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Aphantasia presenting as Cotard’s syndrome

Ravindren, R and Veedu · Discover Neuroscience

A 55-year-old woman had believed since age 29 that her mind had disappeared, a delusion of the kind seen in Cotard's syndrome. She reported no voluntary imagery in any sense, though she had visual dreams about once a month, and scans showed white matter damage in the frontal and parietal lobes on both sides. The authors suggest this damage disrupted her voluntary imagery and her ability to make sense of that loss, so she took it for losing her mind. It is a single case, and the report has no measure of her imagery before the illness.