Aphantasia
Based on Wikipedia: Aphantasia
The Mind's Invisible Canvas
Close your eyes and picture a red apple. Can you see it? The curve of its skin, the glint of light, maybe a small stem at the top?
For most people, this is effortless. But for roughly one in a hundred people, this request produces nothing. No apple. No red. No image at all. Just darkness, or perhaps the conceptual knowledge that apples exist and are red, floating without visual form in the mind.
This is aphantasia—the inability to voluntarily conjure mental images. And until surprisingly recently, most people who had it didn't know they were different from anyone else.
The Shock of Discovery
In 2020, a peculiar image began circulating on social media. It asked readers to imagine a red apple and rate their mental picture on a scale from one (photographic visualization) to five (no visualization whatsoever). The post went viral, and for a fascinating reason: thousands of people were genuinely shocked to discover that when others talked about "picturing" something, they meant it literally.
Some people had spent their entire lives assuming phrases like "see it in your mind's eye" were metaphorical. Others, blessed with vivid mental imagery, couldn't fathom how anyone could think without seeing internal pictures. The comments sections became a strange collision of two groups who had always assumed everyone's mind worked like their own.
This moment of collective realization captures something profound about consciousness: we have almost no way of knowing what's happening inside anyone else's head. Your internal experience could be radically different from your neighbor's, and without a specific prompt to compare notes, you might never discover it.
A Victorian Discovery, Then Forgotten
The story of aphantasia begins in 1880 with Francis Galton, a polymath who was Charles Darwin's half-cousin. Galton was conducting a statistical study on mental imagery among men of science—a survey that would lead him to a startling finding.
When he asked scientists to describe the mental images they could summon, he expected detailed responses. Instead, many of his distinguished colleagues looked at him as though he were speaking nonsense.
To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words "mental imagery" really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of colour.
That last comparison is particularly apt. Just as someone with color blindness might not realize they're missing something until tested, a person without mental imagery has no absent sensation to notice. You can't miss what you've never had.
Seventeen years later, the psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot documented an even stranger variant. He encountered a physiologist who, when thinking of concepts like "dog" or "animal," didn't see mental pictures of dogs. Instead, he literally saw the words printed in his mind—black letters on an invisible page. When someone mentioned a friend's name, he would see that name written out and have to actively work to conjure the friend's face.
For over a century after these observations, the phenomenon attracted almost no scientific attention. It simply fell through the cracks of psychology and neuroscience.
Rediscovery in the Twenty-First Century
The modern scientific study of aphantasia began by accident in 2005, when a man approached Professor Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter with a puzzling complaint. After undergoing minor surgery, he seemed to have lost the ability to visualize. His mind's eye had gone dark.
Zeman published a case study in 2010, and something remarkable happened: people began contacting him to report that they'd never had mental imagery in the first place. This wasn't damage or loss—it was how they'd always been.
In 2015, Zeman's team published a landmark paper coining the term "aphantasia," drawing from the ancient Greek word phantasia, meaning appearance or image, combined with the prefix meaning "without." They distinguished between acquired aphantasia (lost due to injury or illness) and congenital aphantasia (present from birth).
The opposite condition also got a name: hyperphantasia, for those whose mental imagery is extraordinarily vivid, sometimes approaching hallucination-like intensity. These two extremes represent endpoints on a spectrum that most people fall somewhere between.
What Does It Feel Like?
Describing aphantasia is inherently paradoxical. How do you explain the absence of something to people who have it, or the presence of something to those who don't?
People with aphantasia report that they can think about visual concepts without seeing them. Ask an aphantasic to describe their mother's face, and they might list features accurately—brown eyes, curly hair, small nose—while experiencing no visual representation whatsoever. The information is there. The picture isn't.
Interestingly, most people with aphantasia still dream visually. When Zeman studied self-identified aphantasics, he found that the majority reported seeing images in their dreams, even though they couldn't summon them while awake. This suggests that the condition affects voluntary imagery while leaving involuntary imagery intact—a crucial distinction that hints at the underlying neural mechanisms.
