As somebody with no real ability to visualize, I am fascinated by the fact that other people can actually see things in their imagination: the existence of an actual mind’s eye. (Those of us with some form of aphantasia always remember when we discovered that this wasn’t just a metaphor, but a lived experience for some people—usually when they read this New York Times piece that went viral in 2015.) And I’m not the only one who wants to know more: I see the conversation come up again and again and again and again.

Oliver Burkeman asked a good question recently: is this about how we talk about what we “see” or is it what we see? It’s something I wonder, and certainly something I hear from people with some visual ability whenever the subject is discussed. But as somebody pretty far to one end of the spectrum, I suspect that—while the edges of these things are not rock solid, and some people may be confusing their ability to “see” with their ability to “perceive”—there is a true and genuine lack of visual perception for many of us. We aren’t describing the same thing with different language: there is a wide range of capability here.

(The editor in me also wonders: Why has nobody yet written the definitive longform piece on the mind’s eye, explaining the state of the science and capturing what it feels like to be hypervisual or unable to visualize? I would pay good money to read it!)