It's actually written: "For roughly 35% of people who discover aphantasia, it's a significant psychological stressor." It doesn't mean that 35% of the population has aphantasia. It means that among the 1-3% of the population who have aphantasia, 35% feel stressed when they discover it. I can see that the sentence could be easily misread. I have ADHD and dyslexia, so things like that happen to me all the time.

I had very similar experience. 2 days ago I listened to dr Russell Hurlburt explaining that people don't know what their inner experiences are and I realised that "images" I have in my head have no colours at all (not even white or black though I have ideas about the colours) while actual seeing images is all about colours - if everything is for example pitch black it means you don't see anything. I thought that I had mental images because I had something visual happening in my head - putting objects in space, knowing their shapes. I feel the movement of my eyeballs when I imagine looking at something, how I watch different elements, moving my gaze from one element to another or focusing to watch details, and can imagine touch, emotions associated with a things, get concepts about colours and other details. Like I have all elements of seeing just without actual seeing. When there was a question "how vivid the image is?" my brain somehow interpreted is "how vivid the mental representation is" - I didn't rate it high because I didn't have a clear picture but also not very low because I had vivid mental representation. When I read fiction, it's very immersive to me. I also cheat — I combine in my head colours which I really see with shapes I can imagine, so it feels like I can almost see images in my head, which obviously doesn't work at all in the darkness. So only 2 days ago I realised that what interpreted as some kind of images was actually something else. Just like you I could answer all detailed questions about what I imagined but because I conceptualised the scene with details, not because I really saw it. I just don't need another person to prompt the conceptualisation. When I took tests with more awareness about what is an inner "image", I got a confirmation that I actually have "aphantasia". That's why I came here. I love discovering names and descriptions of my inner experiences, it will help me communicating that to others. It is also fascinating to learn about different ways of experiencing the world.

I have a hyperactive brain. I constantly have things happening in my head, see patterns, associations, get ideas or memories popping up. I don't know if it matters but my memories and things I imagine are quite vivid to me and almost visual - it's like looking at a white sheet of paper, seeing white paper but just knowing which part is snow, which a polar bear, which a snowman etc., knowing their 3D shapes, how it would be to touch them, attributes they have. I can realistically remember feelings in my body, emotions and movement. It's just without colours (even white and black) or words. I guess it's a type of phantasia which I have combined with thinking in concepts. There is a lot of information somehow packed in single concepts which I can process in less than a second. Many concepts and patterns go through my mind. What I see, hear or think about reminds me of other things. Words, just like images, are not a part of my system 1 thinking, so it's not a monologue at all as far as I know. I think with concepts and patterns when it's automatic thinking. My conscious and controlled thinking is both with concepts and patterns (I am good in maths and other abstract things, it feels the most natural to me) and with words. I find thinking with words annoyingly slow and less precise but I practise it a lot because when I think with concepts, I am not able to explain my thoughts to others. Inner monologues as a part of system 1 is a total abstract to me.

I had lots of problems with spelling. Seeing a word written correctly 1000 times (reading books) didn't help at all. Handwriting also didn't work for me, but I think it's because of dysgraphia; I had to write every letter separately. I also used sound-to-letter mapping and grammatical rules, but they worked only if I stopped to think about every single word. What helped: - Watching a word written incorrectly, analysing how it looked, watching problematic elements, and thinking ugly and nasty they looked like. I was evoking negative emotions, comparing the word to something disgusting. Then I was doing something similar with the word written correctly, just comparing it to something nice and thinking how nice and beautiful it is, looking at it and thinking about beautiful flowers (I can see some flashes of images but mostly I have emotions and concepts attached to various objects). Later on, I was still writing incorrectly, but when I saw it, I had a negative feeling and knew I had to change it. After correction, the word looked nice. This was actually my best method, which I invented for myself. - My mother tongue is phonetic, so I was reading an English word out loud in a way it would sound in my mother language, repeating it and memorising the spelling that way. - Typing on a computer correctly a few times; my fingers memorise sequences and movement. I may not know how to spell a word or be able to handwrite it, and still type it alright. Playing to one's own strengths is the best way, finding what type of thinking a person has, how a person memorises things and what they like. Trying various things and checking what works may be a way to do it. I think it is important to discontinue methods which don't work when possible to avoid frustration.

I just yesterday discovered that I am on an aphantasia spectrum so I am still discovering what it means for me. I have almost no mental images though not zero. I can perform rotation task better than an average person (high score in tests) but I don't do it through rotating image, that's impossible for me. The easiest way for me is usually just seeing patterns and noticing correlations between elements of an object. I can do that quickly enough and very accurately. When I took an IQ test based on rotating object tasks, I scored high. I had a similar, but a bit lower result in an official IQ test done with a psychologist, which I had a few times in my life (in my country I had to do it on every level of my education to get and keep my dyslexia certificate). The latter had various types of tasks. One task was to look at some image for a short time and then draw it from memory. I was trying to quickly analyse the image, make a description in my head (otherwise I would remember only that I saw some pictures with lines and geometrical figures), but there was not enough time. After drawing from memory I had to do few other tasks and then draw from memory again. I had no mental image and at that point I vaguely remembered my incomplete description so I was dreadful. In this test I lost most of the points on this task and on questions about pop culture (I guess it was about long term memory, they wrongly assumed that everyone watches popular movies, read magazines, talk with friends about famous actors etc). Another way of dealing with rotating object tasks is to do it through a movement of my hand. I don't see much visually in my head but I can decide that for example my thumb represents one side of the drawn object, the second joint of my index finger represents another side of the object. I can rotate my hand, see where my thumb, index finger etc. are after the rotation, and based on it know where elements of an object would end up if they rotated in a similar way to my hand.

