Words are powerful things. In 2015, with the help of a classics-savvy friend and two psychologist friends, I coined the term “aphantasia” to describe the absence of the mind’s eye. We borrow Aristotle’s word “fantasia” for the mind’s eye and add the prefix “a” to indicate its absence.
This term was needed because we came across 21 people who could not visualize anything as far as they knew. Since then, I have heard from more than 10,000 people who recognize this feature of their psychological make-up in our definition – and from several thousand at the opposite end of the spectrum, with images so vivid that “hyperfantasy” rivals “real vision”.
It was clear from the beginning that aphantasia, although intriguing, was not disabling. Early contacts included Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Disney, and Blake Ross, co-creator of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, who described the moment he detected his aphantasia in an enthusiastic Facebook post.
We learned from 21 participants in our original group that people typically discover they are aphantasic in their teens or twenties, often when sharing memories or following visualization instructions. Until then, they had generally assumed that talk about the “mind’s eye” was metaphorical: Suddenly, they realized that when others talked about “seeing” a memorable memory from their past or the face of an absent loved one, they could actually do that.
These original data suggested some additional conclusions: in the absence of visual images, people with aphantasia often have a poor “autobiographical memory” of their personal history. They also often lack other forms of “sensory imagery,” such as the ability to imagine the contrasting feel of velvet and satin. And what is even more surprising is that they often dream visually, although they lack waking images.
The coining of the term aphantasia has led to increased popular and scientific interest: more than 50 articles investigating aphantasia have been published since 2015. A heart-warming aspect of this study was the enthusiasm of many of our participants, who were delighted to have a surprising aspect of their psychology finally identified and studied.
I recently reviewed this new area of research in Trends in Cognitive Science. What are the main results to date?
It’s not an obstacle
Contrary to Aristotle’s view that “the soul never thinks without images”, people with aphantasia think clearly and effectively.
A wide range of standard tests of memory and thinking – “cognition” – show only borderline changes (if any) in aphantasia. However, as suggested by our initial study, one aspect of memory appears to be affected: the richness of autobiographical memory is generally reduced in aphantasia, and the ability to enact vivid future scenarios is correspondingly reduced.
Recent research has also supported our initial suspicions that in aphantasia, images in other senses are often affected and visual dreaming is often spared.
Other associations also emerged. A subgroup of people with aphantasia report difficulty recognizing faces, and aphantasia more generally may be linked to subtle changes in the way the world is perceived.
Aphantasia occurred with autistic spectrum disorder in some of our participants, while people with hyperfantasia were more likely to experience synesthesia; For example, hearing sounds leads to seeing colors.
Aphantasia appears to lead people to science and technology professions, while traditionally “creative” professions are overrepresented among those with hyperfantasia, although there are many exceptions.
Is it a genetic trait?
Aphantasia occurs in approximately 4% of the population. If you are aphantasic, your siblings are ten times more likely to share the trait than would be expected by chance.
With the help of large biobanks (studies that enroll large numbers of participants, such as the UK Biobank, where many types of data are collected, including genetic details), we hope to identify a possible genetic basis for extreme image vividness. The hunt will be further complicated by the possibility that aphantasia is not a single “thing” but occurs in a variety of subtypes.
You may be wondering whether an experience as subjective as the vividness of images can be trusted as the goal of science. The patterns in the results I just described suggest that reports of the vividness of images are meaningful. But reassuringly, other objective evidence points in the same direction.
If you are imaginative and imagine looking at the Sun, your pupils will constrict; This is not the case with aphantasic people. Listening to scary stories changes skin conductance in those with imaginary images (we sweat!); However, this is not the case in aphantasic people.
The study, which directly examined brain activity, suggests that differences in brain connectivity between people with aphantasia and hyperfantasia help explain why thought turns into images more easily for some of us than for others.
Why has our humble coining of a term sparked so much interest? One of the hallmarks of our human lives is that we spend most of them in our heads. Therefore we have to deal with each other’s inner lives.
Visual images are the most frequently reported conscious experience. Therefore, those of us with imagination are surprised to discover that others live in quite different mental worlds. Those of us who do not have this feature are happy to have come across a word that captures this difference.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Adam Zeman receives funding from: Arts and Humanities Research Council Tibore Foundation