Some people can't see mental images

> He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally.

This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their heads.

This is the fundamental question about experience.

You may be "right". What you consider to be "seeing" things in one's head may be not what's happening in that person's mind. What they call "seeing" may be something else.

The best way I can describe it is essentially generating a memory. If I were instructed to picture an apple in my mind, I could imagine a hand holding up an bog standard Red Delicious. I can imagine it free-floating. And it would be much like when I remember what happened yesterday for instance. Of course, we get into whether or not we "see" the memory or not.

So, if you are saying you do not consider yourself to have mental images, what, to your best ability to describe it, do you do when you remember an event?