Mind Blind: Living with Aphantasia
I want you to close your eyes and imagine a horse as clearly as you can.
Once you have it, hold the image in your mind and try to answer the following few questions.
What colour is the horse you’re picturing?
Is it standing, sitting or running?
Does it have a mane, and if so, braided, shaggy or combed?
Below is what I pictured during that little exercise.
Pitch black. Lights out. Nada.
Perhaps you couldn’t mentally visualise a horse either. Maybe you’ve never been able to picture things in your mind, be that the face of a loved one or a childhood memory.
Well, there’s a word for that— aphantasia.
What is aphantasia?
Aphantasia refers to the inability to picture an image in your mind’s eye. The term was coined in 2015 by Professor Adam Zeman, a cognitive and behavioural neurologist at the University of Exeter.
It was brought to Zeman’s attention in 2003 after he was referred a 65-year-old post-operative patient with a curious complaint:
“He used to get himself to sleep by imagining friends and family. Following the cardiac procedure, he couldn’t visualise anything, his dreams became a-visual, he said that reading was different because previously he used to enter a visual world and that no longer happened.”
Intrigued, Zeman decided to investigate and published a short case study reporting on his findings. Tellingly, whilst the man had normal brain activation when he looked at faces in an MRI scanner, he couldn’t activate these same brain areas when he tried to imagine faces. After reading the case report, people started to come forward to say they too couldn’t visualise images mentally, expressing shock that the “mind’s eye” wasn’t simply a colourful expression.
Zeman quickly realised that he’d stumbled upon an intriguing and much-neglected variation in our mental worlds, one that would eventually birth The Eyes Mind research project in 2015. Thousands of people have come forward since, with the large majority of mind-blind people reporting that they have never been able to conjure mental images (myself included). Interestingly, others report losing the ability after periods of depression, psychosis or following a brain injury, with estimates suggesting anywhere from 1–4% of people lack this faculty.
Notable aphantasics include the scientist Craig Venter, the first person to decode the human genome (he described his aphantasia as useful in helping him to concentrate on scientific problems) and the American software engineer Blake Ross who went viral after sharing his own experience in a Facebook post. In Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s iconic account of his first mescaline trip, he reveals his inability to visualise and offers a wonderful definition:
“I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind…When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object.”
What is it like living with aphantasia?
As someone born without a mind’s eye, the simplest answer is that I don’t know anything else — you might as well ask me what it’s like living without the ability to fly. Then again, finding out that all your friends can fly and you can’t would be pretty demoralising, as can finding out you’re a non-visualiser.
Moreover, as the neurodiversity movement has highlighted in recent years, it can be confusing to operate in a system that assumes neurotypical functioning, including the existence of a mind’s eye. In school, children are asked to draw mind maps and in therapy, patients are asked to visualise, for example. The idea of counting sheep as a child baffled me too.
Those with aphantasia can end up feeling deficient for not grasping these techniques, but the truth is they simply don’t have the tools to implement them. Sadly, with so little awareness around aphantasia, many of those living without a mind’s eye end up blaming themselves instead of the system. But those who are mind blind don’t need to be diagnosed or treated, says Zeman: “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience, not a disorder.” And with difference comes an exciting opportunity for dialogue:
“The deepest lesson from aphantasia surely concerns human diversity. We all tend to regard our own experience as normal; inevitably, it supplies our standard for comparison. It is easy, therefore, to fail to recognise quite startling differences between our inner lives.”
— Professor Adam Zeman
One of the most common questions I receive is whether I can dream and the answer is yes, just not visually. My dreams unfold in darkness, but one that is conceptually rich and charged with emotion. I navigate the dream world with a sense of spatial awareness and an almost sixth sense that allows me to intuit the people around me without seeing them. Upon waking, my dreams are defined by the feelings they evoke; joy, fear, lust, anger, and embarrassment.
Despite being an avid reader, I’ve never had much tolerance for descriptive passages in books, preferring concept-rich dialogue instead. Take the opening passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:
“In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.”
These words are a blueprint for a canvas I simply can’t create.
There’s some preliminary research to suggest that those with aphantasia may have poorer memory, but in my own experience, I haven’t found this to be the case. My brain has discovered other ways to create and store episodic memories.
Interestingly, the most vivid and rich of these are anchored in taste suggesting a sort of Proustian compensatory mechanism. To those who ask whether I’m sad I can’t picture the past, I’ve learnt to rejoinder: “Isn’t it sad you’ve never tasted it?”.
For more resources and information on Aphantasia, check out the Aphantasia Network. I would also recommend the book Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights.
