There is typically at least one time in a person’s life when they are asked to imagine an object without looking at it. The person would close their eyes and create a picture of that object in their mind by using the mind’s eye. A mind’s eye is the ability to create mental images of an object just by thinking about it. People with a mind’s eye are able to think of an object and see it vividly in their mind as if it is right in front of them. However, people with aphantasia—the inability to picture objects and scenes in their minds—are not able to create such images in their minds. This means that they do not have a mind’s eye. Scientists have found that aphantasia is simply a different way of interpreting the world. “This is not a disorder as far as I can see,” said Dr. Adam Zeman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Exeter in Britain. “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.”
The phenomenon of a mind’s eye has been around for a long time, but just recently started gaining interest. The idea of a mind’s eye became the topic of conversation after Dr. Zeman coined the term “aphantasia.” Zeman met a patient (patient M.X.) who said that he had lost his mind’s eye after heart surgery. After Discover magazine covered the case study of M.X. having “blind imagination,” Zeman heard from an additional 20 people who said that they couldn’t visualize images in their minds. In 2015, Zeman consulted a classicist friend to come up with a name for this recently-introduced phenomenon. The classicist suggested adapting Aristotle’s word “phantasia,” for “mind’s eye,” leading to the creation of “aphantasia.”
To better understand what aphantasia is and how people with it are affected, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues asked their correspondents to fill out questionnaires. The majority of people who reported a lack of a mind’s eye had no memory of ever having had one, suggesting that they had been born without it. However, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues were also contacted by people who had the opposite issue: they had intensely strong visions, a condition known as Hyperphantasia. These conditions are two of the extremes on a large scale of mental imagery. The vividness of mental imagery is different in every person and it can fall anywhere on this spectrum. To determine where a person falls on the spectrum, tests like the “Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire” are conducted.
“We think we know what we mean when we talk about what mental imagery is,” said postdoctoral researcher Nadine Dijkstra from University College London. “But then when you really dig into it, everybody experiences something wildly different.”
