Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Jablonka and Cohen · Trends Open
Researchers propose aphantasia represents an extreme evolutionary trade-off where the brain hyperoptimizes for abstract semantics by suppressing metabolically expensive visual recall. This suggests aphantasia may have facilitated the cultural transition to abstract writing systems.
Kutsche and colleagues · Cortex
Lesions causing aphantasia are all functionally connected to a specific region in the left ventral visual pathway called the fusiform imagery node. This provides causal evidence that this node's connections are key for voluntary visual imagery.
Liu and colleagues · Cortex
In a 7-tesla brain imaging study of 10 people with aphantasia and 10 typical imagers, attempted imagery activated similar visual areas in both groups. In aphantasia, a key imagery region was less connected with frontal and parietal areas.
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