The Minds We Assume Everyone Has: Aphantasia, Inner Speech and Memory
Close your eyes and picture an apple. Not the word apple , or a list of facts about apples. Try to produce the object itself: its colour, its shape, the curve around the stem. Turn it slightly. Imagine a bite taken from one side. What happened? Perhaps an apple appeared with almost photographic clarity. Perhaps you saw something less stable: a patch of colour, an outline that vanished when you tried to examine it, a suggestion rather than a picture. Perhaps nothing appeared at all. You still knew what an apple looked like. You could describe one, recognise one and probably draw a serviceable version, but there was no internal object to inspect. Questions of this kind often produce an unusual disagreement. People are not merely reporting different experiences; they are uncertain whether they have understood the instruction in the same way. One person says they can see the apple and assumes everyone else can too. Another insists that nobody can literally see an imaginary object and...