What This Study Is About
Can you have a conscious thought without seeing a picture or hearing a voice in your head? This paper explores whether aphantasia—the inability to create mental imagery (picturing things in your mind)—proves that thinking doesn't always require "mental movies."
How They Studied It
This wasn't a single lab experiment; it was a deep dive into existing research. The author analyzed data from hundreds of participants across many different studies. She compared "typical" thinkers to two specific groups:
- Total Aphantasics: People who cannot voluntarily create any mental images (visual, sound, smell, etc.).
- Unsymbolized Thinkers: People who report having clear, conscious thoughts that don't involve any words or images at all.
What They Found
For centuries, many philosophers believed that every conscious thought *must* be an image or a sound. This research argues that’s a myth.
- Thinking without "Symbols": About 22% of people’s everyday thoughts are "unsymbolized"—they know what they are thinking, but there’s no "inner monologue" or "inner eye" involved.
- Equal Performance: People with aphantasia perform just as well as others on memory and logic tests. They aren't "missing" the thoughts; they just process them differently.
- The Fear Factor: In one cited study, people with aphantasia didn't get "chills" or sweaty palms when reading scary stories because they weren't picturing the horror, yet they still understood the plot perfectly.
What This Might Mean
This suggests that consciousness is like a computer. Some people’s "operating system" shows everything on a high-def monitor (images), while others process everything "behind the scenes" in pure data. Both systems get the job done!
While this paper makes a strong case, it is a philosophical review. This means it interprets other people's data rather than providing new lab results. We still need more brain-scan research to see exactly what "imageless" thinking looks like in the neurons.
One Interesting Detail
The paper mentions a specific experience called "unheard words." Some people with aphantasia report "thinking in words" but without actually "hearing" a voice in their head—it’s the internal knowledge of the words without the sound!