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.
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.
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