Discovering Aphantasia in History

Many people reading this article will have experienced a moment when they discovered aphantasia. This discovery may have been sparked by something read online, a remark from a friend or relative, or the results of a mental imagery questionnaire.

My discovery of aphantasia took place whilst I was busy writing an academic book about how nineteenth-century readers engaged with illustrations. The nineteenth century was the great age of illustration, when innovative technologies for printing images led to the publication of thousands of pictures in newspapers, magazines, and books. I was trying to find evidence of how people read these illustrated books and was wading through all sorts of historical texts—letters, diaries, reviews, autobiographies, essays, and articles—when something stopped me in my tracks. It was a discovery that overturned my ideas about how people read in the past, and how they read now.

Aphantasic Readers in the Nineteenth Century

The text that had brought me to such a sudden halt was an essay written by the author and illustrator George du Maurier (1834–1896), the grandfather of the novelist Daphne du Maurier. I had read this piece many times before, but this time I happened to focus on some comments that I had missed in previous readings.

George du Maurier begins by outlining the contemporary popularity of illustrations. Most readers, he comments, like to have their books and newspapers full of pictures. He goes on to describe two types of readers. First, there are readers who visualise with the mind’s eye and create mental pictures as they read. For these readers, illustrations are a hindrance because they interfere with the mental imagery. The second type of reader, however, cannot mentally visualise in this way and does not possess a mind’s eye.

Although the term ‘aphantasia’ was not around in Du Maurier’s day (it was coined by Adam Zeman in 2015), it is obvious to us—and especially to readers of the Aphantasia Network—that Du Maurier was referring to aphantasic readers. In fact, it is these readers who, according to Du Maurier, make up the majority. In Du Maurier’s words, “The greater number … do not possess this gift” of being able to mentally visualise.

Du Maurier may have been exaggerating this statistic for literary effect, but such remarks suggest that aphantasia and very low mental imagery (hypophantasia) were relatively common in the period. Another observation to this effect comes from the great American Dante scholar Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865–1945), a professor at Columbia and Harvard universities, who wrote in 1898 that ‘most of us’ can hardly mentally visualise anything.

As is usual with nineteenth-century writers, Fletcher regards the mental imagination as a faculty that children have in abundance, but that adults tend to grow out of. What is most significant, though, is the fact that both Fletcher and Du Maurier acknowledge mental imagery variations, including what has since become known as aphantasia.

Illustration and Mental Imagery Debates

Probing further into Du Maurier’s comments, I began to realise that discussions of mental imagery (and the lack of mental imagery) had been in these historical documents all along. It was as if my eyes had been opened.

Running throughout these nineteenth-century accounts is a heated debate about the impact that illustrative pictures have on the mind’s eye. On the one hand, illustrations were said to benefit aphantasic readers and those with a weaker mind’s eye because they presented actual images before the physical eye. This may be one of the reasons why illustration became so popular in this period. A reviewer of Charles Dickens’s novels—the majority of which came with illustrations—remarks that the illustrations brought the words to life for ‘those who are incapable of seeing vividly with the mind’s eye.’

On the other hand, critics regarded illustrations as bad for reading because the pictures competed with mental imagery and could stop the mind’s eye from working altogether. With the images before them on the page, readers were unlikely to mentally visualise for themselves, and a temporary aphantasia could set in. Commentators at the time even argued that the presence of illustration led to lazy reading because readers of illustrated works did not go to the effort of mentally visualising.

Aphantasics in Nineteenth-Century Science

These nineteenth-century debates about reading took place alongside another emerging arena for discussions about mental imagery—psychology. The pioneering figure here was the Victorian polymath Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton was the first to conduct experiments to gauge the vividness of mental imagery, sending a questionnaire to family and acquaintances that asked them to think about their breakfast table that morning. Was the picture that rose in their mind’s eye dim or clear? Was it defined and complete like a real scene? Did it have depth and colour?

Galton ranked the responses of 100 men (all men, even though women had also sent in their responses). A ranking of 1 was a ‘perfectly clear and defined’ mind’s eye; 2 was ‘high indeterminate’; 3 was a ‘low indeterminate’; and 4 was ‘very dim’. Galton, like Du Maurier, did not use the term ‘aphantasia’, but the respondents in category 4—who stated that mental imagery was ‘unknown to them’—are what we would now term aphantasic.

