Aphantasia means little or no mental imagery. You know what your breakfast table looked like this morning, but no picture comes when you try to see it. About 1 in 25 people have faint or no imagery, and many only find out as adults.
Most people see a picture when they try, anywhere from dim to as vivid as seeing.
Try it yourselfMost people with aphantasia do: 63.4% in a survey of 2,000 volunteers.
A member's storyMostly as facts: you know it happened, but fewer details of the moment come back.
What the research saysMany people with aphantasia can’t, but say they still know what those faces look like.
Ideas that helpOften not: about half of 2,000 volunteers said their imagery was faint or absent in every sense.
A member's storyMost people were. Some lose their imagery after an illness, an injury, trauma or a new medication.
A talkPeople with aphantasia are sometimes told they aren’t trying hard enough. Measures that don’t rely on anyone’s word find a real difference.
Picture a bright, sunny sky and your pupils narrow a little, as they would in real light.
In 18 people with aphantasia, imagined light made no difference on average. Their pupils still widened with effort, so they were almost certainly trying.
Imagine a striped pattern, then look at a display that shows each eye a different one. The pattern you imagined tends to win.
It did in 209 people from the general public. In 15 people with aphantasia, the imagined pattern won no more often than the other.
Read a frightening story, a shark attack, say, and your skin sweats a little.
In 22 people with aphantasia, it didn’t. Frightening photos made both groups sweat, so it wasn’t a general dulling of feeling.
In a brain scanner, trying to imagine switched on the same visual areas in people with aphantasia as in typical imagers.
The link between those areas and regions at the front and top of the brain was weaker. The authors suggest the brain can hold visual information without it becoming a picture you see. The study had 10 people in each group.
Measures like these are beginning to back up what people with aphantasia say about their imagery (Zeman, 2024). But they compare groups, so none of them can tell you whether you have aphantasia.
Francis Galton asks people to picture that morning’s breakfast table. One man replies: “My powers are zero… I recollect the breakfast table, but do not see it.”
The neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues describe a retired surveyor who lost his imagery after a heart procedure. When a magazine tells his story, more than twenty people write to Zeman: theirs had always been weak or absent.
Zeman and colleagues name it aphantasia, from 21 people’s accounts. One of the 21, Tom Ebeyer, later founded Aphantasia Network with Jennifer McDougall.
Studies recruit through this site, where visitors have given 1.45 million survey responses.
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Many people find out and know no one else who has it. That changes here.
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Read the discussionsMembers meet online every month, people who just found out and people who have known for years.
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A short note from co-founder Tom Ebeyer every other week, plus occasional news and invitations to take part in studies. Change what you get from any email.
