I spent an enormous percentage of my life very frustrated with other people because they couldn't just see the answer to things.

For example, I can put an engine into a car, and still tell you where every part of that engine is located relative to every other part, without being able to see it, including the internals, and describe, for example, over the phone how to troubleshoot it without being able to see it at all in person - just a mental model. And, for reference, I have almost no fundamental knowledge or experience with engines besides taking one or two apart - and it would not extend to other engines. It's been at least 20 years and I could still do it verbatim.

I'm way out on the end of that bell curve, but I'm not unique. I've worked with people who found that ability completely baffling, and would have to break out diagrams and blueprints to do that.

The gap is a lot wider than you think it is, it's not subtle, and this is known as the typical mind fallacy.

Edit: And funnily enough, further down there's a comment about Feynman realizing that his friend counts visually and he counts verbally - and I'm on the verbal side on that one, unless it gets complicated, and then I end up tallying mentally - but I have to count them verbally at the end.

> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.

There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).

While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.

I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.

I hesitate to come to this conclusion.

When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.

The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.

E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.

As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.

Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.

So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.

I certainly have to try. And the results often ain’t great.

I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that.

I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.

But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.

I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.

As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.

If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.