rotating it in my mind has helped me a lot to solve problems while drawing.

As someone else said, though, these imaginations aren't 100% accurate and many times what I imagined doesn't completely work in paper, but it helps me greatly to get most of it down, and I feel I have gotten better at mentally visualizing stuff as I got better at drawing. I can't imagine how I would draw otherwise. Hell, most of my thinking is done as a "mental voice", I reason things by mentally talking to myself, so to speak. I rarely think things abstractly.

And I can imagine sounds very vividly too; too vividly sometimes. I can "play" themes I like in my head as if I was just selecting an mp3 in my pc, but oftentimes I struggle to make them stop and they just keep "playing in the background" if I don't actively make an effort (which often involves thinking in something else, my head is rarely without sound) to do so. That's probably something I should get checked, ha.

[Parkerbaby]

This is really interesting to me. I actually thought I was rather deficient in the matter, mainly because I play chess and always hear about people "visualizing" the board, being able to work through variations in the mind as if it were a 2d diagram on a computer monitor.

My experience is much like Helm's. I picture vague bits here and there, they're hazy and hard to grasp. Some things are easier to picture, such as the sunset or birds or something. With those I could picture at the highest level, I'd say.

In chess, I've never been able to "see" a board mentally--whether it has pieces or not. I can instead kind of 'feel' where the pieces are in my mind and work through it with only hazy spatial definition of the pieces and no actual board pictured in my mind.

[Ai]

On vacation, I did a bunch of geometry / axes study, as well as drawing topview of X while viewing sideview.
This seems to have improved my visualization clarity somewhat, evidenced by easier adlibbing especially with nonlinear axes. This is interesting because it really fits into my earlier 'deconstruction needed' guess : larger deconstructive vocabulary seems to lead to better visualization.

Ptoing's "I know how letters look" comment is interesting because I just thought about this and realized: I know how letters look, but I draw them entirely procedurally; Despite lots of experience with making typography, I do not visualize them before I draw, except in two respects:
1. How the -current- stroke looks (now / when completed), especially the divisions of space and angles it creates.
2. The overall space a letter should occupy (and the padding it should NOT occupy). This latter is a bit vague and greatly aided by dual-wielding (adding another pencil in left hand, that just maintains a physical location for the origin; tying my proprioception into my spatial sense perhaps.)

At the moment I'm most interested in determining a exercise that will make #2 less vague -- possibly something like visualizing negative space of a mildly complex layout of boxes, and blind drawing it, in 2d and 3d.

Personally I would not be surprised to find lettering is a special/nonstandard case, since it ties in so strongly to language. Do deaf -- especially totally deaf -- people have a different relationship to lettering, for example? More directly visual (ie. experiencing an actual graphic, more than a symbol), or less directly visual?