I'm a very visual person, but I can't visualize faces at all. I have no problem remembering faces, but I can't visualize them. When I'm fully awake, I can sort of visualize other things, but it's never perfectly clear. But when I've just woken up, I can lucid dream, and then I can consciously visualize really complex 3d structures, and design mechanisms in my head much more easily than I can using CAD software when I'm fully awake. The brain is truly amazing and very odd sometimes.

What about visualizing the picture of a face ? Or alternatively, like you seem to be able to visualize 3d structures, can you imagine a wax or clay sculpture of the face of the person (i.e. if you have a sculpture laying around which has a face take a look at it and try to visualize it in your head), or a coin head profile.

Once you get it to successfully visualize with one way morph it continuously into the case you don't successfully visualize yet and push the frontier. For example if you get it to work with a small sculpture try it with a bigger one.

Or try to look at a real person face as if it was a sculpture or an object. Try changing the way you gaze at the face. Sometimes, even more so with people we care about, we don't look at them like we would look at an object but we are rather trying to look at the soul behind the mask.

With faces, it's odd. When I go to visualize someone, I kind of get a fleeting glimpse, and then it fades and I can't make out anything except, somewhat blurred, their hairline. No face at all. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what they look like - the recognizer is absolutely fine - but if I try to construct an image, it goes away. On the other hand, if I had to, I could probably draw a reasonable likeness from memory by a process of successive refinement, or I could sculpt a likeness from clay. But visualize internally - no, can't do it.

I think it might be that when I'm fully awake, I can't maintain detailed visualizations very effectively. Faces are really important to us, but perhaps imperfect visualizations of faces fail to pattern match well enough against my recognizer, and so it blanks them. Like I say, I get the briefest glimpse in my visualization, but then it blanks. But maybe I'm over-rationalizing, and my brain is just weird.

Your brain handles facial information differently than it does any other visual information.

Most visual information is processed by your Occipital Lobe.

But facial information is processed by your Temporal Lobe.

To be fair, facial recognition is a major part of human cognition, so this isn't all that surprising that it's specialized.

I can visualize but not very well, if I were to try to actively visualize a structure I'm pretty sure it would be rotated wrong or have different problems. When I was in high school I had a test that put me in the lowest 3% of the population for visual understanding of things (like put these blocks together to make this shape) and the top 95% for reading comprehension.

Generally instead of visualizing something I would tend to have an internal monologue on how it should work. Even if I am drawing something programmatically I would describe the logic for getting what I want, rather than visualizing what it should look like.

"I can visualize but not very well, if I were to try to actively visualize a structure I'm pretty sure it would be rotated wrong or have different problems"

Some claim that's nearly everyone. Someone did an experiment where they asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle, which they had all seen in their lives, from memory without a model. Not a particular bicycle, just "a bicycle". The configurations were very diverse and different from the geometric/physical arrangement of real ones.

My wife has this. One day we had a similar realisation as the article’s author. It was fascinating to discuss and explained so much about how we went about making choices over anything visual, from clothes to home decor (I tend to be in charge of both for our family as I can visualise).

I use visualisation a lot for work, especially when designing or understanding process flows, so not having that ability seems so alien to me.

I have both. My mind's eye is blind and my mind's ear is deaf. The inside of my head is a pretty empty place where I inhabit it, cue the jokes. Thoughts just pop into my head from some other part of my brain. When I'm thinking about how to word something, I feel my mouth start to form the words, though my mouth doesn't move. Maybe I'm sub-vocalizing, I don't know. When I'm thinking hard about something, I just sort of "go away" for a bit and come back, hopefully with an answer. I thought this was normal for everyone, until I read about aphantasia a year or two ago.

I suspect this is why sounds or pictures are so distracting to me. The thing that everyone does where they play a tv show in the background doesn't work for me. If I hear it, I have to concentrate on it. It takes a mental effort to ignore it. So when I'm at home I keep everything off unless I'm ready to watch or listen to it.

The positive aspect is that you should be immune to Kopfkino: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kopfkino

> Kopfkino happens when you involuntarily use your imagination to think of troubling or disgusting things in graphic detail.

> From the german words kopf, head and kino, cinema.

> After i heard 'granny pussy' i had the most disgusting kopfkino.

(Just realized, I need to remember this one as a nice german word with no english equivalent)

That is nice. I can't conjure an image like that at all. Also, seeing a graphic image doesn't stick with me very long since I don't keep seeing it like a lot of people apparently do. People with aphantasia would probably do better moderating images than those without. Still not great, though, because while I can't see the image again I would still remember the circumstances involved.

I realised this about myself only in the last few years. If there's a screen on in the room I will be riveted on it to the exclusion of anything else.

Interesting. I have very little mental visualization and find ignoring TVs to be extremely difficult. I had thought it was because I grew up in a house that did not have a TV on very often.

It's very possible that it's not related. I frequent r/aphantasia on reddit and we're always asking the community if they have certain quirks to see if it's related and the results always end up mixed.