It is common in rationalist circles to ponder the fact that the interior spaces of our minds are surprisingly diverse places -- and that we tend not to grok this no matter how many times it is pointed out.
A perennial example is aphantasia, a condition in which a person does not have the capacity to mentally visualize things. (Here is a well-writen example). A person with aphantasia is generally fully in possession of their cognitive abilities. In fact, the condition first came to light when educated and thoughtful people reacted badly to the psychological and philosophical accounts referring to qualia as if they could really appear uncaused in the mind, rather than existing simply as poetical metaphors. Science is hard enough without people inventing things! And of course, most people reacted to these negative reactions by assuming that those people who did not experience internal qualia were just jerks who were purposely denying reality to make obtuse points.
Anywho... I recently discovered an unexpected addendum to this. A recent discussion questioned whether most people could generally picture detailed, full-color, moving images, such as knots, rotating complex shapes, impossible shapes, etc. My first thought was that I could easily do these things, with the exceptions of knots, which kept turning into impossible objects (inconsistently passing through bits of themselves). Then, I realized that I couldn't, or at least didn't.
So here's a fun thing: some people suffer from anosognosic aphantasia.
Well, almost. I can perceive complex visual forms, moving, and in detail, and I do not have to notice that anything is odd. But if I actually pay attention (which I previously have not had cause to), I am actually connecting a series of still and partial images, combining them in something like a movie reel, and simply interpreting this as if it were movement. Which seems fair enough, except that when I pause on a still, it is often an extremely limited view of one part of the target -- one corner, one piece of texture, etc.
More interesting, this is something that I had thought about before, but completely missed that I was doing it all the time. I do this much more pervasively when visualizing faces, and I spent some time noticing this when the subject was broached in the above link (this one). I simply noted that I was apparently a little bit face blind, as I cannot visualize a whole face at a time, and certainly not moving. It did not even begin to occur to me that this was how I visualized other things, just more so.
If you can believe that you are experiencing one thing in your mind when your mind is presenting you with another thing, an obvious supposition is that rather than your mind selecting an arbitrary level of things to directly experience mentally and then patching up the differences with the illusion of fulsome perception, your mind probably just grinds away through its semantic network and then overlays the appropriate beliefs of meaningful and direct correlations to reality.
So, keeping in mind that the typical mind fallacy is a thing (I will node this someday, I promise, but in the meantime, it simply means that you have a strong tendency to assume that other people think more like you do than they actually do), I am assuming that actually everyone is aphantasic, and that the belief that you see things in your mind is simply another form of qualia that the mind uses to equivocate mental models with sensory models.
This may also account for the indelible certainty that people have consciousness and souls and all that jazz. The mind selects useful bits of processing and applies the appearance of color or space or self or unique-snowflakiness. Unfortunately, this doesn't actually help us understand what causes these feelings of relevance -- we are still not reduced to automations -- but we're getting closer!