Scientists Learn More About Aphantasia

Researchers imaged the brains of people who don't use images to think

Hiya!

You’ve likely heard my story about asking my Dad when I was a kid whether he saw the same shade of green as I did when looking at the grass. He told me he didn’t know, that we could never know because we can’t know what it’s like in someone else’s head. This conversation radically altered my worldview and ignited a fierce curiosity in me about the human experience, particularly our thoughts and perceptions.

Decades later, his answer remains true — we can’t really know what it’s like in someone else’s head — but that’s also changing now thanks to technological advancements. Over the last few decades, scientists finally have the ability to study our imagination, and the findings are astounding.

The Mind’s Eye

I always thought of sight and imagination as two separate things, but it turns out, the brain creates mental images by basically reversing the process it uses for perception.

As electromagnetic waves enter our eyes, they’re turned into neural signals that flow to the back of our brain, where the visual cortex processes them. From there, the information is sent to the semantic and memory regions at the front of the brain. This process tells us if what we’re looking at is a book or a sandwich.

Nadine Dijkstra, a postdoctoral researcher at University College London who studies perception, told Yasemin Saplakoglu of Quanta Magazine:

“During imagination, we basically do the opposite.”

Dijkstra says that when using our imagination, we begin by deciding what we want to imagine, like an epic treehouse (because why not?), then information flows from the brain’s semantic and memory regions to the visual cortex, where the treehouse image is drafted. However, this is by no means the official working model of visual imagination, as the process contains plenty of mystery.

But some people, myself included, struggle to “see” anything in our mind’s eye. Some people can’t “see” at all.

Aphanstasia

Much of my thinking occurs within my body as swirling, whirling sensations that can take time to decode. I also have a rich and multilayered inner monologue, with seemingly countless distinct voices that all serve a purpose. My inner voices are talkative and generally positive, but I can also usually mute them when needed. And, like many people, I spent most of my life assuming everyone’s mind worked this way.

My inner-sight, however, is nearly nonexistent. I can’t visualize anything in my mind that my eyeballs haven’t seen, and even then, the images are static and fragmented. More often than not, it’s like trying to see through a window covered in condensation. I thought people were speaking metaphorically when they said to “picture” something in my “mind’s eye,” and was shocked when I learned they were being literal.

Sir Francis Galton of the University of Cambridge described internal experiences like mine in 1880, over 140 years ago, but there wasn’t an official term for it until 2015, when it was named aphantasia.

Aphantasia refers to people who don’t have a visual imagination, meaning they don’t form images in their minds. While I can sorta “see” things I’ve seen in real life, many aphantasics don’t “see” anything at all. To be clear, aphantasia is not a disorder but just one of many ways humans experience thinking.

While research into aphantasia is still in its infancy, researchers estimate between about 1% to 4% of the general population experiences it. Though, the estimation may change as research into aphantasia continues. The challenge is that scientific methods revolve around materialism, or what we can see and measure, whereas aphantasia pertains to our internal experience, which is subjective.

Researchers have mostly been limited in relying on participants’ reports about their experiences to gain insights, such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, created in 1973, used to study the strength of a person’s mental imagery. The issue is that questionnaires, reports, and surveys rely on self-reported, introspective experiences, leading some neuroscientists to wonder if aphantasia existed at all.

They questioned whether differences in reported mental imagery might be no more than a language disconnect, considering the vagueness with which we tend to describe our inner worlds. Dijkstra explained to Saplakoglu:

“We think we know what we mean when we talk about what mental imagery is, but then when you really dig into it, everybody experiences something wildly different.”

It can be challenging for those who experience mental imaging to imagine what it’s like to think without it. Bence Nanay, a professor of philosophical psychology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and mental imagery researcher, told Saplakoglu:

“You might think that aphantasia is this terrible thing … a very impoverished mental life, [but] I really think that if you have aphantasia, you actually have something to be happy about.”

Mental imagery is intriguingly linked with mental health. Nanay says people with aphantasia may be less likely to experience mental health issues caused by vivid mental illnesses. But the opposite may be true on the other side of the spectrum.

Like most things, mental imagery is a spectrum. Full aphantasia, the complete inability to visualize in One’s mind, is at one end of the spectrum, while hyperphantasia, when people report mental imagery as being just as vivid as reality, is at the other end.

While the images that hyperphantastics see are reportedly as real as reality and can involve all five senses, they aren’t hallucinating. The difference is that hyperphantastics know that what they’re “seeing” in their mind is not real, although hyperphantasia may be linked to Schizophrenia and Parkingson’s disease.

Aphantasia in the Brain

Neuroscientists understandably want to know more about how the brains of aphantasics differ from the brain of people who experience mental imagery.

Early studies suggested the spectrum of people’s abilities to form mental images could be linked to the connections between brain areas related to decision-making, memory, and vision. Since many people with aphantasia can recognize objects and faces and still somehow dream in images, it was thought their minds can store visual information — they just can’t voluntarily access it or use it to recreate the visual experience in their mind.

However, that’s just one possible explanation. As it so often is, people’s subjective experiences vary dramatically, and that means it’s possible there are different neural explanations throughout the aphantasic spectrum. Thankfully, technology has advanced enough that scientists can finally do what had never been done — see how the brains of people with aphantasia work.