Topic: Multisensory Aphantasia

Aphantasia is often described as a visual condition but can impact all senses in your imagination. Current estimates are that ~26% of visual aphantasics experience no mental imagery or have a reduced capacity in other mental senses (imagining sound, movement, smell, taste, and touch). Discover and learn about multisensory aphantasia.

From guided imagery to imagined athletic practices, are aphantasics disadvantaged because they lack a mind’s eye?
My journey understanding the cognitive profiles of aphantasia and hyperphantasia started when I learned at age 30 that most of you have a superpower I don’t.
I can't. Exploring auditory aphantasia and the mysterious mind's ear.
How do you describe aphantasia? Founder of Aphantasia Network often gets asked this question. His answer? Think of a horse.
When it comes to visualizing things in the mind's eye, our experience varies widely. Exploring the phenomenon of visual imagery and its assessment.
I’m pretty sure based on previous conversations, that Aphantasia is the inability to recall all senses, like sight,  taste, touch, sound, etc. But this...
Okay, it’s not exactly that I can visualize movement. I don’t know how to explain it, it’s without visuals yet I can still imagine movement...
To begin, let me clarify my understanding of empathy vs sympathy.  Empathy means experiencing someone else’s emotions while sympathy is an ability to u...
I read a post by Ian Miller that describes the way I think.  He said: “I build mental models of almost everything that I work on, they are often spatia...
I only discovered my aphantasia a few years ago (81 now) but was always aware that I didn’t think like others and was vaguely aware than many seemed to...
February 21, 2021
I have only just discovered Aphantasia as a result of research after also just discovering that other people have a voice in their head. I am now astounded t...
There’s a wide range of ways we can have aphantasia. Some people have total aphantasia, no visual, auditory, olfactory, or motor imagery, and some of u...
Aphantasia isn’t limited to just visual imagination; it can impact all sensory imagery in the mind. For example, when most people go to a restaurant and see ...
Aphantasia is the inability to visualize but can impact all mental imagery senses. Joel Pearson joins Founder of Aphantasia Network, Tom Ebeyer, for a live Ask Me Anything event to answer the community's questions.
February 25, 2021
Phantasia – the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes
Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., … Winlove, C. (2020). Phantasia-The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, 130, 426–440. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.04.003
Visual imagery typically enables us to see absent items in the mind's eye. It plays a role in memory, day-dreaming and creativity. Since coining the terms aphantasia and hyperphantasia to describe the absence and abundance of visual imagery, Adam Zeman and his team have been contacted by many thousands of people with extreme imagery abilities. Through data collected from questionnaires filled by 2000 participants with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia, the researchers have found some interesting patterns. Participants with aphantasia tend to work in scientific and mathematical fields and have difficulty with face recognition and autobiographical memory. On the other hand, those with hyperphantasia tend to work in creative fields and have a higher rate of synaesthesia. The study found that around half of the participants with aphantasia reported the absence of wakeful imagery in all sense modalities, but most of them dream visually. The researchers have also noted that aphantasia runs in families more frequently than expected. This study highlights the widespread but neglected features of human experience with informative psychological associations.