Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
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.
McCormick and Lange · Frontiers in Cognition
This short review compares memory for personal events in aphantasia and in blindness. People with aphantasia recall fewer details of every kind and relive memories less, while the few small studies of blind people suggest their memories feel about as vivid as sighted people's, though they often need more prompting. The authors propose that building a mental scene matters more for vivid memory than having seen the world, and note that no study has yet tested scene building in people born blind.
Monzel and colleagues · eLife
People with aphantasia recalled fewer event, emotion and sensory details from their own lives than controls. During recall their hippocampus was less active, their visual cortex more active, and the two lacked the coupling seen in controls.
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