Visualisation is a common and prominent
part of everyday human experience when
we retrieve memories of people, scenes or
objects, or imagine events that have not
occurred. A new study has highlighted the
implications for those who lack the ability
to visualise – people who appear to be born
without a “mind’s eye”.
In 1880, the English polymath Francis
Galton’s interest in mental imagery was
piqued when he noted that “the great
majority of the men of science” reported no
knowledge of the concept, with some
protesting that they did not experience any
kind of visual imagery. Galton conducted
an experiment in which he asked “100
Adult Englishmen and the 172 Charter-
house boys” to each describe the scene at
their breakfast tables that morning. He
noted that participants varied widely in
their ability to recreate an image and in its
reported vividness, colour and size,
providing evidence of “the variability of
the visualising faculty in the English male
sex”.
Despite occasional case reports of
patients losing the ability to visualise after
a brain injury, and a recent survey finding
that 2.5% people claimed to have lacked
this ability from birth, little further research
has been conducted with those whose visual
imagination appears impaired.
In a paper recently published inCortex,
Adam Zeman and colleagues from the
University of Exeter assessed 21 partici-
pants with self-reported lifelong deficien-
cies in visualisation. Typically, each became
aware of his or her difficulties in adoles-
cence, when they realised that other
people’s descriptions of their memories
were quasi-visual experiences.
One sufferer encountered a reference
to counting sheep, but could not under-
stand how or why people used this method
when they couldn’t sleep. In a media inter-
view he commented: “When I tried it
myself, I found myself turning my head to
watch invisible sheep fly by”.
Another’s discovery of her difficulty
came during workplace training when
asked to visualise a sunrise. She reported
having no idea of what that visual experi-
ence would be like, though she could
describe the event in words.
Surprisingly, almost all of the partici-
pants reported visual images during dreams,
and half of them reported brief, involun-
tary images during wakefulness, suggesting
a dissociation between voluntary and invol-
untary generation of imagery.
The impact of the inability to visualise
was evident in the participants’ reports of
their lives. One noted that he was an avid
reader but avoided books rich in landscapedescriptions, which he struggled to compre-
hend. He commented: “The mind’s eye is
a canvas, and the neurons work together
to project onto it. The neurons are all
working fine, but I don’t have the canvas”.
Many of the participants reported signif-
icant difficulties recalling autobiograph-
ical memories, noting consequences for
their relationships and general functioning.
However, some believe that deficien-
cies in imagery may have promoted the
development of other cognitive skills. The
avid reader, a philosophy student, noted
that while he had difficulty working with
concrete examples, his abstract thinking
skills appeared to be very well developed.
Another participant stated that she
appeared to have a superior memory for
factual information, which may have devel-
oped to compensate for the inability to
retrieve a pictorial memory, noting: “If I
have to recount something that’s absent,
I have to reconstruct it from the facts I
know about it rather than view it in my
mind”.
The ability to voluntarily retrieve or
create visual images is understood to draw
upon multiple distributed networks
throughout the cortex. The posterior
cortical regions are primarily involved in
the storage of remembered images, while
the frontal lobes play a role in the recre-
ation and organisation of images. The
preservation of involuntary imagery in
many of the participants suggests that the
inability to voluntarily retrieve or create
visual images may result from dysfunction
in fronto-parietal “control” mechanisms.
The study’s authors coined the term
“aphantasia”, after the Greek work for
“imagination”, to describe reduced or
absent ability to voluntarily visualise
memories. Along with investigation of
its prevalence and neural correlates and
prevalence, further research is needed to
explore the impact of congenital aphan-
tasia on cognitive, emotional and person-
ality development.JAN/FEB 2016|| 41NEUROPSY Tim Hannan
A Mote to Trouble the Mind’s Eye
The study of aphantasia offers a window into our ability to
visualise.
A/Prof Tim Hannan is Head of the School of Psychology at
Charles Sturt University, and the Past President of the
Australian Psychological Society.bowie15/iStockphoto