"I cannot picture my children in my mind": what is aphantasia and how people with this condition live their lives

About 6% of people on the planet live with limited imagination, and 1% are among those who have none at all. They cannot dream or visualize what someone or something looks like in their minds. These people are also less likely to recognize faces, memorize the sounds of music or the structure of any object. This condition is known as aphantasia.

This term was coined by British neurologist Adam Zeman almost 10 years ago. Most people who have this brain feature did not even realize that it was rare or unusual, writes IflScience.

What is aphantasia

Aphantasia is one of those things that can only be truly understood by people who experience it. For those who can imagine as easily as they can breathe, it's hard to understand what it's like to have no imagination whatsoever.

According to new research, the brains of people with imagination may have an unusual structure. The findings show that the visual cortex in people with the condition, which involves the absence of a "mind’s eye" or the inability to create mental images, is still active and produces visual information. The only problem is that these images cannot be perceived consciously.

"If you try and imagine a beach, you can probably ‘see’ it in your mind’s eye. People with aphantasia don’t get that mental picture – it’s just blank," explains study co-author Professor Joel Pearson from the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Recently, the scientist conducted another study involving 14 people with aphantasia and 18 people from the control group. Both groups underwent visual imagery tests before proceeding to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. While in the scanner, they were asked to either look at colored striped patterns or imagine them. fMRI measured changes in blood oxygen levels that indicated increased activity in different parts of the brain.

The analysis showed that people with aphantasia had a reduced signal of brain activity when they simply looked at the stripes, compared to the control group. But when they were asked to imagine the patterns, their brains were active in the visual cortex. Scientists were even able to "decode" these patterns of activity to get an idea of what images they were trying to imagine. However, the participants themselves still only "saw" a blank page in their minds.

"Our results show that when someone with aphantasia tries to imagine, their brains still seem to create a representation in the early visual cortex. It’s like their brain is doing the math but skipping the final step of showing the result on a screen," explains Professor Pearson.

What it's like to live with aphantasia

Mary Wathen, a 43-year-old woman from Britain, told the BBC what it's like to live with this condition. For her, the ability of other people to create images in their heads is "totally mind-blowing."

While talking to her friends, she realized that she was not like them. She was amazed to find out that her husband could easily imagine any events as if he were watching a movie. However, she said, there is a positive side to this, because she is very good at putting her thoughts into words, not being able to assume or imagine what is possible.

"I just cannot understand what they really mean - where is this image and what does it look like?" she shares her thoughts. "To me, unless you can see something with your eyes, it's not there."

She can't even picture in her mind events that have already happened in her life, such as a wedding or the faces of her own children. "I don't bring up an image - I have all the memories, I just recall it very differently. As someone once described it, all the hardware is working - but the monitor is not switched on," she explains.

This is how Guillermo Antonio Acevedo, a Venezuelan doctor who accidentally found out that he was one of the people who cannot imagine things, describes life with aphantasia.

"I was working in a psychiatric hospital and I started to learn more about neurology and mental illness and I came across Zeman's 2005 article on 'mind blindness'," he said.

The doctor admitted that he was shocked to learn that people can see things in their heads. Previously, he was convinced that when people told him they had a dream, they did not actually see it in the literal sense. Although the doctor does not believe that having aphantasia makes him unique, he believes that this phenomenon helps him in his career, as such people are more likely to work in the natural sciences, mathematics, or computer science.

Research status

Prof. Pearson says that science still knows little about aphantasia. It is not just a quirk of some people. The diagnosis is based on neuroscience - it has links to a number of different brain conditions and help scientists learn fundamental things about how the human brain creates images.

"This research bridges the gap between the seen and the unseen. It’s incredible to think that people with aphantasia still have a neural blueprint for imagery, even if they can’t consciously ‘see’ it," he adds.

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