I don't profess complete incredulity at the concept of mental imagery. My experiences don't match those of people who claim to have aphantasia at all, I'm capable of imagining objects, events, actions, etc. in my mind. I just don't actually see them as if they were there. That's the part that seems unusual to me.
I'm fairly sure I'm aphantasic. When I try to imagine something I don't get any visuals, even the visual processing equivalent of subvocalization. Sometimes I can get a flicker of an outline or something but I can't hold the concept and it'll dissolve inside a second. I used to be a pretty good artist working from photos, but I can't compose in my head. At all.
But I do also know what familiar things look like more or less, and I can easily imagine layouts of buildings I know really well. I can explain those things verbally fine.
But it registers more in the way you might expect if you were encountering the object in darkness, or became blind after thoroughly learning the object as a sighted person. I imagine aspects of the object or scene in relationship to each other, sort of feeling over it with my mind, and cross-referencing with facts I remember about it. I'm wondering if that's what you're talking about--being able to conceptualize it rather than visualize it.
I did manage to imagine "blue" once during meditation, though, and that was pretty cool. I really saw it when I did--my whole visual field behind my closed eyes seemed sky blue. Normally I just see clouds of purplish dots on a black field, if there's no light shining through my eyelids, and it's been that way all my life. That experience, more than anything, convinced me people who say they "see" stuff in their mind's eye really do see stuff.
I'm definitely going to check out the linked technique. Maybe it's snake oil but doesn't seem likely to hurt to try. That blue experience was pretty compelling.
Your experience sounds very similar to mine (even down to once visualizing a color (in my case green), which is what convinced me visualizing is really a thing and I really can't do it).
I describe my "internal" sensory experience as being similar to proprioception. In the same way you can "feel" where your left hand is relative to the rest of your body, that's how my relates to most objects/spaces.
Yes, I've also used the proprioception explanation, terminology and all. It felt a little obscure here, so I spelled it out. We must have extremely similar experiences.
I'm curious: have you noticed any effect on your memory? My autobiographical memory is poor--I remember facts about what I've experienced, but I struggle to recall the experiences themselves. I can't "mentally time travel" back to a moment to recall what it was like to be there or note new details about those recollections. I only retain whatever I notice at the time, and in a disconnected fashion as if I were remembering an incident in a book or movie.
I've read that people with similar deficiencies (such as SDAM) frequently also report aphantasia. I've often wondered if the ability to visualize might play a major role in encoding and recalling our experiences.
>can you not do it with your eyes open?
I can. I just don't actually, physically see it in front of me.
I can imagine a red apple, and I can imagine it's shape and color and the spots on its skin and I can even mentally feel it, smooth or bruised, I can even taste it, but just in my mind.
I think I have the same kind of garden variety visualization experience that you have. There is bound to be a spectrum where some people's mental imagery is virtually non-existent on one end, and it's very lucid and persistent on the other. The people who come out of the woodworks online claiming they have a mental heads-up display, like AR superimposed on their vision, make me raise an eyebrow. I'd be more inclined to believe that a child had such an experience, but by the time we're adults, our brains have normally found it more advantageous to be squarely grounded in baseline reality.
