Huh, I can do audio fairly well. I'm awful at impressions but I can imagine Morgan Freeman saying arbitrary things just fine.
Completely helpless at the visual, though. I try to remember my first home, or an image I studied a minute ago, and it's the same deal: it sort of flashes by, but it's not really an *image* even. It's a shadowy collection of concepts.
Driveway, porch, siding (was brown, nowadays white)
Red eyes, grinning, big scarf
It's more dreamlike than my dreams! I'll have vivid dreams where I see very crisp visual data, and I'll remember it clearly for several minutes after waking up. Writing it down cements the *events* of the dream (putting it in long-term memory even if I never read what I wrote). But the visual part always floats away. It *was* there, *is* there each morning as I jot them down, but I can't hold on to it. Then I'm fully awake and I can't truly picture *anything*.
So like - a normal person can visualize an apple, then be asked what color it was, and there's an answer? That's still flipping wild to me. All I can do is know what a cartoonish profile of an apple is shaped like, and that they're typically green or red. Does the stalk point left or right? For me the only answer is "no".
Also, when feverish I'm pretty sure my dreams lose that visual segment and go full concept. It's about as fun as it sounds- it's a very mixed bag and very interesting, but not what I'd call fun. But it's hard to rate that against the dreams where I imagine a beautiful vista, or a version of myself, and all I can remember is... trivia!! I'll never see it again, but I can remember how it felt.
How it felt to remember how it looked, for those few waking minutes before it slipped away.
YetAnotherEdit: I'm trying to figure out how I recognize faces. I obviously have trouble picturing them. How exactly do I recognize my family? I'm keyed extremely well to their tics and voices, such that their emotions are sometimes awkwardly obvious, so I'd recognize a doppelganger easily. But how much would their faces have to change before I noticed?
For years I've noticed being unsure which of my friends and my family wear glasses. Even this moment, I'm recalling events years ago where their eyewear came up - not when I saw them last week.
Lastedit I swear about 20 minutes after the last: My dad went clean-shaven once for a few months. It was right after college to me and it was deeply disturbing, as if he had a completely different face. I think that I had to figure who he was. It was extremely distracting.
Pretty ironic when I change my look all the dang time. I wonder what I look like to normal people.