Later she again noticed something amiss during a management training course. As part of a meditative relaxation exercise, participants did a guided visualization where they were asked to imagine a beautiful dawn. “Everybody else was talking about what it looked like,” she says, “but I couldn’t see it in my mind’s eye.”
It wasn’t something she felt necessarily closed any doors to her professionally, however. She has a phenomenal memory and has had a successful career and personal life.
“It is very plausible that a person may have aphantasia and not know it,” says Zeman. It’s not uncommon for people to remain unaware for years they have aphantasia. Often people say they discovered it in their teens and twenties, when talking to friends or a partner and realize they don’t have the same ability to visualize. “We take our own experience as the norm.”
But for some aphantasics the condition can cause difficulties in school, for example when studying for exams, or it may prevent them from pursuing certain professions such as being an architect. And the effects can be severely distressing if they prevent a person from revisiting memories of the faces of departed loved ones.
Image Conscious?
Zeman and his team subsequently performed brain scans on people at their lab to further explore the neural bases of aphantasia. The pattern they discovered was consistent with MX. Similar to MX, people who scored higher on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire also had increased activity in visual regions of the brain during visualization tasks. The results were published in Cortex.
Along with new insights, Zeman’s research is raising some intriguing questions. Is it possible that people with aphantasia can form visual images, but aren’t conscious of them? Do other forms of mental imagery, such as auditory capabilities, replace visual representations?
Galton seems to have suspected as much. He wrote that the power to visualize “… is not lost but subordinated and is ready for use.” The other senses are also strengthened, so that people “can express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination.”
More than one hundred years after Galton’s study, it is possible to match responses on questionnaires to differences in brain activity. This is an important advance in understanding more about how visualization works and identifying individual differences. Zeman and his research group are currently studying the entire range to find out more. Another strand of their inquiry is into the opposite extreme, “hyperphantasia,” or extreme imagination. Super-visualizers have such powerful mental imagery that it can be at times indistinguishable from reality.
By exploring both ends of the spectrum, the researchers hope to better understand how visualization affects people’s lives and emotional well-being. It could also be used for developing educational techniques or to help people with PTSD who have disturbing flashbacks.
Of course, you cannot see what another person is picturing in their mind. And neuroscientists do not possess enough information to understand the differences in how aphantasics achieve all that they do.
Although people with aphantasia tend to gravitate toward jobs that don’t require visualization, creative careers are possible. Some aphantasics work as artists or in fields requiring a “visual” thinker such as filmmaking, photography, or graphic design without relying on visualization.
In future studies Zeman plans to explore the heightened use of other imagery, such as auditory faculties, and how they may compensate. But he emphasizes that research is still in the early stages.
Over time, he says MX began to notice that images would occasionally resurface. So it appears it may be possible to reverse the condition. Sometimes MX catches a glimpse of an image, or images, skittering across his mind’s eye — like flicking through the pages of a photo album.
Take The Test
The University of Exeter has developed a standardized test, the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), which identifies aphantasia. It consists of 16 questions and can be completed online at aphantasia.com/vviq.
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