I think you're right. It might also partially be an acquired skill. As a musician I hear a lot more details in music than a non-trained ear normally would. This naturally makes it easier for me to recall music with more detail. If you aren't trained and have a low level of musicality then I would assume you'd only memorize/remember the main parts of the song/passage, like the "sound" of the guitar playing that solo, whereas I hear the piano comping (or is it just another guitar? I remember piano :D), bass & drums, all while picturing how to actually play the solo on the guitar.

Like a non-musician hearing a guitar riff would just replay it as "nana nana na, na-naa" or something simple whereas I would be able to hear it in exact detail and how it interacts with the rest of the band melodically as well as rhythmically.

I'd like to explore this aphantasia idea a bit more. I would classify myself as very visual, but on thinking about this more ... it's not like I have a high-fidelity visual impression of the imagined object in my mind's eye. It's more like a physical / tactile impression of presence. Is that what it's like for you?

As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of describing it as ... If I shut my eyes I still know roughly where the monitor corners, the keyboard, the table corners, the wine-bottle, the apple, etc. are. It's not like I'm seeing them, but I can spatially query them and perform operations on them. So is this a difference in internal perception, or is it a difference in how we describe those internal states?

I think in a very spatial way. I can roughly imagine objects or scenes as something like a 3d graph of connected points. I can imagine the facade of my house if I close my eyes only by sort of tracing its shape, in which case I can feel my eyes moving along that dimension as I do it. I cannot imagine a person's actual face, which I'm told is really weird, although I'm very good with recognizing them when I'm shown them. I can generally map out a location as if I was overhead once i've walked through it, but only really as a spatial scene. Closing my eyes is kind of what I imagine its like to be blind.

For very simple objects, I can vaguely visualize them like a drawing from an early 80's graphics demo, but that's about as good as it gets.

See, what intrigues me about this is I wonder if you're just more nuanced and precise in your description. I always thought of myself as being very visual, and I'm like ninety-nine point something percent of spatial ability, and yet your description seems like a fairly accurate description of what I experience.

The problem is that the descriptions depend on so many subjective things. For instance what does it mean to be able to see someone's face in one's mind? At what resolution question mark at what level of detail? I mean it seems like a lot of people with uncorrected vision can't even see faces to any standards I would consider seeing. So could it be that you're holding your mental visualizations too too high a bar and comparing them with people you have a low bar for mental visualizations?

Edit .. your description of having to trace out the facade is particularly apt to me. It's almost like some kind of DRAM thing where I have to refresh my mental image by touching / scanning parts of it or it goes away.

That's what I always thought originally, but from when I've spoken with other people about it, it's not the normal way of 'visualizing'. In particular, not being able to do things like imagine a persons face is pretty odd. Similarly, when i'm told to "imagine you're in your childhood bedroom" or "imagine you are on a hot desert island", I can't get anything going, while I'm told most people will construct a detailed mental scenery of it.

Like growing up, I always assumed that those scenes where someone's imagination goes wild and they envision other characters doing crazy things (see: the entirety of Scrubs) were just a literary device, but apparently that's at least sort of close to how a normal brain actually works.

The DRAM comparison is pretty good. Or like having a plastic film over the world that you need to press down on to see anything through.

> its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.

That is super interesting!

I would assume that if you audiolize instruments as you making instruments sounds with your mouth, you would audiolize other people as you mimicking them as well...

I mean, when I read your post above, my inner voice does it in a neutral me voice, because I have no clue what you actually sound like. But if I read a text message or something from a friend of mine, I read it in their voice, because I know what they sound like.

Can you also imagine your friends' voices?

If I try to do it right now, I can only really generate a sort of average tone that I associate with them, or maybe a phrase they say commonly. I can't really synthesize a new sentence though, so there's something in there relating to memorability too. If I try to imagine my wife saying things that I know for a fact she said this morning, I just hear myself imitating her.

Maybe it's a combination of both, and you're just more attuned to the nuance? It's funny, when you mentioned November Rain I did the guitar noises, in my voice, in my head. Great, now that's stuck in there. Thanks. But something like the Star Wars sound-track. I do hear a more instrumental version, although for parts that I can sing I also get some ghostly sensations in my tongue and throat.