Ravi M.

Not an advertisement. This was my personal experience and I am unaware of formal research studies that cover this. However, I thought it was a useful data point for others and for further research. And in fact, perhaps some out there may want to even try such activities to see if it gets unlocked for them.

As a side note, even if mental imagery is not decoded from one's thoughts, it is likely that other thoughts such as an internal monologue could still be decoded, in turn revealing one's thoughts. I think safeguarding the privacy of people's neural data is a real concern.

My intuition also agrees that having aphantasia does not necessarily mean your thoughts may not have visual information to decode. I just posted separately that I have been able to unlock the ability to visualize a small number of times in my life. This suggests that the machinery is there and can function correctly, but somehow I usually don't have access to it. Hence, there may be visual information that could be decoded, even though I have aphantasia.