Understanding Mental Imagery Through the Body's Hidden Signals
Have you ever closed your eyes and vividly pictured your childhood home, complete with the smell of your grandmother's kitchen and the exact shade of the front door? For most people, this mental imagery feels as natural as breathing. But for roughly 2-3% of the population, this experience doesn't exist. People with aphantasia cannot create mental images, no matter how hard they try. Until recently, scientists assumed this was a visual processing problem—like a broken camera in the mind. New research challenges that assumption entirely, proposing instead that mental imagery depends on something far more intimate: our body's internal signals.
Scientists have long studied mental imagery by focusing on the visual cortex and other sensory regions of the brain, searching for defects in how we see things in our mind's eye. But researchers Juha Silvanto and Yoko Nagai, publishing in *Brain Topography*, argue we've been missing the bigger picture. They propose that vivid mental imagery requires more than just visual processing—it needs interoception, which is essentially your brain's awareness of what's happening inside your body. Right now, without thinking about it, you're sensing your heartbeat, your breathing, your muscle tension, the position of your limbs. These internal signals are constantly flowing to your brain, creating a baseline sense of "you." The researchers suggest this bodily awareness is absolutely fundamental to creating rich mental images.
The evidence supporting this connection is compelling. In recent studies, researchers found a direct correlation between how well people perceive their own bodily signals and how vividly they can imagine things. Using standardized questionnaires, scientists measured both interoceptive awareness and imagery vividness in study participants. Those with stronger bodily awareness—meaning they were better at noticing their heartbeat, recognizing emotional sensations, and understanding their body's signals—consistently reported more vivid mental images. Even more intriguingly, mindfulness training, which teaches people to pay closer attention to their internal sensations, improved both interoceptive accuracy and imagery vividness. It's as though the brain practices this skill in one domain and naturally gets better at the other.
At the neural level, two brain regions appear crucial: the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. Think of the insula as the brain's integration hub. It's like a translator that takes all your bodily signals—heartbeat, muscle tension, emotional states—and converts them into conscious awareness. The anterior cingulate cortex works alongside it, handling the emotional and cognitive aspects of experience. Together, these regions weave together sensory details, emotional responses, and bodily sensations into a unified experience. When you imagine a scene, these brain areas aren't just retrieving visual memories; they're reconstructing your entire embodied experience. You don't just "see" your childhood home—your heart rate might quicken with nostalgia, your breathing might shift, your muscles might subtly tense. The image becomes real to your body, even though you're sitting still.
This framework offers a new way to understand aphantasia. Rather than a visual processing disorder, aphantasia might reflect suboptimal functioning in these integrative regions. If the insula or anterior cingulate cortex isn't effectively combining bodily signals with sensory information, people struggle to form vivid imagery. This could explain why aphantasia often co-occurs with other conditions: people with aphantasia show higher rates of difficulty with autobiographical memory, emotion recognition, and even conditions like autism and dyspraxia—a motor coordination disorder. Remarkably, the connection between aphantasia and dyspraxia is particularly telling. Both conditions appear linked to problems integrating sensory and interoceptive information. Someone with dyspraxia might struggle to coordinate their movements because they're not properly integrating feedback about their body's position and state. Similarly, someone with aphantasia might struggle to create mental images for the same underlying reason: impaired integration of bodily signals.
What makes this research genuinely exciting is that it reframes an entire field. Rather than studying imagery in isolation as a visual phenomenon, researchers should be investigating how the brain binds together sensation, emotion, and bodily awareness. Understanding this connection could eventually open new avenues for helping people with aphantasia or for understanding why mental imagery is so profoundly affected in conditions like anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. The science suggests that imagination isn't a luxury of the mind—it's rooted in the very tissue and signals of your living, breathing body.