I have partial facial blindness which makes it hard to picture faces that aren’t super familiar and I can’t create new faces in my head. I end up picturing faces of people I know and celebrities.
It becomes frustrating when I’m reading as the faces morph constantly into my head. I constantly stop to get the faces right. Sydney Sweeney ended up as 2 characters when I read “Bunny” lol. I also get a biased view of the characters this way. It makes it really hard to enjoy reading nowadays. Any suggestions? Different strategies for picturing or reading without picturing?
Your post and the subsequent replies is such a fascinating concept to me when seeing how different everyone is as a reader. I’m another with aphantasia and have never pictured any characters, scenes, landscapes - nothing.
I actually find over description in books very annoying, I don’t care what shade of red the lead characters hair is and don’t need a paragraph dedicated to it, get back on plot!
Fantastic how different we all are
Lol! Maybe that’s why I need to visualize things because other wise there is no point of what shade the curtain is or whatever. It kind of is annoying