Have you seen the bicycle experiment?

People are asked to imagine a bicycle. They are asked "Are you imagining a bicycle right now?" and the answer is "yes."

The interlocutor says "ok, please diagram/draw the bicycle you are imagining."

The results are insane. It becomes clear very quickly that people are not really imagining a bicycle. They are pulling up a partial memory of a bicycle that their brain is willing to rubber-stamp as "good enough."

I wonder how many people with "aphantasia" have the same internal images and are correctly unsatisfied with the level of imagery that human memory provides.

That doesn't mean I doubt aphantasia sometimes exists, on some level, but the accuracy of internal images seems to me like an important part of the discussion about it.

This is relevant to LSD because it is possible that you are "seeing" the same things that other people do but you are less willing to treat these visual effects as representing an image. Somebody else looks into the darkness and sees a person-shaped shadow... they think they see a person, you think you see a vaguely person-shaped blob. A schizophrenic looks into that shadow without LSD and sees a person chasing after them.

https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...

That's really interesting, thanks. And sure, a significant amount of remembered imagery is undoubtedly reconstruction and interpolation, but when I try and imagine a bicycle all I get is those partial memories of bicycles that flicker in an out of my mind's eye intermittently, there isn't really any reconstruction or interpolation that produces stable imagery. My visual memory is fine (although the inattention and working memory deficits of ADHD in itself may affect how much detail is committed) - I recognise what things are and things I've seen before - it's my mind's eye and the ability to envision that's lacking. And without being able to envision you can't really imagine visually.