Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
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Bumgardner, Yuan and Chiu · Oxford Medical Case Reports
A 62-year-old man lost his mental imagery during a complicated hospital stay for a stem cell transplant, and six months later had improved only slightly. The cause is unknown; the authors suspect low oxygen reaching the brain.
Keogh, Pearson and Zeman · Handbook of Clinical Neurology
This review chapter covers how imagery is measured and where it arises in the brain, imagery lost after brain injury or psychiatric illness, and lifelong aphantasia and hyperphantasia. It reports that people with aphantasia score low on an objective imagery test and on questionnaires, report fewer intrusive memories, often describe weaker recall of their own past, and do well on visual working memory tasks using other strategies such as labeling. It ends by asking whether aphantasia could be reversed: brain stimulation has strengthened imagery in people with average imagery, but whether that works for people with none remains open.
Fox-Muraton · History of European Ideas
Aphantasia challenges existential models that view mental imagery as essential for selfhood and personal transformation. This suggests that a rich sense of self can exist through non-visual modes of relating to one's past and future.
Milton and colleagues · Cerebral Cortex Communications
People with aphantasia matched others on standard memory tests but recalled fewer details of past events and imagined scenes. The authors suggest weaker links between frontal control areas and visual areas may explain the missing imagery.
Wicken, Keogh and Pearson · Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
People with aphantasia showed no rise in skin conductance while reading frightening stories, yet reacted like others to frightening photos. This suggests visual imagery amplifies the emotional impact of thoughts.
Dance and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
Across two large samples, grapheme-color synesthesia was as common in people with aphantasia as in others. In a separate study, 118 people with aphantasia reported more autistic traits than controls, mainly in imagination and social skills.
Keogh and Pearson · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
In binocular rivalry tests, people with aphantasia were primed by attending to a visible striped pattern but showed no sign of attentional templates when it was absent. The authors conclude templates and imagery are closely linked.
Bainbridge and colleagues · Cortex
People with aphantasia drew fewer objects and less color from memory than typical imagers, but placed objects just as accurately and added fewer false ones. This suggests memory for objects and memory for locations rely on separate systems.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
Questionnaires from 2,000 people with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia linked aphantasia to science jobs and self-reported poor memory of past events, hyperphantasia to creative jobs. Imagery extremes appear tied to wider traits.
Dawes and colleagues · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia reported weaker imagery in all senses, less vivid memories and imagined futures, and fewer dreams, but similar spatial skills. This suggests imagery is a common tool that many mental processes draw on.
Kwok and colleagues · Psychological Science
Suppressed visual thoughts form sensory traces in the early visual cortex even when individuals report successful suppression. This provides an objective way to measure how nonconscious representations trigger thought-control failure.
Brons · Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science
Aphantasics and those with SDAM retain personal and affective memories despite lacking the ability to re-experience the past through mental imagery. This suggests episodic memory is a composite of independent modules rather than a single unified faculty.
Luke · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
A man with apparently lifelong aphantasia saw no mental images despite reportedly using DMT over 1,000 times, unlike a man whose imagery improved after ayahuasca. The author proposes that aphantasia present from birth may resist change.
dos Santos and colleagues · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
A man with long-standing aphantasia reported a faint but lasting gain in mental imagery after one ayahuasca ceremony, though LSD and psilocybin had not helped him. The authors suggest the drug, the emotional setting or both may explain it.
Keogh and Pearson · Cortex
People with aphantasia showed almost no sign of imagery on an objective vision test, yet rated their spatial imagery as high as a comparison group did. This suggests aphantasia reflects a lack of sensory imagery rather than poor self-insight.
Watkins · Cortex
A physicist who lacks both visual imagery and the ability to relive his past describes how he discovered these differences. He suggests the two are linked but not identical, since not everyone with aphantasia has memory problems.
Jacobs, Schwarzkopf and Silvanto · Cortex
A woman with lifelong aphantasia was compared with 11 women with typical imagery on memory tests. She was as accurate as them on a task meant to need imagery, judging whether a dot fell inside a shape that was named but not shown, though she was worse than IQ-matched controls at telling her right answers from her wrong ones. She did worse only on the hardest trials of a matching visual memory task. The authors suggest she uses other strategies that work in most conditions but lose out when fine visual detail is needed; this is a single case.
Berger and Ehrsson · Scientific Reports
Imagining collision-like sounds can cause people to perceive crossing discs as bouncing, with the effect's strength tied to imagery vividness. This demonstrates that mental imagery can integrate with real sensory input to alter our perception.
Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala · Cortex
In a short reply to colleagues who suggested some aphantasia may be psychological in origin, the authors agree that mood and other psychological factors can change imagery and should be assessed, but call the old split between psychological and physical causes dubious, since both act through the brain. The 21 people with lifelong aphantasia from their earlier questionnaire study, most of whom still had imagery in dreams or brief flashes, described a stable difference with few emotional effects, so the authors doubt that psychological problems play a major role in lifelong aphantasia.
de Vito and Bartolomeo · Cortex
Researchers suggest that aphantasia can have psychogenic origins linked to conditions like anxiety and depersonalization. This indicates that clinical evaluations of imagery loss should include psychopathological examinations.