The reality is that every individual's ability to visualize exists somewhere on a spectrum between aphantasia (complete inability) and eideticism (photographic memory).
That bicycle experiment is fun, and it certainly shows that most people are very far from the eidetic end of the spectrum.
But it can also (better) be explained by the facts that:
- people generally don't pay very close attention to any particular object, they categorize things and move their attention elsewhere (mostly to higher levels - e.g. the whole environment level)
- most people don't have a whole lot of experience with bicycles and how they work at a detailed mechanical level (anybody that does can draw a bike fairly well, from a technical accuracy perspective)
The reality is that every individual's ability to visualize exists somewhere on a spectrum between aphantasia (complete inability) and eideticism (photographic memory).
That bicycle experiment is fun, and it certainly shows that most people are very far from the eidetic end of the spectrum.
But it can also (better) be explained by the facts that:
- people generally don't pay very close attention to any particular object, they categorize things and move their attention elsewhere (mostly to higher levels - e.g. the whole environment level)
- most people don't have a whole lot of experience with bicycles and how they work at a detailed mechanical level (anybody that does can draw a bike fairly well, from a technical accuracy perspective)