Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :)
There's actually quite a lot of this: it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.
There's actually quite a lot of this: it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.
I sometimes wonder what people with pain asymbolia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia) or aboulia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulia) make of the rest of us talking abut pain and wanting things.
Some links: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792
Also, while I'm at it: when your nose is stuffy but which nostril it is seems to cycle over the course of the day, you're not imagining it and that's called the 'nasal dilation cycle' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle ; those things you see crossing your vision are also real and part of your eye fluid, called 'floaters' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater ; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination is probably self-explanatory.