I just finished the 2nd book of the Stormlight Chronicles by Brandon Sanderson. Sadly I have had aphantasia all my life and therefore I can not visually imagine things - I do have a very loud inner monologue though and can imagine the voices of the characters.

I just tried out the new version of ChatGPT to generate images for the main characters in a concept art style and for me it makes the story come to life a bit more.

I also run a Pathfinder Campaign every other week and have found great pleasure visualizing scenes in this way for myself. Sometimes I share them with the players and so far the feedback on that has been very positive.

I wish I could picture things in my mind but at least now I have something that can help me with my handicap!

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Then reading a book is outsourcing imagination or enjoying it's illustrations by someone else, as you rely on the others for imagining stories

About 300 million people literally can't imagine.

We’ve outsourced everything else.

Why is that such a bad thing? Imagination is not truly useful for anything without skills to complement it, at least not in my experience.

Outsourcing re-imagination.

I wish I could do it better. There seems to be a lot of variability. This episode of radiolab on the topic is fascinating: https://radiolab.org/podcast/aphantasia/transcript?utm_sourc...

I feel like the reason I dislike reading or find reading boring is because I can't. But it's just a theory. Meanwhile I absolutely love movies.

Not all people can!

I did it as well. But it was fun to imagine it through another type of eyes.

One man's cliche is another man's hacker news comment