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The Architect Who Lost the Ability to Imagine: The Cerebral Basis of Visual Imagery

Thorudottir and colleagues · Brain Sciences

An architect who said his imagery had been vivid lost almost all of it after a stroke on both sides of the back of the brain, scoring close to the lowest possible score on an imagery questionnaire. He also had trouble recognizing faces and seeing colors, yet four other stroke patients, including another architect, kept their imagery although their test results largely overlapped with his. Brain scans showed only small areas in the right lingual gyrus and left fusiform gyrus damaged in him alone, so the authors propose these, especially the left fusiform area, as candidate regions for visual imagery.