When I was younger I used to draw constantly and I'd say that was the only period in my life when I would often picture images. Looking back it was more flashes of angles and line shapes and how it would feel to draw them.
This makes me wonder two things:
1. Apart from understanding how a mechanical object functions or recalling how to get somewhere what other query benefits from visualisation?
2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?
1. It really depends on how you think. I assume that people with strong visualization abilities generally tend to use those abilities to reason and think about many different things, like math or code or filesystems or even, say, cooking. But other people use different "internal modalities" to reason about the same things.
As a photographer, one of the skills you develop is to have a concept of a photo in your mind before actually taking the picture. Likely this is the same for any visual form of art. Literally previsualizing what you want to express seems to be the most obvious way to think about it, but I assume there are also other ways that make more sense to less visually-oriented people.
Yes, I do. As it goes, I think it is some neurological thing, a receptor that is misfiring, or something. I've been testing it for the past decade and I only found three conditions where I can see images:
1. Dreams
2. Transition between awake and asleep during classical music concerts (This one is very interesting, cause one of my most vivid experiences was actually seeing different seasons during a Four Seasons (by Mozart I think?) piano concert, based purely on the music, without knowing which one was actually playing).
3. Psychedelics. Or, at least, mushrooms. Haven't tried others.
It seems when some neurological inhibitor is turned off, the images come back, but I don't know if there was any research on that, or whether it is even true.
This makes me wonder two things: