Can you smell your grandmother's kitchen in your mind? Olfactory aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily conjure smell, on its own or alongside other missing senses.
Nanay · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Aphantasia is a heterogeneous condition with distinct subtypes, including variations in voluntary control and sensory modalities. Recognizing these differences is essential for developing accurate experimental methodologies and explanations.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
Researchers propose defining aphantasia as the absence or reduction of voluntary sensory imagery across any modality. This unified terminology avoids a proliferation of new terms while acknowledging that imagery deficits can be specific or multisensory.