Via interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I got
and have been reading a 2025 book by Adam Zeman titled The Shape of Things
Unseen: A new science of imagination. There is a Google Books preview to page
43 of it. On pages 13 and 14 he says:
“But Keat’s acute sensibility is deeply puzzling to the 2 – 3
percent of us who turn out to lack imagery entirely. The existence of people
whose ‘powers’ of visualisation ‘are zero’ was noted by the remarkable
Victorian psychologist Sir Edward Galton in the 1880s. But neither Galton
himself nor his followers pursued this intriguing lead. In 2015, with
colleagues in Edinburgh, I described 21 people who had always lacked a mind’s
eye [Adam Zeman, Michela Dewar, and Sergio Della Salla, Cortex, 2105,
Volume 73, pages 378 to 380: Lives without imagery – congenital aphantasia],
coining the term ‘aphantasia’ to denote this variation in human experience: we
had borrowed Aristotle’s term for the capacity to visualize, phantasia, adding
an ‘a’ to indicate absence. The public interest that followed came as a huge
surprise: after five minutes on breakfast TV discussing the work, I watched
emails dropping into my inbox many times every second. One of the most memorable
came from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Blake Ross, the co-creator of Mozilla
Firefox, who wrote a feisty Facebook post about his realisation that he was
aphatasiac: ‘If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand
and turquoise waves. If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing.
And mom’s face? Of course. You experience this differently, sure. Some of you
see a photorealistic beach, others only a shadowy cartoon, Some of you can make
it up, others only ‘see’ a beach they’ve visited. Some of you have to work
harder to paint the canvas. Some of you can’t hang onto the canvas for long.
But nearly all of you have a canvas. I don’t. I have never visualiszed anything
in my entire life. I can’t ‘see’ my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my
childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought ‘counting
sheep’ was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any
of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.’
Many others wrote along similar lines – one contact wrote of
‘the amazing click of realization we all get when we first heard about it.’
There turned out to be a substantial community of aphantasic folk who had long
been trying to articulate this quirk in their psychological nature and were
glad of a term with which to describe it.
We shall return to the recent discovery of aphantasia. For
now, the existence of folk who get by perfectly well without a mind’s eye –
indeed in some cases, like Blake Ross’s, without any conscious sensory imagery
at all – underlines the huge variability of our imaginative experience and
inner lives. This helps to explain my teenage puzzlement at a lively but hazy
recollection of the gallery: I have average imagery vividness, but it extends
across the sensory spectrum – I can see in my mind’s eye, hear in my mind’s
ear, walk with my mind’s legs with reasonable ease. When I recalled the
gallery, I precisely imagined being there – the feel of the boards
beneath my feet, the still gallery air, the scent of canvas, a certain mood, as
well as the look of the paintings. The ability to re-experience events in
this richly integrated way – much as we experienced them in the first place –
is a key source of our sense that our recollected or imagined memories are ‘true’,
even when the fine details prove to be elusive.”
There also is a magazine article by Larrissa MacFarquhar in The
New Yorker for October 27, 2025 titled Some People Can’t See Mental
Images. The Consequences Are Profound. And there is another 20-page pdf article
with 165 references by Feiyang Jin, Shen-Mou Hsu, and Yu Li in Vision on September
22, 2024 titled A Systematic Review of Aphantasia: Concept, Measurement, Neural
Basis, and Theory Development.
Yet another article by David J. Wright et al. at Frontiers
in Psychology on October 15, 2024 is titled An international estimate of the
prevalence of differing visual imagery abilities. They surveyed 3049 people
with the results shown above on a bar chart. Just 1.2% had aphantasia. Another 3%
had low imagery - hypophantasia. 89.9%
had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.9% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.
A second bar chart shows similar results just for 887 Canadians
in that larger sample. Just 1.7% had aphantasia. 3.6% had low imagery - hypophantasia. 89.1% had normal visual imagery,
and the other 5.6% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.
Still another article by Rish P. Hinwar and Anthony J.
Lambert at Frontiers in Psychology on October 14, 2021 is titled Anauralia: The
Silent Mind and Its Association With Aphantasia.
The cartoon was assembled using images for an eye and mind
from OpenClipArt.
