Exactly what I was thinking.

TIL I'm in the 0.8% of population. I thought it was a rule, not an exception

It seems that aphantasia is much more common among programmers. It must have something to do with the fact that autism and mathematical ability is correlated, or the third fact that autism and exotically expressed drawing abilities are correlated, too. But this is too complicated a tangle to draw simple conclusions.

Thanks for this comment, I also wasn´t aware of the statistics (also if I´m full aphant / aphantasiac / aphantastic [1]? or within the 3.9% with dim/vague mental images forming capacities). I also wasn´t aware that this is a somewhat new discovery, with research starting ~2015?

> ...in response to reading a frightening story and then viewing fear-inducing images found that participants with aphantasia, but not the general population, experienced a flat-line physiological response during the reading experiment, but found no difference in physiological responses between the groups when participants viewed fear-inducing images (wikipedia)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aj7pyc/whats_th...

That's an interesting question, because as far as I understand we still don't know if the issue is that people don't create the image in their minds, or that the imagined "image" is not perceived.

There are always edge cases. For example, it is often difficult to get conclusive evidence against somebody who has an identically twin sibling.