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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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Kvamme, Nagai and Silvanto · Trends Open
In this opinion article, the authors propose that the brain's processing of body signals, centered on the anterior insula, is a shared source of both mental imagery and emotion. On this view, conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, autism and ADHD change imagery because they disturb this same system, and body-focused treatments might help restore imagery. The authors say the causal direction has not yet been shown and call for long-term and treatment studies to test it.
Kvamme and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Among people with aphantasia, those with more (though still weak) imagery reported more alexithymia and anxiety, the reverse of typical imagers. The authors suggest faint imagery may prompt emotional processing that fails.
Gao, Nagai and Silvanto · Neuropsychologia
People who lost their mental imagery reported more childhood trauma, anxiety, heart and breathing symptoms, and ADHD and autism traits than typical imagers. This suggests acquired aphantasia can follow emotional pathways as well as brain injury.
Monzel, Nagai and Silvanto · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia report significantly lower interceptive awareness and emotional engagement with bodily signals. This suggests that mental imagery plays a key role in linking internal bodily states to the recall of personal memories.
Silvanto and Nagai · Brain Topography
Researchers propose that mental imagery requires the integration of sensory information with internal physiological signals via the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. This suggests aphantasia may stem from a failure to ground sensory simulations in bodily experience.
Kobayashi and colleagues · NeuroImage
In a brain scanning study of 25 young adults, tasting fruit juice and imagining tastes both activated part of the insula, the brain's main taste area. Imagined taste activity sat mostly on the left side, while real taste activated both sides. Frontal areas appeared active whether people imagined tastes or pictured foods, so the authors suggest these areas start imagery in any sense. People who rated their taste imagery as weak were left out of the analysis.