So, it's recently come to my attention that there is a condition called aphantasia currently thought to affect about 2% of the population, where these people literally lack the ability to imagine things, in the sense that they can't conjure up images in their minds. Many people with this condition don't realize that they are unusual and usually interpret statements about "picturing" things in their minds or using their "mind's eye" as being metaphors talking about considering these things abstractly as concepts, rather than what imagination actually is: mental images created in your mind, with more-or-less the same visual features as your actual vision (or other senses, as the case may be), though perhaps of varying degrees of vividness depending on the person.
My thought is: is this condition more common among Flat Earth believers? I ask because Flat Earth believers seem to have bizarre ideas about what things should look like. Examples of things Flat Earthers have suggested on this forum that are so bizarre that I suspected they are were trolling include:
1) Not understanding why if the stars were on a sphere and the flat Earth were in this middle of the sphere, half the sky should not be visible to anyone at one particular time, and if the stars are rotating above the North Pole, then the lower half of the sphere should never be visible, so there would be a "celestial plane", not a "celestial sphere".
2) Thinking that if you can see the bottoms of buildings disappear behind the horizon, there should also be obvious curvature in the line of the horizon.
3) Not getting that rotating around the South Celestial Pole is a very different kind of motion from the edge of a disk rotating around a point behind you.
4) Not understanding that the motion predicted by parallax on a plane does not match the way the stars actually move.
5) Basically everything a Flat Earther has said about the way perspective works, ever.
Could it be that these bizarre understandings are a result of some Flat Earthers being unable to make pictures in their minds, so it would require an intensive mathematical analysis to understand the problems that these things pose?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that every Flat Earther has this condition. Clearly some Flat Earthers recognize these problems and try to fix them with various explanations (bendy light, DET). But so many Flat Earthers have understandings of things like perspective that are so messed up that the simplest explanation to me is that they just can't make pictures in their heads to see what things should look like if the Earth has different shapes. And I wonder if people with this condition are more likely to be convinced by Flat Earth arguments, so that the condition is overrepresented among the Flat Earth community.
What do others think? And would any Flat Earthers like to volunteer information about whether they can actually imagine things?