Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Incekara and Blom · Frontiers in Psychology
Reading Carl Jung's journals and other self-reports, the authors argue that many of his unusual experiences, such as a mental image of a dead friend so vivid that he considered getting up to follow it, reflected extremely vivid imagery (hyperphantasia) rather than a psychotic illness. They suggest he was probably born with this vividness and developed it through a practice he called active imagination. They accept that some daytime hallucinations were psychotic symptoms, which are fairly common in people without a disorder, and call for research on hyperphantasia in psychotic experiences.
Blomkvist · Mind & Language
This philosophy paper reviews early studies of aphantasia and picks out six recurring findings: weak or absent voluntary visual imagery, uneven loss in the other senses, involuntary imagery such as dreams often less affected, fewer details in memories, fewer details when imagining general or future events, and intact spatial abilities. It argues that two earlier accounts cannot explain all six and proposes that aphantasia is a fault in how the memory system retrieves sensory details on demand, rather than a problem of vision alone. The theory makes predictions that have not yet been tested.
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