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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McCormick · International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring
In a composite case of a senior lawyer with aphantasia, a coach kept mainly to non-visual methods, such as career stories, four values words, goals and daily habits, and she said she had made some useful progress. The author suggests other coaches do the same, though the case never tried a visualization exercise.
Cleary and colleagues · Neurocase
Researchers found that a 16-year-old with HSAM exhibited typical visual imagery vividness but significantly higher rates of involuntary memories. This suggests that superior memory may be driven by retrieval frequency rather than imagery ability.
Guillaume and Armand · L’Année psychologique
A 51-year-old man with lifelong aphantasia, who reported no visual or auditory imagery, was compared with seven matched men on two recognition tests. He recognized word and picture pairs as well as they did when the two items were related in meaning, but almost never when they were unrelated, calling nearly every unrelated pair new whether or not he had seen it. He also recognized fewer of the studied faces that showed fear. The authors suggest his memory works when it can lean on meaning and fails when it needs visual reconstruction, and caution that this is a single case.
Tolman · Auditory Perception & Cognition
Three classically trained musicians who report no inner hearing, a pianist and two singers, were interviewed about how they learn and rehearse music. They described relying on the feel of their hands, voice and breath, on memory of the written score, on silent syllables or number codes, and on music theory, and none had noticed their lack of inner hearing when they began training. The author suggests inner hearing may not be needed for several kinds of musical reasoning and rehearsal, and that teaching should offer other routes, though the study rests on interviews and did not measure performance.
Silvanto · Cortex
A commentary argues that whether to treat aphantasia depends on subtype. Imagery lost after trauma or stress is the clearest candidate, with care aimed at underlying problems; lifelong absent imagery without impairment is variation, not pathology.
Megla, Prasad and Bainbridge · Cerebral Cortex
Researchers found that an aphantasic twin had surprisingly similar brain activity to their imager twin during memory tasks despite lacking visual imagery. This suggests aphantasia may be a spectrum with more preserved visual information than previously thought.
Rebecchi · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
One autistic woman aged 34, who said she had never had images in her mind, reported that they first appeared after she took psilocybin truffles and stayed after the drug wore off. Her imagery questionnaire scores, the first two recalled about a year later, went from no imagery to the most vivid possible, then settled just above average at 12 and 33 months, though by a year her images had turned gray and she struggled to imagine movement. She kept taking psilocybin during follow-up, and the author says a single self-reported case should be read with caution.
DeKock · The Confluence
This short literature review, drawing on eight sources, describes visual imagery as a spectrum from aphantasia to hyperphantasia and summarizes research on memory, emotion, brain areas and measurement. It argues that teaching and therapy should allow for differences in imagery, for example by offering non-visual approaches to people with aphantasia. It reports no new data, and some of its claims do not match the studies it cites.
Best and colleagues · Cognitive and Behavioral Practice
This case report describes one man with PTSD after an assault who had 10 sessions of trauma-focused cognitive therapy, with the imagined revisiting of the trauma done inside a low-cost virtual copy of the real site, built from phone photos in two days. His PTSD symptom score fell from 64 to 19 and he no longer met criteria for PTSD; he found the virtual scene realistic and said it prepared him to visit the real place. The authors note that a single case cannot show what virtual reality added. The paper did not measure his imagery or mention aphantasia.
Furman and colleagues · Neurocase
A 35-year-old man with lifelong aphantasia scored in the normal range or above on standard tests and high on mental rotation, which he said he solved with a body-based, non-visual strategy. His EEG was recorded as he looked at a face and then tried to picture it. For picturing, estimated brain activity began in left temporal rather than frontal areas, with no significant activity in rear visual areas or in a parietal area linked to imagery within 300 milliseconds. It is a single case with no comparison person, which the authors call only a first step.
Knowles, Jones and Zeman · Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry
In 88 people who lost their visual imagery, the commonest triggers were head injury, mood disorders and stroke. This suggests acquired aphantasia can follow both neurological and psychological disorders.
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.
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.
Arshamian and Larsson · Frontiers in Psychology
This short review compares imagining smells with imagining sights and sounds. In many studies smell imagery behaves like the others, but people differ far more in it, and most find it hard to call up a smell. The authors link stronger smell imagery to knowing odor names, interest in smells, and experience such as daily cooking or perfumery, and suggest regular exposure to smells may help. Most of this evidence compares experienced people with novices at one point in time, so it cannot show that practice caused the difference.
Zeman and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
A man who suddenly lost his visual imagery still passed imagery and visual memory tests, but his brain worked differently when he tried to picture faces. This suggests imagery tasks can be done without the experience of seeing.
Stevenson and Case · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
This review asks whether people can imagine smells. Reports from hallucinations, dreams and questionnaires suggest smell images do occur, but people rate smell the hardest sense to imagine, and many lab results could come from knowledge or words rather than images; only one study ruled out every alternative. The authors argue that the main problem is calling up a smell from its name, since links between words and smells are weak, and predict that training people to link odors with names or other cues would make smell images easier to form.