I may have some thing similar to Aphantasia disorder.
When I close my eyes and try to visualize a family member or friend, it is like worse than an old low quality VHS tape.
If I close my eyes and visualize a vacation I had, it is like old low quality VHS tape.
Does this sound like some thing similar to Aphantasia?
Not I seem to be at 3 or 4
Should have gone with Betamax.
Stranger
Not to minimize the OP’s experience, but I think I may have Elephantasia.
I all-too-vividly remember people I’d rather forget.
I think you may be misconceiving what other people see in their “mind’s eye”. Nobody (probably) sees 6. You are probably normal.
Heh.
I get this:
I should say the quality is 3 or 4 but the display screen is like 2.
I get –
a sense in my mind of what a brown horse is like.
But I’m not seeing the horse. I’m not seeing blackness, either. If my eyes are open, I’m seeing whatever’s in front of them. If my eyes are closed, then I’m seeing something like blackness with a lot of little white dots that can’t be focused on.
The sense of horseness is there. But it isn’t visual. It’s something else that I can’t describe.
Exactly that. I mean, most people don’t literally see what they’re visualizing, right? For me, when I close my eyes, it’s not like I see what I’m thinking of. My visualization is somewhere … in my head … like, impossible to describe, as you said. When I close my eyes, I also see blackness with patches of white dots or things. That sensation is more like “seeing” than my visualization. If I’m high or extremely tired, I can sometimes get the dots to connect and form a visual impression of something I’m thinking of. In that case, it’s like the 2/3 in the picture above, and in monochrome, so far as I remember.
What @thorny_locust said. IMO/IME “Mind’s eye” is a figure of speech; it isn’t a display screen. At least as to memory, it’s much more a high fidelity “display screen” as to live imagination. Or at least mine is.
I have some very specific memories that have a very vivid visual photo-like component. But as a 65yo guy having lived 24,000+ days and been awake and paying attention some 380,000 hours, I probably have 20 or 30 total of what I call “slides from the past”. I have zero visual “movies from the past”. Everything else I know about my entire life’s vision is impressions of horseness that “feel” somehow visual, not visible pictures of horses. Or aren’t visual memories at all, but are facts, words, stories, music, etc.
And the older the visual memory, the more the brightness and contrast of the “slide” memory goes to hell. What were once bright detailed backgrounds are featureless dull gray. And what was once a full color bright foreground is now a vague chiaroscuro sketch. I can only recognize that it once was a bright shiny slide by dint of having “seen” it so many times over so many years. IOW, I remember the memory of having “seen” the memory in better condition earlier. So take your example image 3, but also make it B&W, not color. That’s what my childhood and into early teenhood “slides” look like. What handful exist at all.
Maybe I’ve got the same mental defect you do. More likely, that’s simply how many (most?) humans work.
I’m at a 1.
I have very vivid visual recall. 5-6, quite crisp.
A magnificent stallion galloping through the misty dawn, steam emanating from his flared nostrils as he rises on his hindquarters, tearing at the air with his forelimbs, wild flowing mane tossing about. Then I look away from that photograph and I see a stick figure of a dog.
When I smoke a lot of weed take mushrooms, I see bright reds and bright blues in weird patterns.
Yeah, if I get stoned sometimes I see colored patterns. They’re nothing like a photograph, though.
I think when I was a small child I used to see them more often even though I wasn’t stoned. One night when I was around seven I got a real show, and could see not only patterns but images – I don’t remember what they were, except that at least one was a fairy (the little winged type) but I remember being impressed by that show, it wasn’t usual. Then after that the patterns went away entirely until I started smoking weed in college.
But none of that had anything to do with imagining, or remembering, a horse or a train or whatever.
That’s what I thought nearly all my life. Then we had a thread on aphantasia here and I discovered that for a lot of people apparently it is a display screen. At least, unless I was somehow entirely misunderstanding them.
Ive been trying the “visualize” a bright red apple test, ever since I saw the Aphantasia thread here. Im some where between 0 and the negative numbers. I have vivid dreams, but Im not sure if they are in color or black and white. Some like a grainy 8mm, others like HD data…those usually for closeups?
I think LSL guy said it well.
I think I can actually recall “visuals” better with my eyes open, if I think “red apple”, somewhere in my head, I see round red “apple”, just for a second. I just tried with a series of colored fruit and that seems to be how my systems work. Getting high or tired, or weird naps, I “see” ALL sorts of things!!!
I dont recall ever hallucinating with my eyes wide open though, mostly just distortions and “enhancements”, from psychedelics. Nothing ever under normal conditions.
I think if I could imagine images at a level 6 I would just wander around in my mind looking at memory slide shows!!!
One problem I have with high visual recall is that when someone says something like “Asshole!”, I see it.
When I first heard about this, I was amazed by how many people are 1s on that scale. I’m a 5 or 6, always have been, and can’t imagine what it would be like not to be.
I’m also a grapheme-color synesthete (I see letters and numbers in color) and I was out of college before I learned what synesthesia was and that it wasn’t completely normal for eights to be pink and Ks to be lime green.
Great. Now I’m always gonna see a literal asshole. 
I guess I don’t know what is being asked here. If somebody says “imagine an apple”, I imagine a particular kind of apple (like a Macintosh), its color, its little stem, the lighting, the shadow, if it has something bitten out of it. But I don’t actually “see” anything. It’s like a fleeting internal impression, but it’s good enough to be a 6. I can’t, like, trace it onto a piece of paper or anything. It’s not something I can really hold on to. It’s just weird for me to understand what and how people are visualizing, and its extremely difficult for me to explain it, as well.
A very good friend of mine from college has synesthesia and I have aphantasia. We didn’t know the names for it but we were astounded to discover how each other saw things when we discussed it on one of our acid trips together.