What is aphantasia?
In 2018, Nick Watkins wrote, “I see what is around me, unless my eyes are closed when all is always black. I hear, taste, smell and so forth, but I don’t have the experience people describe of hearing a tune or a voice in their heads.”
Sound familiar? You may have aphantasia!
Sound unfamiliar? Well, let me explain.
We’ve known for a long time that there’s quite a lot of variation in how clearly people can picture things in their mind’s eye, hear things in their mind’s ear, and so on. The earliest research I know of on mental imagery was done in the 19th century by Francis Galton, who asked people to imagine their breakfast table and to report the clarity, definition and colours of what was in their mind’s eye.
“Um, actually, my Instagram #aesthetic is breakfasts in awkward positions, so I don’t use a table.”
From the answers Galton got, he formed the opinion that “men of science” were not very good at mental imagery compared to others, which is kind of a leap. Possibly Galton thought this because abstract thought was considered “superior” to mental imagery at the time. For Galton (a white, male scientist in Victorian Britain and also, you know, the man who came up with eugenics, for fuck sake), men like him would have been “better” than other humans in every way – including the way in which they thought about the world. Anyhow, when some researchers tried replicating his breakfast-table study as nearly as possible in the 21st century, they did not find the same thing, and concluded that Galton had been misled by some initial early responses with very low levels of mental imagery from his “men of science”.
Nonetheless, there is one valid point in Galton’s research on mental imagery: not everyone has it to the same degree.
An aside about vision
To this day, most of the research on mental imagery is indeed on mental imagery – and not, say, mental taste – which reflects the general tendency of psychologists to research vision much more intensively than any other sense, which in turn is probably because it is our most spatially accurate sense and the one we tend to think of as ‘most important’. We also tend to assume it’s a sense that everyone has, and that everyone’s senses are like our own. Because those assumptions are rarely challenged, the human world is largely designed for people who have/can access aids like glasses to bring about 20/20 vision, are not colourblind, are not overwhelmed by large amounts of visual input, etc., which can cause some big problems for the large number of people that doesn’t apply to. Long story short, we are not all the same.
A big leap forward
Thanks to what we might call… fads… in psychology research, for much of the 20th century researchers in this field were interested not in thought but in behaviour. Mental imagery is not a behaviour, so we’re just going to leap 130 years into the future from Galton’s work.
No biggie, just hurdle the 20th century.
In 2010, researchers encountered a man who’d had heart surgery at 65. Quite a few people have heart surgery in their 60s, but this man – MX – was rather unusual. Shortly after the surgery, he noticed that he’d completely lost the ability to create mental imagery, and also that the visual content of his dreams had disappeared. He had no problems with recognising familiar faces, navigating familiar routes or even drawing pictures from memory – he just couldn’t picture anything in his mind’s eye.
The researchers who MX talked to thought that perhaps he was using mental imagery but it just wasn’t reaching a conscious level, and when picturing faces he did seem to have lower levels of brain activity compared to other people in the regions that are associated with looking at faces (though we need to be careful reading too much into this, since we’ve not got a particularly detailed grasp on how brain activity and thought are related). However, he was still perfectly able to complete tasks that the researchers thought should require mental imagery, and when he did so showed high levels of activation in areas that are related to executive functioning – planning and executing tasks – so the researchers also suggested that maybe you didn’t actually need mental imagery in order to do those tasks, even though that’s what many people do.
This was all very mysterious, and intrigued a popular science writer enough that they wrote an article about MX for a magazine… which is how the researchers found out that MX wasn’t the only one with no mental imagery.
Their next piece of research was with 21 people who reported that they’d not had mental imagery their whole lives – aphantasia. Though this is a pretty small number of people for a psychology study, there were still some interesting findings based on the questionnaire that the participants filled out:
People who have aphantasia are quite likely to have close relatives with the same condition, which suggests there might be a role for genetics.
Some people have aphantasia for all types of mental imagery, not just vision – so in addition to them having no mind’s eye, they also have no mind’s nose, no mind’s ear, no mind’s tongue…
Having aphantasia might be associated with having difficulties with autobiographical memory, but better-than usual skills in some other areas, like maths.
