But you've seen apples yes? It doesn't require imagination or any mental processing at all. I can imagine various apples I've never seen but just forming a mental picture of an apple just requires recall for everyone whose ever seen one.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with apples, it's not like I run into the local grocers and stand in stunned silence at the granny smiths, and I can describe a given apple from experience quite easily - in text form, I just can't form a visual mental image of one.
It's slightly better when it comes to people, in that I can barely picture someone's face (sometimes) if I concentrate, but it's simply not something I have much capacity for.
It's honestly not something that I ever even realised was unusual until quite recently, and certainly not something that caused any problems for me over the years. I simply assumed that people were using figures of speech or simply exaggerating when they talked about that sort of thing (imagine my surprise at finding people that can actually daydream the way that you see in movies), and actually describing things or people to others has always come easily to me.
There's also folks out there who claim to have purely image based thoughts as well, and they were the ones being tagged as NPCs the last time I saw this topic come up. These people claim to have to "translate" words to and from images while they're in a conversation - something that takes them enough time to make conversing difficult - and that's a completely alien concept to me. I think most people fall along a spectrum between these extremes though.
I've always thought it was natural to do both. I think in pictures and words. Each can be more efficient in differing circumstance. Lacking either seems unnatural and a handicap.
Really it goes further than that. Some thoughts are pure math. Some thoughts can be a combination. Lacking any of these seems defective to me.
Perhaps, but we all have our crosses to bear, and while I admittedly am not a very good interior decorator I have with great difficulty come to terms with that and never really had any problems anywhere else.
I would counter however, by pointing out that being extremely good at one thing is often better than being decently good at several things and is a perfectly valid trade-off. A mix of generalists and specialists is ultimately more beneficial to a society than the communist ideal where everyone does everything equally well.
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