I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
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An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. For everyone else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid imagery than you and some people less, but probably that doesn't change very much about your life.
Is that because it’s hereditary or instead something that was missing in early childhood? Like as a toddler you were never given one of those games where you fit shapes into different sized holes for example?
As someone said below, I suggested figuring it out early is best because of a lot of things that just work differently, especially in learning. There seems to be a real selection bias that most people who learned they were aphantasic reading a New Yorker article, say, by definition figured out how to make it work somewhere along the line. Aphantasia isn’t at all a learning disability in a real sense, but you definitely have to approach things differently.