What is hyperphantasia?

Researchers describe it as imagery “as vivid as real seeing”: a picture called up in the mind is as clear as the thing itself.

Nearly everyone with it dreams in pictures: 98.5% in one survey of volunteers, against 63.4% of those with aphantasia.

In the same survey, they reported synesthesia, a merging of the senses, more often than people with aphantasia.

In one small study, people with hyperphantasia recalled more details of past events than people with typical imagery, and described imagined scenes in more detail too.

Vivid imagery doesn’t mean a better memory for everything. On one visual memory task, people with hyperphantasia favoured picturing and placing things, and scored no better than anyone else.

About 6 in 100 people have imagery as vivid as seeing, so hyperphantasia is more common than aphantasia. Where researchers draw the line changes the figure: one review, counting only the most extreme cases, puts it nearer 3 in 100.

Hyperphantasia and aphantasia sit at opposite ends of one range. People with aphantasia can call up little or no mental imagery: they know what things look like, but no picture comes. Most people are somewhere in between. More in What is aphantasia?

Imagery in different senses can come apart. Some people rate one sense as strong and another as weak, and a person can have vivid sound imagery and no visual imagery at all.

There’s no medical test, and we know of no quick check tested for it. Researchers use a questionnaire that asks how vivid your imagery is for a series of everyday scenes, and call it hyperphantasia when the pictures come out as vivid as really seeing, or very close, across the whole questionnaire.

The one question in our beginner’s guide was tested only for spotting no imagery, not vivid imagery.

Researchers say both ends of the range appear to be widespread but neglected parts of human experience.

In one survey of volunteers, people with hyperphantasia more often worked in arts, design and media than people with aphantasia, who more often worked in science and computing.

In the same survey, about 9 in 10 people with hyperphantasia said their imagery brings advantages, against about half of those with aphantasia.

Many people with hyperphantasia also said it affects their relationships, and three in four of those said mostly for the worse.

Most of this comes from people describing themselves, and objective study of hyperphantasia has barely begun.

In one small brain-imaging study, the parts of the brain that handle sight were more closely linked with the front of the brain at rest in people with hyperphantasia than in people with aphantasia. The study found no difference in the structure of their brains. Read the study.

The word joins the Greek hyper-, “over” or “beyond”, and phantasia, Aristotle’s word for the power that brings images to mind. The neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues, who named aphantasia in 2015, named hyperphantasia too.

The range itself was noticed long before: in 1880, Francis Galton found that imagery varies enormously from person to person.