Another thought here is connected with my writing. I now write crime mysteries (see www,bryanlawson.org). Some readers have kindly said they find my writing to be very vivid. Again is there some connection with the aphantasia here? Because I cannot visualise does my brain work harder describing things, places and people in symbolic ways eg using language?

Yet another thought is that unusually for aphantasics I never forget faces, though I am dreadful with names.

I use visualization/ mental eye all the time to design. Heavily reply upon it to improve and validate ideas, constructs and prototypes (beforehand).

many artists go with intuition rather than visualization.

When did this start? Were you "born like this"?

I wonder if it is reversible. If there are excercises to train visualization. Would think so.

The brain constructs all the time. If you think of something you have a mental representation, so my thought is that it is more a case of a lose connection.

I generally want to see what i want to work on.

At the same time, seeing may be/ mean different things.

If i see before me, like code i am working on etc, i dont really want to see in my head, although i still want to see or sense what i am working on.

I think there is also sensing versus seeing. Even of you dont see, you still sense.

There is also the question if you dont see if you think of an elementary concept like an apple or a colour like red, because even that is a mental representation.

Read "Homer's Vividness: An Enactive Approach" by Jonas Grethlein and Luuk Huitink, 2018. They explore how many of the most vivid episodes in Homeric poetry is created through descriptions based less on providing exhaustive visual detail than only the most essential sensory information. This enables the audience to imagine how they would interact with the described subject (as opposed to just looking at them).

(I think it’s probably best to side-step the multiple issues around what actually constitutes an ‘image’ or ‘picture,’ and confine any discussion to the purely visual.)

The ability to visualise using the mind’s eye is an invaluable evolutionary mechanism. Working as an educator, illustrator and artist, I rely heavily on my ability to not merely recall visual information and represent it, but to often synthesise in the mind new, original visual data, detailed and vivid enough to allow me to draw, paint or otherwise assemble an image to share with others. This process effectively takes component data from the mind’s eye and objectively manifests it, (within the cultural conventions of representationalism) a common enough process amongst designers, I think.

The relationship between the brain, vision and perception is highly complex and not yet fully understood. For the sighted, the role of vision permeates, even dominates, our sensory awareness and is perhaps directly interwoven with the functions of consciousness, memory and imagination. These factors also articulate it to self-identity. Gregory’s work (1978) demonstrates the sophisticated reciprocity of vision and touch.  Purves, Lotto and Nundy (2002) have persuasively theorised the historic experiential nature of vision giving rise to its probabilistic aspects. Bartolomeo (2008) recognises that our brains accumulate an accessible store of visual data. This information seems both specific and conceptual, recording not only objects, textures and faces but also charting the underpinning mechanisms which control the distribution and formulation of this data. In a sense, we not only see the things in this world but we also ‘see’ the processes and probablistic mechanisms by which they are formed and distributed. It is perhaps this combination of specific and distributory information that enables the mind to vividly visualise in dream that which it has never seen optically. Clow and McNamara’s Dreams and Dreaming (2010) issue of the International Review of Neurobiology certainly presents a plethora of evidence which seems supportive of this possibility.

Whilst this situation seems complex enough, visual data also seems to be neurologically processed in more than one way. Cowey’s (1991) and Weiskrantz’s (1996) work on Blindsight argues that while we are conscious of the visual data stream, there are alternate, parallel neurological pathways for the same visual data which we are unable to consciously perceive. Their work suggests that this alternate processing route, whilst occluded from our consciousness, appears accessible to our motor system. This duality suggests that visual mechanisms may be at work in our brains of which we have no consciousness though, as yet, nothing suggests these may include imaginative vision.

Given the highly complex, and not always consciously accessible nature of vision, is it possible that in aphantasia, a cerebral visualisation process may be neurologically extant but is inaccessible to the consciousness? Could this disconnection to visual consciousness be the motivating element in the exemplary work of the individuals, you mention?

Can I ask, do you dream? If so, is the dream visual, olfactory, aural or affective? Any sensory dominance evident in your dreams may offer you helpful insights into your question.

@Bryan R Lawson's reference to his literary descriptions is very informative. Visual perception is no longer understood as the passive receipt of photographic imagery (like projections on some internal mental screen), but an actively interpretive and constructive process aimed at enabling the immediate physical and mental orientation of a person to their surroundings. Creators of images and objects do so for viewers/users who will mentally and physically interpret and interact with these. If a person is skilled at employing the same strategies to construct imagery and objects that the brain uses to process what is seen, then it is not illogical that a person could be both anaphantasic and highly 'visual'. It is also probable that their emphasis on the extent to which humans actively interpret and engage with what is seen may make for particularly compelling designs and artworks.