by Words are powerful things. In 2015, with the help of a classics friend and two psychologist collaborators, I coined the term “aphantasia” to refer to the lack of eyes. We found Aristotle’s word for the mind’s eye, “phantasia”, adding the prefix “a” to indicate its absence.
The term was needed because we had found 21 people who, as far as they knew, could not imagine things. Since then I have heard from over 10,000 people who have identified this aspect of their psychological makeup in our description – and from thousands at the other end of the spectrum, with “hyperphantasia”, imagery so vivid it rivals with “real seeing”.
It was clear from the start that, although interesting, aphantasia was not disabling. Early contacts included Ed Catmull, president of Disney’s Pixar, and Blake Ross, co-creator of the Mozilla Firefox internet browser, who described the moment he recognized his aphantasia in a hilarious Facebook post.
We learned from the 21 participants in our original group that people usually discover they are aphantasic in their teens or twenties, often when sharing memories or trying to follow instructions for visualization. They generally assumed, until then, that talk of the “mind’s eye” was metaphorical: suddenly they realize that when others speak of “seeing” a memorable moment from the past, or the face of an absent loved one, that they really can.
These original data suggested several additional conclusions: in the absence of visual images, people with aphantasia often have a thin “autobiographical memory” of their personal history. They also often lack other types of “sensory imagery”, such as the ability to imagine the contrasting feel of velvet and satin. And more surprisingly, they often dream visually despite their lack of waking imagery.
Because of the term aphantasia, there has been a huge surge of public and scientific interest: since 2015, over 50 papers have been published investigating aphantasia. A heartwarming feature of this work was the enthusiasm of many of our participants, who were happy to finally have a harmful aspect of their psychology named and studied.
I recently reviewed this new area of research in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. What are the main conclusions so far?
Not a hindrance
Despite Aristotle’s view that the “soul never thinks without an image”, people with aphantasia think clearly and effectively.
A wide variety of standard tests of memory and thinking – “cognition” show only borderline changes, if any, in aphantasia. But one aspect of memory appears to be affected, as our initial work suggested: the richness of autobiographical memory is typically reduced in aphantasia, along with the ability to conjure up vivid future scenarios.
Recent studies have also supported our initial suspicion that in aphantasia imagery is often affected in other senses, and visual dreams are often preserved.
Other associations have emerged. A subgroup of people with aphantasia describe difficulty recognizing faces, while aphantasia may be more generally linked to subtle changes in the way the world is perceived.
Aphantasia with autism spectrum disorder occurs in some of our participants, and people with synaesthetic hyperphantasia, in which colors are evoked by hearing sounds for example, are more likely.
Aphantasia seems to lead people towards science and technology careers, and “creative” occupations are traditionally overrepresented among those with hyperphantasia, although there are many exceptions.
A genetic trait?
Aphantasia occurs in about 4% of the population. If you are aphantasic, your siblings are ten times more likely to share this trait than expected by chance.
We hope to identify a possible genetic basis for vivid imaging extremes with the help of large biobanks (studies, like UK Biobank, enrolling large numbers of participants from which many types of data, including genetic data, have been collected). The likelihood that aphantasia is not one “thing” but occurs in a variety of subtypes will complicate this hunt.
You may be wondering if an experience as subjective as the vividness of images can be relied upon as a target for science. The patterns in the results that I have described suggest that descriptions of the vividness of the images are meaningful. But to my delight there are other lines of objective evidence pointing in the same direction.
If you have imagery, and imagine looking into the Sun, your pupils will be constricted – not so with people with aphantasia. Listening to scary stories changes the skin behavior of those with imagery (we sweat!) – not so in people with aphantasia.
Work that directly examines brain activity suggests that differences in brain connectivity between people with aphantasia and hyperphantasia help explain why thought translates into image more easily for some of us than for others.
Why has our modest base of a term attracted so much interest? One of the most remarkable aspects of our human lives is that we spend a large part of them in our heads. Therefore, we must be inspired by each other’s lives.
Visual imagery is the most frequently reported conscious experience. So those of us who have this imagery find that other people live in quite different mental worlds. Those of us who are not happy to have met a word to catch the difference.
This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Adam Zeman receives funding from: Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Tibore Foundation
