The basics
Aphantasia is having little or no mental imagery: when you try to picture something, no picture comes to mind, or only a faint one, though you still know what it looks like. It can affect any sense, not only sight. About 1 in 25 people have little or no visual imagery.
Yes. Measures that don’t rely on anyone’s word, such as how the pupils respond to imagined light, find a real difference between people with aphantasia and others. They compare groups, so none of them can tell one person whether they have it.
About 1 in 25 people have little or no visual imagery, and about 1 in 100 have none at all. Studies put the figure anywhere from about 1 to 5 in 100, mostly depending on where they draw the line.
Yes. Imagery runs from none at all to as vivid as really seeing, and aphantasia is the end with little or none.
Researchers call faint imagery hypophantasia, which people also call partial aphantasia, and imagery as vivid as really seeing hyperphantasia. The range isn’t even: more people have imagery as vivid as seeing than have none at all.
They sit at opposite ends of the same range. Aphantasia is little or no mental imagery; hyperphantasia is imagery as vivid as really seeing. About 1 in 25 people have aphantasia and about 6 in 100 hyperphantasia.
Francis Galton first noticed people with no imagery in 1880, when he asked people to picture that morning’s breakfast table. In 2010, the neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues described MX, a man who lost his imagery after a heart procedure. When a magazine told his story, more than twenty people wrote to Zeman to say theirs had always been weak or absent. In 2015, Zeman and colleagues named it aphantasia, from 21 people’s accounts.
The word joins the Greek a-, “without”, and phantasia, Aristotle’s word for the power that brings images to mind. Adam Zeman and colleagues proposed it in 2015, 135 years after Francis Galton first noticed people with no imagery.
Ay-fan-TAY-zhuh, or a-fan-TAY-zhuh, with the stress on “tay”.
Finding out
People most often find out by comparing their experience with friends and family, many of them as adults. The beginner’s guide has the one question researchers tested, as a first step, and things people notice.
There’s no medical test for aphantasia, and it isn’t a diagnosis. Researchers usually measure it with a questionnaire that asks people how vivid their imagery is.
If your imagery faded and no doctor has looked at it yet, tell one, especially if it went suddenly, since the cause may need checking.
Most people you tell can picture things, so it may take them a while to believe you don’t see pictures the way they do. Questions and doubts are normal.
One way to put it: “I have aphantasia. When I imagine something, I know what it looks like, but no picture comes. About 1 in 25 people have faint or no visual imagery, and most have had it all their lives. It’s a different way a mind can work.”
Many people don’t know where they sit. Francis Galton noticed in 1880 that people with the least imagery were often unaware they were different, and in one survey of 2,000 volunteers with aphantasia, about 6 in 10 only realized it after age 20.
Causes and change
Most people with aphantasia have had it all their lives. Some lose their imagery later, after a stroke, a head injury, surgery, an illness or a new medication, or after trauma or depression. It seems to run in families: in one survey of volunteers with aphantasia, their siblings appeared about ten times as likely as other people to have it. If your imagery faded, tell a doctor, especially if it went suddenly.
Possibly. It seems to run in families: in one survey of volunteers with aphantasia, their siblings appeared about ten times as likely as other people to have it. Families share more than genes, so this alone doesn’t show a genetic cause.
The figure comes from a 2020 survey by Adam Zeman’s team, who named aphantasia, and he repeats it in a 2024 review. Watch how he came to name it.
Most people with aphantasia have had it all their lives. Some lose their imagery later, after a stroke, a head injury, surgery, an illness or a new medication, or after trauma or depression. That’s called acquired aphantasia.
If your imagery faded and no doctor has looked at it yet, tell one, especially if it went suddenly, since the cause may need checking.
Imagery lost later in life can come partly back, but the evidence is thin. One man who lost his imagery after a stem cell transplant had some of it back six months later, though it stayed faint. No study yet shows how often imagery returns, or after what.
When the loss follows depression, anxiety or trauma, one researcher suggests treating that first, since imagery may return as it eases. The idea hasn’t been tested yet.
If your imagery faded and no doctor has looked at it yet, tell one, especially if it went suddenly, since the cause may need checking.
No method has been shown to give people with lifelong aphantasia imagery they can call up at will, so be wary of anyone selling one. Dustin Grinnell’s science-fiction story imagines a cure, and what it costs.
Some training programs report gains, but only in how people rate their own imagery. No study that measured imagery objectively has shown practice creating pictures where there were none.
Psychedelics aren’t a treatment either: the few reports of people gaining imagery are single cases from recreational use, and no controlled study has tested them.
Senses, memory and dreams
Often not: about half of 2,000 volunteers said their imagery was faint or absent in every sense.
Some people can’t see a picture but can hear a tune or feel a texture in their mind. When imagery is missing in other senses as well as sight, it’s often called multisensory aphantasia.