However, their dreams may feel different. A 2020 study found that aphantasics experience less control over their dreams and fewer sensory emotions within them. The researchers theorized this might reflect a trade-off in the brain: when the systems handling abstract, semantic information are emphasized, sensory and emotional qualities may be diminished.
Beyond Pictures: The Inner Voice Goes Silent
Here's where things get stranger still. Visual imagery isn't the only mental sense that can be absent.
In 2021, researchers surveying people with aphantasia discovered something unexpected: many of them also lacked auditory imagery. They couldn't hear their own inner voice, couldn't replay a song in their heads, couldn't imagine what a friend's voice sounds like.
The study proposed a new term for this condition: anauralia, from the Greek meaning "without hearing." And the overlap was significant—most people who reported visual aphantasia also reported weak or absent auditory imagery.
Think about what this means. Some people navigate life without any mental sensory experience they can voluntarily summon. No pictures, no sounds, no replaying yesterday's conversation. Their thinking must happen in some other mode entirely—perhaps pure abstract concepts, perhaps verbal labels, perhaps something we don't have good language for.
Yet curiously, when researchers actually tested these self-reported aural aphantasics on tasks that seem to require auditory imagery—like judging musical pitch or recognizing voices—they performed normally. The subjective experience was absent, but some functional capacity remained. This gap between what people report and what they can do remains one of the field's most intriguing puzzles.
The Science Gets Rigorous
Early aphantasia research relied heavily on self-reports and questionnaires—not ideal for studying something as subjective as mental imagery. But scientists have developed increasingly clever ways to measure the phenomenon objectively.
One breakthrough came from binocular rivalry experiments. When your two eyes are shown different images simultaneously, your brain typically alternates between perceiving one or the other. But if you first imagine one of the images, that priming can bias which one you see first. The strength of this priming effect correlates with imagery vividness.
When researchers tested self-reported aphantasics with this paradigm in 2017, the results were clear: imagining a stimulus had almost no priming effect for them, while it significantly influenced perception in people with normal imagery. This wasn't self-deception or poor introspection. Something genuinely different was happening in their brains.
Another approach involved measuring skin conductance—essentially, how much your palms sweat, which tracks emotional arousal. In 2021, researchers had participants read a frightening story and then look at scary images. The general population showed elevated fear responses during both tasks. Aphantasics? Their skin conductance flat-lined during the scary story but spiked normally when viewing actual scary pictures.
This makes a certain intuitive sense. If horror fiction relies partly on making you visualize gruesome scenes, and you can't visualize, the words might process as mere information rather than visceral imagery. But real images bypass the need for mental construction entirely.
Memory Without Pictures
Perhaps the most striking practical consequence of aphantasia involves autobiographical memory—your mental record of your own life.
A 2020 study found that people with aphantasia have less vivid autobiographical memories overall. They showed significant differences across all aspects of memory compared to controls. When asked to remember past events or imagine future ones, aphantasics generated fewer specific episodic details.
One 2018 case study was particularly illuminating. Researchers examined a single aphantasic's visual working memory—the ability to hold visual information in mind briefly. The subject performed significantly worse than controls specifically on tasks requiring high precision, and remarkably, they lacked insight into their own performance. They didn't know they were struggling.
But the picture is complicated. A 2021 study found that while aphantasics recalled fewer objects in drawing tasks, they actually showed superior spatial memory. They knew where things were, even if they couldn't picture what those things looked like. And another 2021 study found no significant differences in overall visual working memory task performance—instead, the difference appeared in the strategies aphantasics used to achieve similar results.
This suggests aphantasia isn't simply a deficit. It may be more like a different cognitive style, with its own strengths and weaknesses. People adapt. They develop alternative strategies. The end results often look similar even when the underlying mental processes are radically different.
Connections to Other Conditions
Researchers have begun mapping how aphantasia relates to other variations in human cognition.
A 2021 study found that people with aphantasia reported more autistic traits than those without, particularly weaknesses in imagination and social skills. This doesn't mean aphantasia causes autism or vice versa, but it suggests these phenomena may share some underlying cognitive architecture.
