I have APHANTASIA (and you may too...without realising it!)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as a vivid first-person description of aphantasia and an example of an aphantasic artist.
What it is
An artist describes discovering she has aphantasia, the inability to form mental images, and how it affects her work. She asks viewers about their own visualization.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec michaelbuckbee · 2019-06 · on “Aphantasia”
A little slow, but this video is fantastic for describing the feeling of aphantasia and it's sort of doubly fascinating that the incredibly talented artist who made it suffers from it (as I'm the flip side, great at visualizing and horrid at creation) [this video]
Recommends cybersol · 2019-01 · on “The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia”
So I have aphantasia, and I first realized when talking to someone about mental images and memories. They have photorealistic pictures in their mind, or even video scenes like a movie. At my best I have something like an expressionist painting with words and concepts arranged spatially on blobs of color representing the object. More typically, just blackness. Here is another description of it, and a test in the first part: [this video]
Cites frabcus · 2023-10 · on “My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things”
It's hard! There are some professional artists who are aphantasic, e.g. this YouTube video talks about it [this video] IIRC, the artist does lots of sketches, and looks at them to see what looks right. And also uses computer models to get angles of what she's drawing which she struggles with otherwise.