Steven Levithan on three things he learned from having multisensory aphantasia, and the musician Neesa Sunar on playing music with it. More in multisensory aphantasia.
Most people with aphantasia do: 63.4% in a survey of 2,000 volunteers.
Pictures can arrive on their own even when you can’t call them up. In the 2015 study that named aphantasia, 17 of 21 people had them in dreams, and 10 of 21 had brief flashes while awake.
Liana M. Scott writes about the pictures that come between sleep and waking in Hypnopompia. How do you dream? Join the discussion.
Mostly as facts: you know it happened, but fewer details of the moment come back.
In interviews about their past, people with aphantasia recall fewer details of the moment itself, what happened, what they saw and felt, where and when, even when asked for more. General facts hold up. You may not relive a memory, but you know it happened.
Read what the research says about remembering the past, the biochemist Alice Grebanier on learning and remembering, with or without aphantasia, and her story of the 1963 solar eclipse.
SDAM, severely deficient autobiographical memory, means never having been able to relive past events, though memory for facts is normal. It overlaps with aphantasia, but no study has measured how often the two go together, and no tested question yet tells them apart.
The physicist Nicholas Watkins, who has both, writes about them in a 2018 paper.
Usually. In an online face test, face blindness was no more common with aphantasia, though in another study about 4 in 10 said faces were hard.
In an online test of 65 people with aphantasia and 55 without, face blindness was no more common with aphantasia, though faces and cars were both recognized a little less accurately. On a questionnaire in another study, 42% of people with aphantasia reported difficulty with faces, against 2.5% of others.
Moritz Dürr writes about faces and memory in Memories inside Schrödinger’s box. Do you recognize faces? Join the discussion.
Many people with aphantasia can’t, but say they still know what those faces look like.
As one person put it in a 2026 interview study: “I can’t picture my mum’s face, but I still know what she looks like.”
Photos, voice notes and written memories can hold some of what a picture in the mind would. The photographer Chris Wooley on photography, creativity and aphantasia.
Thinking and daily life
It’s knowing without seeing. Ask someone with aphantasia whether cherries are a darker red than strawberries and they’ll answer correctly. Ask how, and they often say, “I just know.” For some, it clicks when they learn that “picture a beach” or “count sheep” was never a figure of speech.
Asked how they’d count the windows in their home, people with aphantasia in one large survey tended to use a sense of space or movement, or simply knowing.
It varies. In one survey of 2,000 volunteers, about half named advantages, and many said it affects their relationships, mostly for the worse.
Diane Currie Richardson spent her working life as a sign language interpreter: Interpreting in the dark. Laura Rincon on embracing aphantasia, and Mette Leonard Høeg on why aphantasia can be a gift to philosophers and critics.
Not in general. When something is actually happening in front of them, their bodies respond as other people’s do in lab studies. The difference shows with described or imagined scenes: in one small study, reading frightening stories set off a bodily fear response in typical imagers but not in people with aphantasia, while frightening photos set it off in both.
Some studies find people with aphantasia rate their feelings as less intense, but most can identify and describe them.
In one large survey of volunteers, many people with aphantasia said it affects their relationships, mostly for the worse. No study has measured attachment itself, and nothing so far suggests it is weaker. Many can’t picture the people they love, but say they still know what they look like.
In one study of 47 readers with aphantasia, they liked fiction as much as other readers and read as many books a year, though they felt less absorbed in the one story they read. The author Kim Zarins on imagination without images.
In one online study, people with aphantasia rated their ability to find their way, and their spatial memory, about the same as other people did. In an online drawing study, they also placed objects from memory as accurately as typical imagers. Read how others find their way.
You can. Meditations built on pictures can be frustrating, but plenty don’t use pictures at all. Liana M. Scott on meditation with aphantasia, and a guided meditation by Auri’An Lay that needs no mind’s eye.
Hypnotherapists who work with aphantasia say you can. Paulina Trevena explains in Can hypnosis work on those with aphantasia?
Strengths
In a 2024 review, Adam Zeman wrote that creative work by people with aphantasia suggests imagery isn’t needed for creative imagination. Elina Cerla on why we don’t need visualization to make visual art, and Peta Tranquille on drawing what she couldn’t “see”.
In one survey of 2,000 volunteers, about half said aphantasia brings advantages.
A few have been measured, each in one or two small studies. Drawing a room from memory, people with aphantasia added fewer things that weren’t there, and following a worry, they thought of fewer catastrophic next steps. Neither means they remember better or worry less in general.
We found no study showing that people with aphantasia are smarter. In one study that compared 20 people with aphantasia with 20 typical imagers of the same age and IQ, both groups were as accurate on every thinking test, including planning and mentally rotating shapes.
Didn’t find your question?
Ask it in the discussions, where people with aphantasia answer each other, or write to us.