What is The Loss of The Mind’s Eye or Aphantasia? (You May Have It Without Even Knowing)
Sept 5, 2022 | Written By Sophia Mai
Try imagining a beach. Close your eyes and imagine the waves crashing against the sand or a beach ball thrown in the air. Can you produce a mental image of this scenario? Compare it to what you would see in real life. Was it extremely accurate or vivid, somewhat inaccurate, or could you not visualize anything at all? The inability to conjure mental images and create an interpretation of a concept is called aphantasia or the loss of the mind’s eye.
Photo by Sean Oulashin on Unsplash
What is Aphantasia?
Aphantasia is the inability to visualize things, images, or concepts in one’s mind. When you think about someone, often you might think of their face. While most people can create an image of a scene or an object, people with aphantasia cannot.
When asking people with aphantasia to imagine something, they would likely describe the object based on facts or explain concepts, but there would not be a mental image with the information. Since those experiencing this phenomenon cannot use visualization and visual cues to remember something, people with aphantasia must use other tactics to jog up their memories. They might instead recall factual information about an object or use other senses to remember information.
Estimates say that around 1-5% of people may have aphantasia, and 10-15% may have hyperphantasia, the opposite of aphantasia, a vivid sensory imagination as if you were looking at the object or scenario one was imagining.
Causes of Aphantasia
Most people with aphantasia have it from birth, and rarely does it result from a stroke or head injury. Aphantasia happens when the brain’s visual cortex doesn’t work properly. This cortex is important for processing visual information from the eyes. While scientists aren’t sure of the causes of this phenomenon, people born with aphantasia are otherwise healthy. This ability to create mental images occurs on a spectrum with some having strong abilities to visualize while others not being able to at all. Most people fall somewhere in between.
Scientists aren’t entirely sure whether aphantasia is caused by genetics or one’s environmental factors such as trauma and how it can affect one’s thinking process. There is currently no known way to cure it.
Research on Aphantasia
Aphantasia was first discovered in 1880 by Francis Galton; however, it has been relatively understudied and little was known about the phenomenon. Aphantasia has really only been studied recently and continues to be poorly understood. However, there has been more interest and an increasing number of studies on aphantasia. Galton published the 1880 paper explaining that people have variations in the vividness of imagination and noting that some people can’t visualize at all. The study coining the phenomenon by Adam Zeman in 2015 reignited interest. The name “aphantasia” came from the Greek words “a” meaning “without” and “phantasia” meaning “imagination.” Scientists have yet to figure out what causes aphantasia, but with the use of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans, researchers have found that people with aphantasia use different regions of the brain when processing or recalling information and use different brain patterns when asked to form mental images.
My Experiences with Aphantasia
I can’t visualize or “see” anything in my mind. It’s just black. While I don’t believe that aphantasia is necessarily a disability, there have been many occasions where I was frustrated at my incompetence, especially as an artist, when creating works for class or myself. Before I knew that my lack of mental imaging wasn’t common and my assumption from birth that everyone processed the world the same way I did, I was blown away by the artistic abilities that the people around me possessed. They seemed to create masterpieces out of thin air while I fumbled to find enough photo references to begin my artwork. No matter how hard I tried to make something from “imagination,” all I could accomplish were vague or distorted forms of people, places, or things based on inferences and slight memorization of the shapes.
I never knew that aphantasia was something I had until my teens from the media. I used to believe that “imagining” was a figure of speech and that no one could truly visualize. Things such as “daydreaming” or “counting sheep” didn’t ever make sense to me. I never understood the appeal of reading fictional novels when one could not envision the scenario in one’s mind, and I had always preferred movies.
I had a random conversation with a friend in high school who asked, “Do you think in words or images?” I quickly answered that I thought in words, but I was baffled when she told me that her sister vividly thought in images. What she was about to do, she visualized herself doing those things. Rather than thinking, “I’m going to do the dishes,” she envisioned herself washing the dishes. I had already heard of aphantasia then, but the encounter solidified my information and answered some of my questions.
When talking to people about how I think and visualize, it was hard to explain my inability to create mental images and compare them to something I did not experience. One of the best analogies I heard, from an artist himself (a YouTuber called JAMIErightmeow), was a comparison to a computer. He explained that people with aphantasia have a working memory, can identify objects such as faces, and can think. He described the brain as a functioning computer only with a disconnected monitor, unable to pull up and “see” files and memory stores. Identifying or explaining things relies on factual information about them such as an apple. It can be red, has a stem, and is shiny, but there is the inability to see the image in the mind.
While aphantasia may hinder certain abilities, there are many successful, creative people and artists with aphantasia. It’s merely a different way of perceiving the world, and similar to being born blind (although I don’t equate aphantasia to the severity of blindness), from birth, we have adapted to this way of thinking and formed perceptions of reality through a different lens. Just as it’s hard for someone born blind to understand what being able to see is like, it’s difficult for someone who has the complete inability to visualize to understand what imagining in images is like. It’s something so hidden and internalized that people with aphantasia can go their whole life without knowing they have it until someone explains the experience of having aphantasia.
There is much more to the brain and perception than we could fathom. Can the human brain come to understand itself fully? What are the causes of these variations in perception? How do people with the ability and inability to visualize function within society? How do people create connections and understand concepts? There may even be categories within aphantasia that may hinder other ways of perception related to the senses and memory that haven’t been discovered or researched. These are a couple of my experiences and opinions about aphantasia, and with more research, we may have a better understanding of the human brain.
Aphantasia Test:
Image Credits: https://www.leonlinsx.com/aphantasia/
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Bibliography:
Benisek, Alexandra. "What Is Aphantasia?". WebMD, 2021, https://www.webmd.com/brain/what-is-aphantasia.
Cherry, Kendra. "Aphantasia: When You Are Blind In Your Mind". Verywell Mind, 2021, https://www.verywellmind.com/aphantasia-overview-4178710.
"Is There An Aphantasia Cure? About The Neurological Condition". Healthline, 2021, https://www.healthline.com/health/aphantasia-cure#causes.