Tony writes:
Is this truly as absolute as it sounds or do you just mean that you find it very, very difficult?...
if I were to ask you to describe your parents to me, or brothers, sisters, a friend, etc, are you really saying that you don't "see" their faces in your mind?
I've been trying for many years now and I still can't picture my parents' and siblings' faces, let alone describing them.
It's not a dumb question. I have found that not many people are like myself.
This is probably why I am not good at all with mental math. I can't even say out the quadratic formula without writing it down first, look at it, and say it out loud... and I have it memorized since middle school. I know all the kinematic equations but I always have to write them all out on the board when I do a lecture session (I usually pretend that they are on the board to help my students).
This is why I didn't like my high school calculus teacher. Back then, he made each one of us stand up and say out loud all the trig ID's, functions, intergrals, derivitives, etc. I always stumbled through them. Sometimes I even had to use my finger to write in thin air to help me say them out loud... and I ended up with a 5 on the AP exam.