It's actually written: "For roughly 35% of people who discover aphantasia, it's a significant psychological stressor." It doesn't mean that 35% of the population has aphantasia. It means that among the 1-3% of the population who have aphantasia, 35% feel stressed when they discover it. I can see that the sentence could be easily misread. I have ADHD and dyslexia, so things like that happen to me all the time.

I had very similar experience. 2 days ago I listened to dr Russell Hurlburt explaining that people don't know what their inner experiences are and I realised that "images" I have in my head have no colours at all (not even white or black though I have ideas about the colours) while actual seeing images is all about colours - if everything is for example pitch black it means you don't see anything. I thought that I had mental images because I had something visual happening in my head - putting objects in space, knowing their shapes. I feel the movement of my eyeballs when I imagine looking at something, how I watch different elements, moving my gaze from one element to another or focusing to watch details, and can imagine touch, emotions associated with a things, get concepts about colours and other details. Like I have all elements of seeing just without actual seeing. When there was a question "how vivid the image is?" my brain somehow interpreted is "how vivid the mental representation is" - I didn't rate it high because I didn't have a clear picture but also not very low because I had vivid mental representation. When I read fiction, it's very immersive to me. I also cheat — I combine in my head colours which I really see with shapes I can imagine, so it feels like I can almost see images in my head, which obviously doesn't work at all in the darkness. So only 2 days ago I realised that what interpreted as some kind of images was actually something else. Just like you I could answer all detailed questions about what I imagined but because I conceptualised the scene with details, not because I really saw it. I just don't need another person to prompt the conceptualisation. When I took tests with more awareness about what is an inner "image", I got a confirmation that I actually have "aphantasia". That's why I came here. I love discovering names and descriptions of my inner experiences, it will help me communicating that to others. It is also fascinating to learn about different ways of experiencing the world.

I have a hyperactive brain. I constantly have things happening in my head, see patterns, associations, get ideas or memories popping up. I don't know if it matters but my memories and things I imagine are quite vivid to me and almost visual - it's like looking at a white sheet of paper, seeing white paper but just knowing which part is snow, which a polar bear, which a snowman etc., knowing their 3D shapes, how it would be to touch them, attributes they have. I can realistically remember feelings in my body, emotions and movement. It's just without colours (even white and black) or words. I guess it's a type of phantasia which I have combined with thinking in concepts. There is a lot of information somehow packed in single concepts which I can process in less than a second. Many concepts and patterns go through my mind. What I see, hear or think about reminds me of other things. Words, just like images, are not a part of my system 1 thinking, so it's not a monologue at all as far as I know. I think with concepts and patterns when it's automatic thinking. My conscious and controlled thinking is both with concepts and patterns (I am good in maths and other abstract things, it feels the most natural to me) and with words. I find thinking with words annoyingly slow and less precise but I practise it a lot because when I think with concepts, I am not able to explain my thoughts to others. Inner monologues as a part of system 1 is a total abstract to me.

I had lots of problems with spelling. Seeing a word written correctly 1000 times (reading books) didn't help at all. Handwriting also didn't work for me, but I think it's because of dysgraphia; I had to write every letter separately. I also used sound-to-letter mapping and grammatical rules, but they worked only if I stopped to think about every single word. What helped: - Watching a word written incorrectly, analysing how it looked, watching problematic elements, and thinking ugly and nasty they looked like. I was evoking negative emotions, comparing the word to something disgusting. Then I was doing something similar with the word written correctly, just comparing it to something nice and thinking how nice and beautiful it is, looking at it and thinking about beautiful flowers (I can see some flashes of images but mostly I have emotions and concepts attached to various objects). Later on, I was still writing incorrectly, but when I saw it, I had a negative feeling and knew I had to change it. After correction, the word looked nice. This was actually my best method, which I invented for myself. - My mother tongue is phonetic, so I was reading an English word out loud in a way it would sound in my mother language, repeating it and memorising the spelling that way. - Typing on a computer correctly a few times; my fingers memorise sequences and movement. I may not know how to spell a word or be able to handwrite it, and still type it alright. Playing to one's own strengths is the best way, finding what type of thinking a person has, how a person memorises things and what they like. Trying various things and checking what works may be a way to do it. I think it is important to discontinue methods which don't work when possible to avoid frustration.

I just yesterday discovered that I am on an aphantasia spectrum so I am still discovering what it means for me. I have almost no mental images though not zero. I can perform rotation task better than an average person (high score in tests) but I don't do it through rotating image, that's impossible for me. The easiest way for me is usually just seeing patterns and noticing correlations between elements of an object. I can do that quickly enough and very accurately. When I took an IQ test based on rotating object tasks, I scored high. I had a similar, but a bit lower result in an official IQ test done with a psychologist, which I had a few times in my life (in my country I had to do it on every level of my education to get and keep my dyslexia certificate). The latter had various types of tasks. One task was to look at some image for a short time and then draw it from memory. I was trying to quickly analyse the image, make a description in my head (otherwise I would remember only that I saw some pictures with lines and geometrical figures), but there was not enough time. After drawing from memory I had to do few other tasks and then draw from memory again. I had no mental image and at that point I vaguely remembered my incomplete description so I was dreadful. In this test I lost most of the points on this task and on questions about pop culture (I guess it was about long term memory, they wrongly assumed that everyone watches popular movies, read magazines, talk with friends about famous actors etc). Another way of dealing with rotating object tasks is to do it through a movement of my hand. I don't see much visually in my head but I can decide that for example my thumb represents one side of the drawn object, the second joint of my index finger represents another side of the object. I can rotate my hand, see where my thumb, index finger etc. are after the rotation, and based on it know where elements of an object would end up if they rotated in a similar way to my hand.