Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Vetterlein and colleagues · Neurobiology of Pain
In a brain-scanning study of 82 healthy adults, people imagined themselves in everyday painful situations, such as burning a lip on a hot drink, and matched painless ones, shown as pictures or text. Imagining pain raised activity in frontal, motor, body-sensing and parietal areas and the cerebellum, regions earlier studies link to pain, and also in visual areas. Pain sensitivity and sense of control did not predict this activity. With no real-pain comparison, the authors call the evidence for shared brain activity between imagined and felt pain preliminary, and imagery ability was not measured.
Wagner and Monzel · Brain and Behavior
Sixteen people with schizophrenia and 44 people without it rated their visual imagery and did a binocular rivalry test, in which a pattern someone has just imagined is more likely to dominate what they then see. The groups did not differ on either measure, although the people with schizophrenia reported far more hallucination-like experiences. Among the people with schizophrenia, more vivid self-rated imagery went with more religious-themed hallucinations. The sample was small, all patients were on medication, and the rivalry test was not very reliable.
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