A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]

They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.

[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104

▲

wongarsu 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics

Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display

	▲	nevinera 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly. Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).