Like MX, other people with aphantasia could still carry out mental imagery tasks like figuring out how many windows their home had – they just didn’t use mental imagery to do it, instead relying on knowledge or memory.
In 2020, the same researchers published a study with around 2000 people who have aphantasia, and also found that it might be linked to problems recognising other people’s faces, and that they were more likely to be working in computational, mathematical and scientific careers than people who didn’t have aphantasia – though it’s important to note that this echo of Galton’s finding might be because people chose to take part in a study on aphantasia, rather than being randomly selected from the general population. That is, they might have taken part because of stereotypes about the kind of people who are “supposed to” have good or bad mental imagery. Interestingly, in the same study they also found a group of people with unusually vivid mental imagery, or hyperphantasia!
What’s going on?
So, it seems that some people have aphantasia their whole lives – congenital aphantasia – and some, like MX, acquire it at some point. We don’t know a whole lot about what causes congenital aphantasia, though it might be related to individual differences in the part of the brain that’s associated with knowing what something is (as opposed to where it is) when we look at it. A study in which people with and without aphantasia were asked to draw photographs from memory supports this idea – while people with aphantasia drew fewer objects than people without, there was no difference in the groups in terms of whether the objects were placed accurately or not.
We have more of an insight into the acquired stuff. Acquired aphantasia sometimes has an obvious physical cause, like a stroke affecting the parts of the brain we believe to be involved in vision and mental imagery, and sometimes there’s a physical cause that’s not got an obvious link to the brain but clearly has something to do with the onset of aphantasia, like MX’s heart surgery.
And then there are the cases of acquired aphantasia where there’s no obvious physical cause at all, but instead a psychological one. One such case is that of SE, a man who attributed his aphantasia to a traumatic separation from his father at a young age. It’s possible that cases like this might occur when people don’t want to imagine anything because it is so stressful – perhaps in the same way that derealisation (the sense that the world isn’t real) or depersonalisation (the sense that you aren’t real) can happen in times of intense stress.
A serious caption, for once: many people will experience depersonalisation or derealisation at some point in their lives; it’s not necessarily anything to worry about but repeated episodes can be a sign of epilepsy, head injury, stress or certain types of mental illness – so, as ever, if you are worried about your health, please speak to a medical professional.
Is it possible to make aphantasia go away?
If you have aphantasia, you might be perfectly fine with that – or you may not even know you have it if it’s not causing you any problems. If you’re not fine with it, then unfortunately there isn’t much information out there yet about how to ‘unblock’ your mental imagery ability. However, one promising avenue is the psychoactive drug ayahuasca (last seen in my blog on synaesthesia). SE, whose traumatic separation from his father appeared to trigger aphantasia, tried taking ayahuasca in the presence of a healer while visiting the Amazon rainforest and experienced a vision of forgiving both his father and himself. Afterwards, faint mental imagery became possible for him.
It’s really important to take this kind of research cautiously, though – this is just one person, whose acquired aphantasia was clearly linked to a psychologically traumatic experience. The only other study on psychoactive drugs and aphantasia I was able to find was of a man called HE who had probably-congenital aphantasia and also regularly smoked DMT, a chemical in ayahuasca that’s considered likely to cause visions – and in his case, the DMT did not make a difference to his aphantasia. We could interpret this in a few ways: maybe some other component of ayahuasca is actually important, maybe only acquired aphantasia responds to psychoactive drugs, or maybe the therapeutic component of SE’s experience was necessary to unlock his mental imagery.
In any case, if you want to try ayahuasca, my advice is the same as with any drug – check your local drug laws so you know about any consequences of possession, get it from a reputable source, and make sure you take it in a safe environment.
Thanks to Dr Mary Spiller, psychologist and mental imagery expert, for her input on this blog. If you'd like to know more about her research, click here.
References
Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A. F., & Baker, C. I. (2019). Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. BioRxiv, 865576. [Note: this hasn’t been through peer review yet.]
Galton, F. (1880). Statistics of mental imagery. Mind, 5(19), 301-318.