What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

This article in Quanta magazine was really interesting to me! I’m aphantasic, and I always thought things like “counting sheep” and “visualize it” were just metaphors. I remember discovering the concept of Aphantasia in 2016 or so, and it blew my mind that there were people that could actually visualize things when they were told to imagine a concept.

Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually *see* an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

That is me. I imagine the apple, but see nothing. But I do dream in images! I just can’t conjure an image. Apparently, this is normal for aphantasic people!

Because many people with aphantasia dream in images and can recognize objects and faces, it seems likely that their minds store visual information — they just can’t access it voluntarily or can’t use it to generate the experience of imagery.

I also have a pretty weak autobiographical memory, particularly for things like day to day memories of high school; and a terrible sense of direction. Turns out, these things are related!

They found that people with aphantasia indeed tended to have weaker autobiographical memories and less activity in the hippocampus, which helps encode and retrieve such memories.

Overall, just a really interesting article.

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

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