"Kind of makes the descriptive stuff pretty pointless in books." Yes! I sometimes admire the writing, but the words are wasted on me. I'm also a developer: I sometimes find it useful to draw things, but much prefer written specs. And as someone else wrote, it's frustrating when everyone assumes that everyone has a mind's eye. Visualization seems to be key for positive thinking, technique in sport, hypnosis, pleasure (?); memory, certainly. It's been great to hear from a few people with the same condition. I've come to think of it as a disability, and I now like to tell people I'm intellectually disabled (since it seems inconsistent with my career). As for the underlying processes, I think that mental images are "there", and the problem is right at the last step: I can't bring them to consciousness.