I feel kind of stupid right about now. I just realized that I have a form of #aphantasia. I knew what that was but I thought „I can rotate 3d objects in my mind so I don’t have that.“

Turns out, that is not actually visual imagination, that is entirely spatial.

When I imagine a scene in my mind, I feel the masses of objects and how they move in space, but there are no details at all. 🫠

No wonder the only way I can draw anything from imagination is by using construction on paper and iteratively refining what I have already put down.

#drawing

@yamiyume I totally understand this because I'm the same!

Apparently there's a sort of chain from the eyes, to the occipital lobe where visuals are processed, through the parietal lobe (which handles spatial relationships) and thence to the frontal lobes. Visualisation goes the opposite way, and I hypothesise that aphants can send imagined objects to the parietal lobe but not the occipital - hence the shapes feel real but there are no images.

I'm not a scientist, by the way :)