Aphantasia Explained: Some People Can’t Form Mental Pictures
How do you draw from memory if you can't form mental pictures? Evidently, you don’t need to “see” with the mind’s eye to carry-out these tasks.
4 min readByDr Zoë Pounder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How many times have you watched a book adaptation on film or TV, and felt disappointed when a scene wasn’t quite how you’d pictured it? Or perhaps a character looked nothing like you’d imagined them to look?
Most people, when asked to form an image of a person they’re familiar with, can see it within their mind. In other words, it’s a visual, mental experience – similar to what we would see if the person were in front of us.
Citations
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- Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery – congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378–380. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019
- Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A. F., & Baker, C. I. (2021). Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Cortex, 135, 159–172. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.014
- Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., Hattersley, A., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., MacKisack, M., & Winlove, C. (2020). Phantasia–the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex, 130, 426–440. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.04.003
