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I have a middling case of aphantasia. I can create a basic image, blurry shapes, low detail, etc. with a lot of focus and concentration. I struggle immensely with faces I haven't seen a lot, and spatial orientation. Beyond that, I simply think in terms of words more than images.
As far as chess, this means I'm logically thinking out the moves, rather than mentally picturing it. I tend to get a bit overwheled trying to internalize the new board state after more than a couple of moves. I also don't play chess much, though, and would probably simply train that ability by playing more, just like someone without aphantasia will train visualizing more board shapes ahead.
I just wanted to say I'm almost exactly the same way, and it's kinda cool to see someone else stuck in this halfway point, lol. The way I describe it is that I can picture the concept of something in my head, but the moment I try to focus on any details, it gets warped or corrupted or simply won't manifest any more detail. Same on struggling with faces/remembering people, not so much on spatial orientation.
While I haven't played chess in a long while, I can kinda draw off my experience with similar games and logic problems I've worked on. I can kinda hold the concepts in my head, but not really visualize it. So I'll not be envisioning the chess board, but I can still easily puzzle out "if I take this pawn, that one will take my rook, then I can take it with my knight", etc.
Yeah, pretty much the exact same thing for me. I describe things as, I can get a single detail to pop, but then I lose the overall composition, and when I scale back to the whole image, it's a different image.
Do you dream?
god yeah, i have aphantasia, but i also dream, so i often experience these unquantifiable dreams, which often bleed into reality, because my brain has never experienced anything other than "physically observing the world" so anytime i dream half the time my brain is just confused as fuck and considers it to be a real event that actually happened, because fuck it why not.
That has been the source of confusion more times than i'd like to admit. My more wacky and obviously not real dreams help a lot with that though.
it's weird as fuck waking up, and having no mechanism to recall something that "happened" you have this like, weird fleeting state of emotion and vague comprehension of what happened. But no way to visually process it.
Yes, actually. Very vividly.