This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.
The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never thought it could be any different for other people.
I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to learn for people.
I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember via other means are more effective.
I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical locations.
I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.
I’m a prolific consumer of fiction. For me reading isn’t about the scenery so much as the ideas and messages within a work. I can appreciate character growth without the visual imagery involved. I hate fluffy details added to books. I don’t need an item by item run down of their entire wardrobe or the place settings on the table. That’s mostly just noise to me and books that feature those details prominently are a slog.
“He was all jowls and scowls”
Is infinitely better for me than writing out a list of visual characteristics that so many authors seem to lean on.
Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to describing what people are wearing). I often even visually skip over section of text that express visual descriptions.
All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent of me thinking about something.
Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as some entity "space station" next to some other entity "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without any associated form.
If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere", "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations would look like geometrically (expressed as relations between shapes, angles, etc).
If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute the tags "clouds."
Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is directing my attention in this manner.
I will lightly defend a lot of this description in American Psycho.
I agree that I generally gloss over that sort of description, but in the case of this one book I felt like the obsessively-materialist descriptions in it did a great job of helping communicate the vacuuous frivolity of the culture the novel's picking at, if that makes sense?
That is to say, when I feel like the descriptions are ~fungible I'm probably right there with you in skipping over them, but they were one of my favorite parts of American Psycho.
It's a lot like thinking, I guess. (Much of my thinking is already roughly abstract-lingual, so reading feels of-a-piece. I would characterize myself as having a running interior narrative, but this isn't a voice I "hear" as I gather it is for some.)
I generally prefer reading to listening since it's easier to back up and re-read if my attention has wandered.
I can have trouble staying ~oriented when there are lots of characters because I have no strong sense of what they look or sound like. (TBH I think this is an asset when it comes to adaptations. I may notice plot divergences, but I'm rarely bothered by the specifics of a place or character.)
A fair fraction of the enjoyment I get out of reading is about wordplay and language aesthetics, and much of the rest is about ~ideas and personalities.
Reading tends to drive a lot of synthesis/connection between divergent concepts for me. Some of my most intellectually-fertile (generative) time centers around reading.
I generally can't count on any kind of eidetic memory (unlike those I know who can, say, picture a page or replay a conversation to extract information from it). Instead, I generally lean more on deep conceptual synthesis. I am much more likely to retain some picky detail when it's integrated into my broader understanding than if it's effectively an arbitrary fact. I am the person who would rather take an essay exam centered on understanding than a picky multiple choice that hinges on arbitrary details like dates.
Likewise, I don't really vibe with arch/infra/service maps as much as narrative documentation. (This is not to say that they aren't sometimes helpful for understanding, but I do find them hard to ~grasp in isolation and not the first resource I reach for.)
This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.
The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never thought it could be any different for other people.
I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to learn for people.
I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember via other means are more effective.
I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical locations.
I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.