I find it interesting that the author describes aphantasia as an impediment to writing descriptions.
My own experience has been that, while scenarios of the ‘imagine you are looking at a picture of it, now describe it to me’ flavor are challenging because I can’t imagine the picture; what I ‘see’ when I think of something actually strongly resembles what I ‘see’ when I have the something directly available to look at; but for some reason I remember and work from that intermediate internal description rather than remembering and working from a mental image; so the act of imagining something and the act of describing it are actually quite closely intertwined.
Catastrophically bad if you are being asked to recall something that didn’t strike you as terribly relevant when you saw it; since there’s no option to just pull the tapes and have the homunculus re-watch them; but pretty workable for describing the impression something left on you, since what you do remember basically is that, just before the cleanup and formatting you do before speaking.
The bit that I really don’t understand, though,(not that I understand how memory works in general, this just strikes me as particularly witchcraft-y), is when you find yourself recalling a particular detail that apparently was part of your impression of something; but you would not have remembered was part of it if you’d just been asked for your impression of something.
By way of example, when I saw the below picture used as stock art on an Arstechnica piece
I was immediately struck by the fact that it was almost certainly a T40 or T60-series Thinkpad; because I spent a lot of time with a T42 in college and the shape of the protective overhanging ‘lip’ at the edge, the position of the latch mechanism and concealed screws; and the proportions were instantly familiar; but if you’d asked me to describe the laptop I used in school I very much doubt that I would have remembered to mention any of that, except perhaps the existence of the latch, given that the shift from latching to latchless laptop designs was very noticeable historically.
