aphantasia

aphantasia, inability to create mental imagery during cognition. The word aphantasia is derived from the combination of the Greek word phantasia, meaning “imagination,” and the prefix a-, meaning “without.” The term was coined in 2015 by British neurologist Adam Zeman. Aphantasia affects between roughly 1 and 4 percent of the population; greater numbers of individuals, however, self-identify with the experience. Medical experts consider aphantasia to be a variation in the way in which the brain processes information, rather than a disorder or disability.

Causes and characteristics

The cause of aphantasia is unclear. According to one theory, it arises from impairment of the episodic system, which is a long-term memory system that encodes and stores information about personal experiences and events for later recall. Other research indicates that aphantasia may have genetic causes, based on evidence that it clusters in families.

Aphantasia also appears to be either congenital (lifelong) or acquired. Acquired aphantasia is considered rarer than its congenital counterpart, and research suggests that it is associated with neurological or psychological factors. Individuals with aphantasia also seem to have deficits in metacognition, specifically the ability to perceive or produce mental images at will. They also are less likely to remember the details of past events or individuals’ faces.

History

Although mental imagery has been a subject of philosophical inquiry since ancient times, its scientific beginnings date to 1880, when English scientist Sir Francis Galton wrote about otherwise typical individuals who experienced vivid mental imagery and others who lacked the ability to visualize. His observations were based on a questionnaire in which respondents were asked to imagine their breakfast table and to describe the clarity and vividness of their mental images. His findings revealed that mental imagery varies dramatically across individuals.

In 1897 French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot discovered a “typographic visual type” of imagination, an alternative method of cognition not involving imagery. Ribot described an individual who was unable to visualize a dog when prompted to think of one, even though that person was familiar with dogs. Instead, they would imagine seeing the printed word, D-O-G. Ribot wrote that this individual was unable to understand that others’ might experience cognition differently.

In 2010 Zeman published a case study of a person, identified as MX, who reported an abrupt loss of the ability to mentally visualize, which marked the beginning of Zeman’s scientific research on the topic. In 2015 Zeman and colleagues published the results of a study using the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire to evaluate the experiences of 21 individuals who reported experiencing lifelong aphantasia. The questionnaire, the first version of which was developed in 1973 by British psychologist David Marks, asked individuals to visualize different images, such as a rising sun and the front of a shop they frequent, and to then rate the vividness of the image.

Experiencing aphantasia

Not all individuals who report aphantasia experience it in the same way; for example, some individuals say they only experience it when their eyes are closed. Some persons have reported an inability to form mental imagery stemming from non-visual sensory modalities, such as imagery associated with a specific smell or sound. Many individuals with aphantasia describe having visual dreams as well. Such differences in personal experiences suggest that there are subtypes of aphantasia and raise the possibility that aphantasia itself may be a subtype of a more extensive imagery deficit.

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Those who are unable to form mental imagery are more likely to work in analytical fields, such as mathematics and science. However, people who experience aphantasia can also work in the creative arts. For example, American animator Glen Keane worked as a character animator for Walt Disney Animation Studios for almost four decades, contributing to various feature films; in 2013, he was named a Disney Legend for his animation, writing, and illustrations. He later directed the short film Dear Basketball (2017), an animated retelling of Kobe Bryant’s retirement poem, for which both he and Bryant received the 2018 Academy Award for best animated short film. Other prominent people who have self-identified as having aphantasia include American animator and computer scientist Edwin Catmull, American-British fantasy writer Mark Lawrence, and American science-fiction writer Yoon Ha Lee.