Exactly my experience too. These fleeting images are rare, but bloody hell it feels like cheating at life if most people can summon up visualisations like that at will.

I think I have it as well. But my theory is that we might have imagination but it is only accessible to subconscious. It is as if it is blocked from consciousness. I have ADHD as well, might be that this is protection mechanism that allows my kind of brain to survive in the world better (otherwise it would be too entertaining to get lost in your own imagination). As a kid I used to daydream a lot.

I've come to realize that's how they all are.

No one really sees 3d pictures in their head in HD

Welcome to the aphantasia club. We would make signs for our next meeting, but no one's come up with a good design yet :s

You may notice when doing the apple test, once you try and define a texture, your brain adding things you think should be there.

Scared the crap out of me a few years ago when I realized I had it. Came to grips with it now.

I guess it's a spectrum with varying abilities. If you ask me, I can see a red apple - or a photo of a red apple precisely. It's not in 3D though, I cannot imagine it from other angles so I cannot image the dots around it. But if I were to sit in a quiet and dark room without any distractions, and tried concentrating super hard (with my eyes closed), then I would be able to see it as other can. Perhaps even manipulate it in my mind.

Then maybe, at least in my case, it is my inability to focus my imagination when my senses are already being bombarded with external stimuli. But I cannot speak for anyone else.

I found out recently that I have aphantasia, based on everything I've read. When you tell me to visualize, I imagine. I don't see it. An apple, I can imagine that. I can describe it in incomprehensibly sparse details. But when you ask details I have to fill them in.

I hadn't really placed those three dots in a specific place on the apple. But when you ask where they are, I'll decide to put them in a line on the apple. If you ask what color they are, I'll have to decide.

For me the hard question to answer is whether I have aphantasia because people describing “actually seeing” things like with their eyes is an absolutely wild concept.

To answer the question I imagine an apple with three dots in a triangle, closely together. There is no color because there is no real image, it’s just an idea. As other have said if prompted the idea gets more detailed.

That said, when I tried to learn building mind palaces it has worked. I can “walk through” places I know just fine, even recall visual details like holes in a letterbox. But again, there is no image.

They may not answer but what they'll realize is that the "placing" comes consciously after the "thinking of" which does not happen with others.

That is, they have to ascribe a placement rather than describe one in the image their mind conjured up.

There's no apple, much less any dots. Of course, I'm happy to draw you an apple on a piece of paper, and draw some dots on that, then tell you where those are.

It's a great aspect to evaluate (fiction books/movies), thanks for mentioning it. I think it's much easier to use as an evaluation tool than techniques like the apple example. One of the tests, for example, is to recall a book that you have never seen a movie adaptation of and try to remember the characters and scenes. For me, in these cases (when I try to recall), the characters appear faceless, while places are more detailed, but they usually remind me of some real places I have encountered before in my life.

It's interesting that if non-aphantasia people are so common, I wonder why so few paintings have scenery based solely on imagination. I even remember asking a person who paints (not in the context of this condition) how hard it was for him to paint something not directly before his eyes, but from imagination, and why he didn't do it more often. I recall that he definitely did this (painting from imagination) rarely or not at all, and the question really puzzled him