I discovered i accidentally had afantasy. When you’ve lived your whole life without a “ghost”, it seems perfectly normal not to visualize anything when you remember people and places, or imagine the future.
Two years ago I wrote an article on pupillometry, or the measurement of a person’s pupils to infer their cognitive state. Joel Pearson, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales, attempted to use pupils as a biomarker to assess aphantasy, a condition thought to be approximately 3.9% of people.
A quick home test for afthanasia, I learned, is called the red star or red apple test. Close your eyes and picture a red apple. How well can you visually see the apple on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the most vivid? Can you see the color, shape and length of the stem? Is it a little blurry, coming in and out of focus? To me, I saw nothing – no fuzzy outline, no hint of any image whatsoever. As I was working on my story, I thought, “Well, no one can really see an apple when they close their eyes. It’s just a metaphor.” Then I asked some friends. Not all were a 1, but most could see between 1 and 4. (There is also a more official questionnaire, called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, or the VVIQ.)
“But you can really see that?” I pressed, confused. I know what an apple looks like. I can easily describe many varieties of apples to you now, even the subtle differences in their color. But when I do, I “see” nothing – I retain these details in another way.
Although I’ve been reporting on the brain for years, it never occurred to me that it was unusual to have no visuals.
Aphantasia is relatively new to be mentioned. In the late 19th century, scientists, notably Francis Galton, wrote that some people were better able to imagine objects in their minds than others. But it wasn’t until 2003 that Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter published the first case report on aphantasia, after meeting a 65-year-old who had lost the ability to mentally visualize famous people and places after surgery.
After hearing from those who had never been able to mentally visualize, Zeman published a newspaper on 21 people with “congenital aphantasia” in 2015. Since then, more and more people like me have realized that mental imagery is a spectrum, and we lie on the outer limits of it, in the dark.
WWhen I went on dates after a breakup in 2022, my friends often asked what people looked like compared to their profile pictures. I would describe their mannerisms, how they made me feel, how they acted in certain situations; a friend might say in frustration, “Yeah, but what are they doing look as?” It was a clue that something was off in my visual representation of others. In a July 2022 journal entry, I wrote about a man I was seeing, “Why can’t I keep what [he] look like in my mind?”
There has been a surge of research on how afthanasia affects our lives. There are probably different subtypes of afthanasia, as Pearson and his colleagues have shown a recent paper: for some it affects images alone; some cannot imagine other sensory information, such as sounds. Some people with aphantasia have visualizations when they dream (I do), and others don’t. There is evidence that it can make it harder for people to remember visual detailsalthough other studies show that afants perform better on some memory tests unrelated to images. “I remember stories, facts and trivia about my own life, but I can’t experience it in any way,” said Tom Ebeyer, the founder of the Aphantasia Network. “It also makes it difficult to sequence and remember very specific details properly.”
But in general, people with dementia don’t seem to have serious problems navigating their daily lives, unlike those with more serious memory conditions like episodic amnesia.
The ways it affects me were more understated. In therapy, I struggled with therapeutic techniques that relied heavily on visualization. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) manuals are full of such techniques, said Reshanne Reeder, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool. For example, one exercise ask people to practice responding to different situations by “imagining[ing] a scene as if it were a photograph”, followed by “imagine[ing] the action begins as if it were a movie”.
People who know me will agree that I have a very strong memory, but I have noticed that my memory works a little differently. I can remember visual details, just not visually. I can tell what a person was wearing or what a scene looked like by remembering a list of what was there, not by seeing it. Mostly, I remember how experiences felt – emotionally and physically. I am best at remembering concepts and themes from books or conversations.
I don’t have face blindness. I’m very good at recognizing people, and often remember people from long ago who don’t remember me: people I served in restaurants, went to college with, or reported on many years ago. But when I’m not physically with someone, I can’t summon their face. As a result, I also have a somewhat unusual relationship with my own appearance – it’s not that I forget what I look like, but I’m sometimes a little surprised, and don’t feel connected to my outward appearance as a matter of identity. It’s not what makes me who I am.
What I find most striking is how much variety there is in people who have afantasy. Andrea Blomkvist, a researcher in philosophy of cognitive science at the London School of Economics, said that her group met afants who are not only skilled in non-visual jobs and hobbies, but are artists, writers, animators. “Afantasia has no problem producing highly creative work,” Ebeyer said. “Our process can be very different.”
For example, visualizers can imagine their work before they start. “Afantasy, myself included, tend to have a general ‘sense’ or idea of what they want to create,” Ebeyer said. Ebeyer gets to work, then edits and refines until he’s satisfied. He often hears from other artists with afantasy when they are busy making art: I know it when I see it. It teaches us that imagination goes beyond mental images.
Zeman did writing that people with aphasia may have more of an interest in the visual arts, because their minds are deprived of them.
I love visual art – I originally majored in art history alongside journalism – but it makes sense to me that my medium is words. They best match my internal meaning, as well as the concepts and monologue that make up my daily experience. In October, the author John Green tweeted about the red apple test, which reveals that he also cannot see mental images. “I always thought ‘visualizing’ meant thinking about the words/ideas/feelings associated with a thing, not actual visuals,” he wrote, adding that his choice of profession aligns with this. “For me, everything has always been made of language, so language fits naturally.”
This also manifested itself in other preferences: I seem like someone who would like science fiction novels, but growing up I found books with long visual descriptions of scenery or characters boring. As a journalist, when I’m reporting I have to make sure I take pictures of everything I see so I can refer back to it later. It’s not my instinct to describe physical details in my writing – it’s something editors often have to remind me to do. What someone looks like, what they wear – it’s not as interesting to me as how they feel, or the ideas they have.
Ssome people view afthanasia as a deficit and wish they could reverse it. People claimed they could train their way out of aphantasia, or use psychedelics to regain a sense of mental imagery (the jury is out whether it works). I have no desire for this – my mind is very busy without a stream of images. If I was born with imagery, it would be commonplace for me, and I’m sure I would enjoy it. But I can already overwhelm myself with thoughts and feelings that have no visual aspects to them.
Aphants often ask Pearson what imagery is like. It’s not quite as simple as seeing an apple floating in front of you, he said, as someone who can mentally visualize. “I have a conscious experience, often fleeting, but I experience something in my mind’s eye of what an apple looks like,” he said.
Blomkvist has heard that some descendants find it difficult not being able to visually remember loved ones who may have died or moved away. It’s true for me: a best friend of mine, who died in 2020, had an infectious smile, and to see it—really see it—I have to look at pictures of him, which I do often. An ex-boyfriend I haven’t seen since we broke up is often in my memories, but not in visual form. He can feel like a ghost.
But my memories of people I loved are very important to me in other ways. My favorite description of aphantasia comes from a set by Mette Leonard Høeg in Psyche. She wrote that her imagination and memories have a strong spatial component. When Høeg remembers the house she grew up in as a child, “I can almost physically feel it when I think about it,” she wrote. My memories are also very physical, and these sensations refer to concepts and emotions. Recently, remembering something my current boyfriend and I discussed in London last spring, I remembered that we were on an escalator while we were talking; I could feel the memory of the movement of my body going up the moving stairs.
I love experiencing my memories of people and places in this way, just as I enjoy knowing that people can really “see” me in their minds. Conditions like aphantasia remind me how distinct our view of the world is compared to the person standing next to us on the street, or even our closest friends – we all see each other in our own ways. “Aphantasia is part of the range of neural diversity,” Pearson said. “Some people think in pictures and others don’t.”
