EventsTalk
What’s Different in the Aphantasic Brain?
Dr Alfredo Spagna, Columbia University
What happens in your brain when you try to picture something and nothing comes?
In typical imagers, picturing something draws on an imagery network: visual areas on the underside of the brain, which handle how things look, working with areas toward the front and top. One patch on the left, which researchers call the Fusiform Imagery Node, joins in whether people imagine a shape, a colour, a word, a face or a map.
So in aphantasia, does that network stay quiet?
What the study found
Dr Alfredo Spagna was one of the team behind “Visual mental imagery in typical imagers and in aphantasia: A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study”, published in the journal Cortex in 2025. They used a 7-tesla scanner, which maps brain activity in millimetre detail.
The study compared 10 people with lifelong aphantasia and 10 typical imagers. Everyone in the aphantasia group reported no visual imagery at all on a standard questionnaire, and an interview confirmed it.
In the scanner they imagined, and in other trials looked at, shapes, colours, written words, faces and a map of France.
When the people with aphantasia tried to imagine, visual areas switched on much as they did in the typical imagers, the Fusiform Imagery Node among them, and the node was about as active.
They answered as accurately as the typical imagers, if a little more slowly.
The main difference was in the links. In aphantasia, the Fusiform Imagery Node worked less in step with the areas toward the front and top of the brain.
The team’s reading: the brain still reaches what things look like, but that doesn’t become a conscious picture. Other researchers think people with aphantasia do these tasks by other routes, such as words or a sense of space.
The groups were small, 10 people each, and these are group results, so they can’t tell you what happens in any one person’s brain.
What you’ll take away
- Why “nothing comes” doesn’t mean the visual parts of your brain sit idle
- What a weaker link between brain areas might mean for seeing in the mind
- Two ways researchers explain knowing how something looks without picturing it
About Alfredo
Dr Alfredo Spagna is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies attention, perception and mental imagery. When he gave this talk he taught psychology at Columbia University in New York, where he directed undergraduate studies in neuroscience and behaviour. In 2026 he joined John Cabot University in Rome as an associate professor of psychology.