Aristotle coined phantasia in On the Soul to describe a capacity between perception and thought, a kind of sixth sense. It's often translated as imagination.
Monzel, Nagai and Silvanto · Scientific Reports
People with aphantasia report significantly lower interceptive awareness and emotional engagement with bodily signals. This suggests that mental imagery plays a key role in linking internal bodily states to the recall of personal memories.
Wymark and colleagues · Journal of the Neurological Sciences
In this conference abstract, people with aphantasia, average imagers and very vivid imagers did a task that tests whether imagining something gets in the way of seeing it. The more vivid a group's imagery, the more imagining hurt accuracy, by about 9 percent in the vivid group, while the aphantasia group was slightly more accurate on imagery trials. Brain recordings also differed between the groups. The authors argue aphantasia is a different way of processing rather than a deficit, but the abstract does not say how many people took part.
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.
Balaban and Ullman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Researchers propose that the mind separates physical simulation from graphical rendering, much like a game engine. This suggests aphantasia may be a case of "broken rendering" where underlying spatial and physical representations remain intact.
Nanay · Neuropsychologia
Aphantasia is not a monolithic condition but a heterogeneous spectrum with diverse underlying causes. Recognizing this complexity helps researchers better understand the interpersonal differences in imagery vividness across the entire population.
Bruder and Zehra · Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
Among 636 adults in Qatar, 5.0% scored in the aphantasia range and 12.1% in the hyperphantasia range, similar across cultures. Middle East and North Africa participants reported weaker imagery than Southeast Asian and Western ones.
Rebecchi · Journal of Psychedelic Studies
One autistic woman aged 34, who said she had never had images in her mind, reported that they first appeared after she took psilocybin truffles and stayed after the drug wore off. Her imagery questionnaire scores, the first two recalled about a year later, went from no imagery to the most vivid possible, then settled just above average at 12 and 33 months, though by a year her images had turned gray and she struggled to imagine movement. She kept taking psilocybin during follow-up, and the author says a single self-reported case should be read with caution.
Mehta · Oxford Open Neuroscience
This philosophy paper, with no new data, is about people who control a computer through a brain implant by imagining movements. It argues that the brain activity of weighing possible moves may look like that of imagining the chosen move, so a device could act on a passing thought, making an action voluntary but, on some theories of action, not intended. Using a hypothetical implant user with aphantasia, it proposes comparing users with and without aphantasia to help find signals that separate an intended move from moves merely considered.
DeKock · The Confluence
This short literature review, drawing on eight sources, describes visual imagery as a spectrum from aphantasia to hyperphantasia and summarizes research on memory, emotion, brain areas and measurement. It argues that teaching and therapy should allow for differences in imagery, for example by offering non-visual approaches to people with aphantasia. It reports no new data, and some of its claims do not match the studies it cites.
Bouyer and colleagues · Consciousness and Cognition
In three student samples, the link between autistic traits and imagery vividness came mostly from autism-questionnaire items about imagination. The authors conclude that any link between imagery vividness and autistic traits is likely weak.
Bruder and Zehra
Researchers found significant cultural differences in mental imagery vividness, with WEIRD and South-East Asian groups reporting higher levels than those from the Middle East and North Africa. This highlights the need to consider cultural factors when studying imagery across all senses.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
This short definition, published in a special issue of the journal Cortex, describes aphantasia as the absence or near-absence of imagery, most often the inability to picture things while fully awake, as opposed to simply thinking about them. Aphantasia affects deliberate imagery, may affect spontaneous imagery, and often leaves imagery in dreams intact. It can be lifelong or acquired, and the note proposes labels such as visual, auditory, multisensory and global aphantasia, while recording that some researchers keep the word for vision alone.
Williams and Suggate · Imagination, Cognition and Personality
People with low imagery reported being less absorbed in stories, especially in seeing scenes and feeling transported, yet still enjoyed reading. This suggests imagery shapes how reading feels more than whether people like it.
Eker, Ozer and Gencel · International Journal on Studies in Education
Students and graduates with aphantasia reported slightly higher undergraduate grades than others and differed only in learning orientation. This suggests lacking visual imagery did not hold back academic achievement in this group.
Wright and colleagues · Frontiers in Psychology
Researchers found that 0.9% of people have aphantasia and 3.3% have hypophantasia in a large global sample. This highlights the need to account for imagery differences in research and clinical settings.
King, Buxton and Tyndall · Consciousness and Cognition
Autistic adults in an online survey reported less vivid visual and emotional imagery than non-autistic adults, and more of them scored in the aphantasia range (20% versus 6%). Imagery in other senses did not differ.
Larner, Leff and Nachev · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
This review and conceptual analysis argues that mental images are not seen, so rating them from faint to vivid, as imagery questionnaires do, cannot be checked against anything. The authors propose defining aphantasia by a person's sincere statement that they have no visual imagery, and studying it with behavioral tests and physical measures, such as pupil responses, rather than graded questionnaires or brain scans alone. They suggest new tasks, for example with ambiguous figures, to separate imagery from how people report it.
Westby · Word of Mouth
This short overview, written for speech-language pathologists in a practitioner newsletter, describes aphantasia as a difference rather than a disorder, often affecting other senses and memory. It suggests how aphantasia might affect children's pretend play, reading, spelling and planning, and notes there is no research showing that people with aphantasia can be trained to visualize. Most of its list of possible benefits, such as protection from trauma, grief and depression, comes without supporting studies.
Blazhenkova, Kotov and Kotova
This preprint, not yet peer reviewed, asked two groups of university students (185 and 181) what share of people have no visual imagery and what share have imagery as vivid as seeing. Average guesses were 27 to 32% and 37 to 53%, far above survey estimates of about 1% and 3%, and they overestimated how common high and low sensory sensitivity are. High guesses for one extreme went with high guesses for the other. The authors point to general biases in judging rare traits, with people's own imagery playing a limited part, and call for objective tests of imagery.
Zeman · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
About 1% of people report no visual imagery and about 3% report imagery as vivid as seeing, and objective tests are starting to back these reports up. The review suggests conscious imagery is not needed for thinking or creativity.