It is worth digging a little deeper into Galton’s results. Of the 100 men, 13 were category 4 (aphantasic), and these included an anatomist, engineer, physiologist, anthropologist, surgeon, geographer, and biologist. The psychologist James Sully (1842–1923) was among the aphants. Interestingly, Sully’s bestselling book The Teacher’s Guide to Psychology (1886), published a few years after his participation in Galton’s experiment, stressed the importance of forming mental images for understanding and comprehension. Perhaps Sully wanted to refute Galton’s ranking!

Another key figure in the aphantasia category was the military engineer and astronomer Major John Herschel (1837–1921), who came from a renowned family of astronomers. Herschel’s response to Galton’s questionnaire is itself significant because he assumes that Galton is taking liberty with his definitions and ‘straining the analogy between mental perception and ocular vision.’ In other words, Herschel believes that there is no such thing as the mind’s eye, and it is simply an ‘analogy,’ a figure of speech.

Galton himself was ‘amazed’ at the results of his questionnaire. He was expecting to see variations in mental imagery, and he was already aware of imagery extremes (what we would now term hyperphantasia and aphantasia). What he did not expect, though, was the number of scientists who were aphantasic. Galton concluded that mental imagery impeded abstract thinking, and scientists were likely to have lost their mind’s eyes through disuse (although the scientists’ responses indicated that they had never possessed a mind’s eye to ‘lose’).

Aphantasic Readers Now

Nineteenth-century accounts of aphantasia are, of course, part of their historical moment. Galton’s experiment is a good example of how these ideas are bound up in cultural meanings and values, and it is this that makes them so valuable to the historian. But historical accounts of aphantasia can also have implications for how we think about and understand aphantasia today.

Exploring these debates about illustration and mental imagery has led me to look at how today’s aphantasic readers engage with literature. Like Galton, I have been amazed at the responses. The question—do you mentally visualise as you read?—can spark that moment of discovery when people realise that they do not experience reading in the same way. This can be as much a revelation to non-aphantasic readers as aphantasic readers.

It has been fascinating discussing experiences of reading with aphantasic literature students and finding out what sorts of literature they enjoy reading. Aphantasic readers can take as much pleasure in reading fiction as readers with vivid mental imaginations, but, as with all readers, there can be a decline in reading for pleasure if readers do not find books that they are interested in and that suit their way of experiencing the written word. Many aphantasic students (although not all) enjoy reading texts with pictures, like graphic novels and comics, which substantiates George du Maurier’s conviction that readers with aphantasia enjoy illustrations.

I would love to find out more about the experiences of reading literature. I have devised a short questionnaire that you can find here: https://forms.office.com/e/NZuWErK4j7

I am very grateful for your responses and will report back on the findings.

Aphantasic Readers Have a History

It is not easy finding aphantasia in historical documents, primarily because the term ‘aphantasia’ is a recent one. However, it is important to acknowledge that aphantasics do have a history, and that they are present in historical texts—sometimes hiding in plain sight. In the nineteenth century, there was a growing awareness that mental imagery was highly variable and that not everyone had a mind’s eye. This became a topic of debate in a variety of different discourses, from literary criticism to early psychology. There is more work that needs to be done in this field. The research I have undertaken is just the beginning of my own voyage of discovery.

References

Burbridge, David. 1994. ‘Galton’s 100: An Exploration of Francis Galton’s Imagery Studies’. British Journal for the History of Science 27: 4, 443–63.

Major John Herschel qtd. in David Burbridge, ‘Galton’s 100: An Exploration of Francis Galton’s Imagery Studies’, British Journal for the History of Science 27: 4 (1994): 443–63, p. 461.

Jefferson B. Fletcher, ‘The Visual Image in Literature’, Sewanee Review 6: 4 (October 1898): 385-401.

Francis Galton, ‘Statistics of Mental Imagery’, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 19 (July 1880): 301–18; Galton, ‘Mental Imagery’, Fortnightly Review (September 1880) 28: 165: 313–24.

[John Hollingshed], ‘Mr. Charles Dickens as Reader’, Critic 17: 426 (4 September 1858): 537–38.

George du Maurier, ‘The Illustrating of Books. From the Serious Artist’s Point of View. —I’, Magazine of Art (January 1890): 349–53

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., and Della Sala, S. 2015. ‘Lives without imagery: Congenital aphantasia’. Cortex 73, 378–380. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019