science

I'm pretty sure I have aphantasia. My mom, on the other hand, is an artist with very powerful imagination. She would often tell me how she sees something she's imagining and I never really knew what she meant. I just assumed that it's kinda a figure of speech. Only when I first read about aphantasia I realized that it probably really works completely differently for her.

I would like to know whether aphantasia has any practical impact on one's life. For example, I had this suspicion that differences in my "mental image processing pipeline" might be a factor in my terrible driving skills. Quick visual assessment of the traffic situation, at an intersection for instance, is very hard for me. This is just me making stuff up though, no idea if it makes any sense. In fact, I think I'm going to research this topic and look for some papers now!