Iām curious now, @roger_holland when you say you were a āgood looking, sharp dresserā, can you remember what that looked like, or is that what you remember someone telling you? 
Guitaristsā fantasies vs. ānormalā people 
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He didnāt want to make a secret of it and didnāt spend much time thinking about it at the time, but said he would come back to it himselfā¦ but itās funny when people like him talk a lot about āimagining things and stuffā ( and myself too) do not do that at all in the way we hear around us or thought how we do it ourselvesā¦ after that conversation in the evening I suddenly understood why I often told that i could not see my father (as I even said ) clearer in my mind after his death (2002) and that that was probably my own protection against the enormous sadness and pain I suffered from it, even for many years afterwardsā¦
Not being able to see loved ones in front of them is what most people have difficulty with
At the time I just thought Ooooo, thatās why ā¦
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Lots of people saying that 
(and dance evenings school and even sport camps where I won the ācompetitionā best dressedā¦ Oh my goodness, there has changed so much as many years ago in terms of clothing style)ā¦ and thanks to photos and being able to select the right photos also from that days 
ā¦way to much information 
Edit:
I knew this was going to have the wrong connotation
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I can see my father. Itās the face that I see looking back at me every day when I look in the mirror. I am becoming more and more like he was every day.
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well ā¦that`s 100% the same here
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Hehe, I find it hard to avoid my dadās stare as I fritter away my days on my guitar in front of my pc
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It almost makes you practice harderā¦yes almost
Nice
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I thought it was interesting when Justin brought that up during the class as well, especially when he tried to describe his subjective experience of it, and how he first realized that not everyone has this same experience. (I have a bit of a background in Philosophy, so these sorts of phenomena have always interested me.)
I had a friend in grad school who was an aphantasiac, and great with math and logic. I use my visual imagination quite a bit. I even manipulate objects in my mind sometimes when Iām doing math problems. When I told her that, she thought it was so bizarre.
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I wonder if the things often go hand in hand. Maths and logic are my strengths also, but Iām hopeless at anything creative. The closest I get is copying stuff. I have a fancy camera, and as a logical person I completely understand what all of the dials and buttons do however most of my best photos are based on images Iāve seen elsewhere and used as inspiration. Iāve long since said that if you give a creative person a camera and give them some random rock to take a picture of, theyāll effortlessly (it seems effortlessly) hand you a piece of art, whereas in the setting Iāll hand you a boring picture of a rock!
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laughing so hard here. Yesterday went to the beach with my wife (her birthday) and dog. We walked separately and the dog went crazy. I was a nice husband and took a picture of her and the dog. I sent it her and all she could say that she was a @#$%^ microdot. It was the only way to get her and the dog in the same shot, I told her she could zoom in.
Framing and what photos will look like are not something my mind even cares about. Oh well I tried and I thought I did good to get a photo of her and her dog on a beach on her birthday.
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I donāt think so. I see maths, logic and visualization as being great facilitators of ācreativityā
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Not here I used to hate not very like math( sorry teacher )
and there is no shortage of creative thinking and doing hereā¦ and what he 
say`s is also truth but also not necessaryā¦as far as Iām concerned
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The apple thing is interestingā¦ Just tried it: Picture an apple. Ended up with the luxury problem of having too many apples to pick from and randomly going through pictures of various ones in my mind.
Itās similar when Iām learning a song. I have some kind of map in my head that shows me where I am in the song, which chords I should play nextā¦ though this becomes more of an ear thing the more confident I become with different keys and chord progressions.
While I agree that there is always a spectrum I do find this quite fascinatingā¦
@philsmith @roger_holland @mattswain ā¦ Sorry if this is redundant, maybe it has been mentioned somewhere earlier in this threadā¦ This is a visual thing only? You can picture sounds? You can picture how you would like a song to sound that you are practicing on guitar?
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Years ago I heard an interview of someone with this condition. I had no idea that it existed and now I am shocked by how many people say that have it. I canāt fathom not being able to āvisualizeā something.
When I was doing martial arts, I would do a mental playback of the katas I was learning, picturing myself performing them. I now use visualization for some of the things I have learned playing guitar.
I took up drawing late in life, a few years back, and although I can imagine what something looks like, I am not able to put that image to paper and must rely on a photo or the real thing.
I had never learned the wordā¦will add aphantasiacs to my vocabulary.
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No this was another direction that I was interested in taking this thread. It is interesting once you start thinking about it, other senses being the same or different. I am very sensitive to smells like garlic - makes me wretch, but cannot āvisualizeā that smell.
When Justin talks about getting things in your musical imagination. I am not sure what to think. I can hear when things are right and wrong, can hear scales, and intervals (need lots more work). I am really good at recognizing songs from the first few notes. However from a songwriting point of view I am really stuck at trying to choose chords other than random. I actually now have some words, so am reviewing the dice song writing lesson to write the chords. This will be interesting to understand how I develop a process.
Apart from a very few songs I couldnāt tell you how they sound without a prompt. When I sing them in my head they donāt have the true singers voice attached.
I very rarely wake up thinking I have had a dream, however last night before going to be I heard The hook from Ace of Spades on TV, and I looked up. I was also playing GT7 a driving game on PS5. This morning I woke up and I remembered a dream of being in a car being driven by a policeman smoking with some others, blasting Ace of Spades on the radio, with a Futuristic Dashboard. The driver was in front of me on the right side, which I havenāt really driven on for over 25 years.
As for what I imagine if asked, no I have no image at all. I think I am being asked to think of a tree on an island and I know both of those things.
I dislike reading fiction because they spend pages and pages describing the scene for most people to build a mental image of, I am just thinking get on with it. So I skip lots of sections
When I was at work, I was a technical leader for Gore who make Gore-Tex and Elixir Strings. I was pretty successful if I say so myself. I did a lot of drawing on whiteboards and powerpoints to try to communicate with others. I think that may have helped me memorize things, I know I drew it but donāt have a picture of it in my mind.
I have a constant dialog in my head, there is a voice dictating this post right now. My wife has music on, which is really distracting as well.
Mnemonics have helped me with guitar learning, bit I have no visual to go with it. I have heard some teachers describe images that help them learn the mnemonic.
It is fascinating how the mind works so differently for us all.
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For me absolutely not just visual, applies to sounds and smells too. When it comes to guitar Iām always playing songs that I know, that someone else has transcribed. As Iām familiar with them I know if Iām somewhere close to sounding correct. If you asked me to visualise a series of notes or chords, it would spark absolutely nothing
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This is another one of those topics where you never know if everyone else encounters the world in the same way as you do or if youāre some sort of weird outlier and maybe itās just best to say nothing!
Iāve had this inner chatter for as long as I can remember but it was only through reading a book on meditation that I came to realise that I definitely wasnāt alone in this. The real bonus was learning that you can actually turn down the volume on that voice, knowing that what it says can be quite unreliable and you have the choice of what you do with what it says. My inner chatter tends to be quite negative and cynical and my life has got a whole lot better since I learned to ignore it!
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Aw, Matt, now youāve gone and spawned a new, fascinating topic! My mind reels with questions and commentsā¦ 
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I wonder how often aphantamaniacs provide eyewitness testimony at murder trials 
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Iād be happy to answer questions. I think discussing all of these topics is hugely beneficial. It helps people who experience them realise that they arenāt uniquely terrible in some aspect of life and also can educate others who donāt experience them. For example, itās easy for someone who is a visual thinker to assume everyone else can do it too, or for an non-visual thinker to believe that itās only them who canāt bring crystal clear images to mind
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