I'm a sighted person with multisensory aphantasia. Since birth, I have never been able to visualize something in my mind. I didn't even realize until age 30 that most other people were seeing images in their heads. The same is true for me with other mental senses. None of my thoughts or memories include an experience of sound, smell, etc. I do remember facts about what something looked, smelled, felt, tasted, or sounded like, but those facts are just words.

Recently I've been wondering about the inner experience of blind and deaf people, and the range of experiences they might have with their mind's eye or mind's ear.

I'm guessing that, like me, people who have been blind since birth do not have a mind's eye (though I've heard that some blind people can echolocate and have a spatial or semi-visual image in their heads based on sound). But what about people with acquired blindness? Have you retained a mind's eye as vivid as it was before your blindness? If so, can you describe what the experience of seeing in your mind is like for you? Do you use visualization purely for imagination, or can you get visual mind-images that are at least partially based on your hearing, touch, and smell, and that you presume are at least partially accurate?

Thanks for any insight!

$1 includes a person with acquired blindness who mentions she has visual dreams and can "remember" (I'm guessing that means visualize) what her husband looked like when they met, back when she had sight. And $1 (from the same blind-since-birth host) directly addresses mental visualization, which unsurprisingly he can't do at all. But alas, the videos don't explore whether other physical senses could feed into visualizations for people with acquired blindness.