Aphantasia also appears connected to synesthesia, though the relationship is complex. Synesthesia involves unusual sensory crossovers—seeing colors when hearing music, for instance—which might seem like the opposite of aphantasia's sensory absence. Yet they may both reflect variations in how brains wire up sensory processing.
There's also evidence linking progressive aphantasia to dementia. Some researchers have suggested that gradual loss of mental imagery might serve as an early warning sign, appearing before more obvious cognitive decline. This remains preliminary but raises important questions about imagery's role in overall brain health.
Can It Be Changed?
For most of its history, aphantasia was assumed to be fixed—you either had mental imagery or you didn't. But recent research suggests it might be trainable.
In 2024, a team led by Jonathan Rhodes at the University of Plymouth worked with athletes who had aphantasia or low imagery ability. (Athletes are particularly interesting subjects because sports psychology has long used mental imagery for performance enhancement.) Over six weeks, the researchers ran a training program designed to improve imagery ability.
The results were encouraging. A significant majority of participants showed improved imagery abilities. This doesn't mean everyone with aphantasia can develop vivid visualization, but it suggests the condition isn't always a permanent binary. The brain's capacity for imagery exists on a spectrum and may be more plastic than assumed.
There's another intriguing route to altered imagery: psychedelics. Some people with aphantasia have reported acquiring visual mental imagery after using substances like psilocybin (the active compound in "magic mushrooms") or ayahuasca (a traditional Amazonian brew). This makes a certain neurological sense—psychedelics are known to increase visual cortex activity and create vivid hallucinations. They might temporarily—or sometimes permanently—activate dormant imagery circuits.
This remains anecdotal and uncontrolled. But it points toward fascinating questions about what aphantasia actually is at the neural level. Is it missing hardware, inactive software, or something else entirely?
Theories and Puzzles
Scientists and philosophers are still working to explain what aphantasia actually represents.
One researcher, Blomkvist, suggests it's best understood as a malfunction in the episodic memory system—the brain's capacity for mentally traveling through time to revisit past experiences. This would explain the autobiographical memory differences that studies have documented.
Another researcher, Nanay, has proposed something more counterintuitive: perhaps some aphantasics do have mental imagery, but it occurs unconsciously. They might be generating visual representations without experiencing them as imagery. This would explain how aphantasics can sometimes perform normally on tasks that seem to require visualization.
Zeman, who helped launch the modern study of aphantasia, suggests the neural substrate may involve differences in connectivity between the brain's frontoparietal networks (involved in executive control) and visual networks. Essentially, the wiring that lets you voluntarily activate your visual cortex to create imagery may be weaker or different in aphantasics.
The philosophical implications run deep. If you've never been able to visualize, what is imagination to you? If you can't replay experiences mentally, how does that change your relationship to your own past? Philosopher Šekrst has argued that the spectrum from aphantasia to hyperphantasia should fundamentally reshape how we analyze mental imagery in philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics. We've been theorizing about minds without recognizing how different those minds might be from one another.
Living Without Pictures
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about aphantasia is how ordinary most aphantasics' lives are. They hold jobs, maintain relationships, appreciate art, read fiction, solve problems. Many achieve success in fields that might seem to require visualization—including art and design.
This challenges assumptions about how mental imagery functions. We might think visualization is essential for creativity, planning, or empathy. But millions of people manage these tasks through other means. They conceptualize without picturing. They plan with words or spatial sense rather than mental movies. They remember facts and impressions rather than replay sensory experiences.
In some ways, aphantasia serves as a reminder of consciousness's fundamental privacy. You will never directly experience another person's mental imagery—or lack thereof. You can only compare notes through language, which might be describing utterly different internal phenomena with the same words.
The mind's eye, it turns out, comes in more varieties than we ever imagined. Some people see in vivid Technicolor. Some see in dim outlines. Some see the words printed instead of the images named. And some see nothing at all, navigating through a world they cannot replay, armed with knowledge and concepts where others have pictures.
Which raises a question you might find yourself pondering: when you close your eyes and picture that red apple, what do you actually see? And how would you ever know if someone else sees it the same way?