The Language Game of Visualization: Why Aphantasics Don't Need Mental Images to Imagine

When Christian Scholz first learned about aphantasia during his master's studies in logic, he was fascinated by a puzzle that seemed impossible to solve. How could people function normally—even excel—on tasks supposedly requiring visualization when they couldn't form mental images at all?

The answer he developed challenges our fundamental assumptions about imagination, mental imagery, and even what it means to "see with the mind's eye."

The Paradox That Launched a PhD

Scholz, now pursuing his doctorate in philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum, stumbled onto what he calls the aphantasia paradox. Contemporary philosophy and cognitive science attribute enormous importance to mental imagery for human cognition. This belief stretches back millennia—Aristotle claimed that the mind never thinks without an image.

Yet research consistently shows that aphantasics function normally across a range of cognitive tasks. More remarkably, they successfully perform tasks explicitly designed to require visualization, sometimes even outperforming typical visualizers.

The question Scholz set out to answer: How can aphantasics function so well without visual mental imagery?

His provocative answer: Because visualization isn't that important.

What Philosophy Reveals About Mental Images

To understand Scholz's argument, we need to understand how mental imagery is typically defined. Most researchers identify it with quasi-perceptual experience—the subjective feeling of "seeing" something that isn't there, like closing your eyes and visualizing a cup.

But the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a radically different take. For Wittgenstein, language is fundamentally public and rooted in community practices. The meaning of a term isn't determined by private experience but by how we use it in social contexts.

This led Wittgenstein to propose that a mental image is simply the image described when someone describes what they imagine. Notice what's missing: any reference to quasi-perceptual experience.

As Wittgenstein wrote, instead of imagining, someone could draw in the air with their finger, and this could take the place of the image entirely.

The Language Game of Visualization

Building on Wittgenstein, Scholz developed what he calls the "language game" of visualization—the set of expected behaviors that arise when someone uses the term.

Consider two scenarios involving the same conversation:

Scenario 1: In a police station, an officer asks a witness to visualize a criminal. The witness responds: "I see a black cat with sharp claws." This would be a clear rule violation—the point is to give a realistic description to catch the criminal.

Scenario 2: In art therapy, a therapist asks a trauma survivor to visualize the same criminal. The patient gives the identical response: "I see a black cat with sharp claws." Here, there's no rule violation at all. The point is creative self-expression, and metaphorical descriptions are encouraged.

The language game is determined by context and purpose, not by the private experience happening inside someone's head.

Enter Meta-Imagination

Scholz's central concept is what he calls "meta-imagination," which he defines as acting as if visualizing without actually visualizing.

This might sound like pretending or deception, but Scholz is emphatic that it's neither. Instead, he argues that meta-imagination is a factual description of what aphantasics actually do—and have been doing successfully their entire lives.

Consider the evidence: Over 10,000 people with lifelong aphantasia didn't realize they couldn't visualize until adulthood. Their partners didn't notice. The term "aphantasia" was only coined in 2015.

How is this possible if visualization were truly essential?

Type vs. Token: The Key Distinction

To explain how meta-imagination works, Scholz draws on a philosophical distinction from the early 20th century: types versus tokens.

A token is a specific instance—your friend's cat Lulu, with her particular orange fur and green eyes. A type is the abstract concept—"cat" in general, which has no fixed visual details because it encompasses all possible cats.

Scholz proposes applying this distinction to imagery. When hyperphantasics imagine a cat, they form a token image with specific visual details. It's like seeing a particular cat.

Aphantasics, he argues, access the type level—the abstract concept "cat"—without the quasi-perceptual experience. But crucially, they have indirect access to token-level descriptions.

Building Token Descriptions Without Visual Experience

Here's where it gets interesting. Consider aphantasic Ross's description of imagining a beach:

"If you tell me to imagine a beach I ruminate on the concept of a beach. I know there's sand. I know there's water. I know there's a sun, maybe lifeguard. I know facts about beaches... but I cannot flesh to beaches I've visited."

Ross accesses the type—the abstract concept "beach." This triggers knowledge, associations, and memories. He knows beaches can be sandy or rocky or pebbly. He knows about water and sun and palm trees. Maybe memories surface of playing cards in the shade.

Now here's Scholz's key insight: Ross can build a token-level description by simply fixing some of these details. His beach becomes a sand beach with water, sun, no lifeguard, but palm trees and people playing cards in their shade.

Put that into a verbal description starting with "I see," and you get: "I see sand and water. The sun is shining. I see palm trees, and in the shadow of the palm trees I see a group of people playing cards."

This is a token-level description with specific visual details. It describes a particular beach. And it requires no quasi-perceptual experience whatsoever—just knowledge, associations, and creativity.

The Aphantasic Child Learns to "Visualize"

Scholz illustrates this with a thought experiment about a child named Anna. In kindergarten, Anna observes another child being asked to visualize an apple. The child closes their eyes and gives a verbal description of an apple that isn't present.

Anna learns that the language game of visualizing consists of: closing your eyes and giving a verbal description of something that isn't there.

The other child may have a private quasi-perceptual experience, but that experience is invisible to Anna—it plays no role in the public language game.

The next day, when asked to visualize a beach, Anna does what she learned: closes her eyes and gives a verbal description based on her knowledge, associations, and memories. She has no quasi-perceptual experience, but the kindergarten teacher has no way of knowing that. Anna isn't breaking any rules.

She grows up for decades successfully playing the language game of visualization, never realizing that other people have this additional private experience she lacks.

Successfully Playing the Game

This, Scholz argues, is why lifelong aphantasics can successfully play the language game of visualizing without anyone noticing. The game doesn't require quasi-perceptual experience—it merely requires reporting visual details.

To play the game correctly, you don't have to actually visualize. You merely have to meta-imagine.

The Neuroscience Connection

Intriguingly, Scholz's philosophical argument aligns with recent neuroscience findings from researchers like Dr. Paulo Barolo at the Paris Brain Institute.

Using ultra-high-field brain imaging, Barolo discovered that aphantasic individuals activate the same brain networks as typical visualizers when answering questions about visual properties. The difference isn't in which regions activate, but in how they coordinate—specifically, in the functional connectivity between attention networks and high-level visual areas.

As Barolo explains, aphantasic individuals may use their attentional networks less efficiently to read out activity in high-level visual cortex, so the activity is there and can access information, but it doesn't reach conscious levels.

The knowledge is present. The brain regions are working. The connectivity patterns are simply different—resulting in the same cognitive abilities without the conscious visual experience.

A Provocative Conclusion

Scholz's work leads to a provocative claim: Following Wittgenstein's definition that a mental image is what gets described when someone describes what they imagine, aphantasics actually do have mental images.

They can describe at the token level what they're imagining. They successfully play the language game. They access and report visual information.

They just don't have the quasi-perceptual experience that typically accompanies these abilities.

What This Means

For aphantasics, Scholz's framework offers validation. You're not failing at visualization—you're successfully meta-imagining, using knowledge and creativity to accomplish the same communicative and cognitive tasks through a different route.

For researchers, it's a reminder that private experience and functional ability can come apart in surprising ways. The subjective phenomenology of consciousness may matter far less than we assume for many cognitive tasks.

And for everyone, it challenges us to question our assumptions about what's truly necessary for imagination, creativity, and thought itself. The mind's eye might be just one way—and not even a necessary way—to navigate a visual world.

As Scholz concludes, for many visual imagery tasks, we merely need to act as if we're visualizing instead of actually visualizing. And aphantasics have been proving this point, quietly and successfully, their entire lives.