Imágenes mentales: por qué no sé deletrear, pero sé hacer cuentas muy bien.

Hi Jimi, you add a good observation to what I have experienced. Your comment reminds me of one student who could/would ONLY do his math work in his head. He could not, or would not, write it down. This worked well for him – he was an honor student –  until he got into tenth grade and the math got harder. Then he started failing. Neither I, nor his distraught parents or teachers could get him to change, to write down. 
sadly this behavior applied to other subjects such as history. 
so I’m thinking that he must have had an extreme “case” of aphantasia: strong imagining visual coupled with weak observational (or whatever one might call it) for the concrete written.

 I’d be curious to know how he turned out, it’s been many years, and to examine him with aphantasia in mind.

I’ve good enough with basic math as I’ve memorized a lot of addition, subtraction and multiplication, but advanced algebra and beyond were so hard for me. I’m also an above average speller. I can’t see the word in my mind, but I can tell if it’s spelled correctly or incorrectly on the paper. 

What Syber said about a one-way connection makes sense with my situation. I can “think” what people I know look like, but can’t see them clearly in my head. I recognize faces (although I now realize why I sometimes had trouble later matching people to their names if I met them in a group) but I can’t see them in my mind.

I sometimes like to think that aphantasia is like having a 1-way connection in your brain. Most people can see something and recognize it, or recall something and imagine it. For me, I can recognize things just as well (if not better) than most, but it’s a 1-way street. No imagining the thing back from the recognition process.

I can tell when something looks “wrong”. The spelling doesn’t seem right, the perspective in the sketch is off, the colors used don’t quite match, etc. etc. but that doesn’t mean I can “see” what the right thing is. Even faces are that way. I can recognize someone, but not really describe what features I was looking at to do so.

With a piece of paper, I can kind of use it as the “scratch surface” for the recognition to play off of. Scribble a little and I’ll know if I got closer or further from what I wanted. Math isn’t hard with paper since I can put all the numbers there and not have to remember what I was doing. It’s just process at that point, and my brain can do processes.

Neat to hear that experience is somewhat parodied in others with aphantasia!

How very similar you and Syber are to me.  I can spell pretty good by writing it out (it’s the visual pattern I recognize, not the letters generally) but it is almost impossible for me to spell anything complicated in the ‘air’ (like a spelling bee).

It *is* like a one way matching system!  When I developed software, it was very difficult to compete  with other top developers (but compete I did) because memory is the coin of the realm.  When coding, I always had to work with my short term stack memory (7-9 slots) to accomplish specific tasks complemented by frequently coming up for ‘air’ (looking at the call sequences, etc) to see where I was in a bigger sense in the code since I can’t visualize it.  I had some health issues in my 50s that ended up damaging my short term stack (one, two or three have become unreliable – I can’t really tell and it seems to come and go with anxiety levels) and thus I retired, leading me into…art.

Most interesting this art – I started drawing a year and a half ago – so I have somewhat of a fresh perspective on how I create it mentally.  I know what a picture is *not*.  If I try to call to mind something, say and Elephant, I see a large dark oval shape.  No, two.  There’s also a long trunk.  Curly tail.  Wait, it has ears and the are large… I can’t see these (gray fuzzy, no color but the idea of a color) but I can recognize corners and pockets – simple shapes – so I can draw each of those individual things.  It’s the overall composition my brain can’t come up with but as I put the pieces down I know when they are not ‘right’ (generally that is, I’m pretty stubborn about not using a reference [for just this mind stretching reason] until the end or I don’t have [or it shifts] a mental shape.

I feel like I threw a lot of words at this but you and Syber actually have a better description.  It’s just nice to hear other people’s experiences and coping mechanisms.