by James Wallace Harris
If you don’t know what aphantasia or hyperphantasia then you should read “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.” by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, so I’m going to reiterate the high points to encourage you to find a copy. I highly recommend subscribing to the magazine or Apple News+.
The article is about a condition called aphantasia, one that I have. I wrote about that when I first discovered it in 2016. This new article by MacFarquhar describes the condition and its discovery in much greater depth than I have previously read. It also describes the opposite of this condition, hyperphantasia.
If you don’t know what aphantasia and hyperphantasia are, then you need to read this article if you have a certain kind of mindset such as artist or scientist, have trouble remembering the past, have difficulty recognizing faces, feel disconnected from your self, think you might be autistic, and many other personality traits that make you wonder if you’re different.
Aphantasia is the inability to remember mental images. Most people can close their eyes and recall a scene from their life. The face of a loved one, their desktop at work, the home they lived in as a child. About 2-3 percent of people can’t. But it turns out there all many degrees of not being able to see mental images, including some people who are overwhelmed with mental imagery. That condition is called hyperphantasia.
This article taught me a great deal about this condition I didn’t know. From my previous readings, I simplistically thought aphantasia meant one thing, but it’s not. For many people with the condition, they can’t remember their own past. I can. In fact, I’m obsessed with my past. I was particularly impressed what aphantasia did to artists and scientists.
I’m not like the extreme members of The Aphantasia Network or the people interviewed in the book Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle. That’s comforting, but I still miss mental memories. Yet, I’m lucky. Some people have aphantasia so severe they can’t remember anything about their past, and they feel like living corpses.
For most of my life, I assumed everyone perceived reality pretty much the same if all their sense organs were healthy. Of course, I knew some people had better sight or hearing than others, but I assumed what we perceive was the same reality. That’s because I naively thought we observed reality directly.
I now know we don’t. Our senses are used to construct a model of reality inside our heads. And we all model reality differently. This is called our Umwelt. I highly recommend reading An Immense World by Ed Yong if you want to learn more about that.
MacFarquhar’s article explores how the ability to recall mental images affects our personality, memory, sense of self, and our Umwelt. When I first learned that I lacked the common ability to consciously recall mental images, I felt deprived. Some call it mental blindness. MacFarquhar suggests I would be a different person if I had what I missed. More than that, aphantasia affects people in various ways, and I could have been very different in other ways.
MacFarquhar begins her article by profiling Nick Wakins. He thought he was normal, but couldn’t understand why other people could remember their past and he couldn’t. He abstractly knew about his earlier life from what people told him and photographs. He started researching his condition and discovered that some 19th century scientists had discovered people like him. Then in the 1970s, psychologists again explored visual memory, but it didn’t go far.
In 2010 Adam Zeman and colleagues published research in Neuropsychologie about “blind imagination.” The journalist Carl Zimmer wrote an article for Discover magazine. That caused dozens of people recognizing the condition in themselves to contact Zeman. Zeman coined the term aphantasia with the help of a friend, and published “Lives without imagery–Cogential aphantasia” in Cortex in 2015.
That inspired an article in The New York Times and Zeman got around seventeen thousand emails. It was around this time that I heard about it and wrote my blog piece.
Zeman was now hearing about many related conditions that people claiming to have aphantasia experience. Since 2015 a tremendous wealth of research has gone into this topic, information I didn’t know about. Larissa MacFarquhar does a fantastic job of catching me up.
This article is as exciting as anything Oliver Sacks wrote about. He also had aphantasia. And it’s more than just visual memories. It also relates to being remember sound, smells, tastes, and touches.
We all peceive the world tremendously different.
Nick Wakins thought he was absolutely normal until he uncovered this research. Nick has a PhD. He didn’t know what he was missing until he researched how other people peceived. We seldom compare notes like that.
Melinda Utal had an extreme case of no past memory that is very sad:
One of Kendle’s interviewees was Melinda Utal, a hypnotherapist and a freelance writer from California. She had trouble recognizing people, including people she knew pretty well, so she tended to avoid social situations where she might hurt someone’s feelings. When she first discovered that she was aphantasic, she called her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and living in a nursing home in Oregon. He had been a musician in big bands—he had toured with Bob Hope and played with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. She asked him whether he could imagine a scene in his head, and he said, Of course. I can imagine going into a concert hall. I see the wood on the walls, I see the seats, I know I’m going to sit at the back, because that’s where you get the best sound. I can see the orchestra playing a symphony, I can hear all the different instruments, and I can stop it and go backward to wherever I want it to start up and hear it again. She explained to her father what aphantasia was, how she couldn’t see images in her mind, or hear music, either. On the phone, her father started to cry. He said, But, Melinda, that’s what makes us human.
Melinda had an extremely bad memory for her life, even for an aphantasic. She once had herself checked for dementia, but the doctor found nothing wrong. She had become aware when she was in second grade that she had a bad memory, after a friend pointed it out. In an effort to hold on to her memories, she started keeping a journal in elementary school, recording what she did almost every single day, and continued this practice for decades. When, in her sixties, she got divorced and moved into an apartment by herself, she thought it would be a good time to look through her journals and revisit her younger days. She opened one and began to sob because, to her horror, the words she had written meant nothing to her. The journals were useless. She read about things she had done and it was as though they had happened to someone else.
MacFarquhar profiles many people for her long article, but I was particularly taken by two artists she interviewed. Sheri Paisley had aphantasia:
Among the e-mails that Zeman received, there were, to his surprise, several from aphantasic professional artists. One of these was Sheri Paisley (at the time, Sheri Bakes), a painter in her forties who lived in Vancouver. When Sheri was young, she’d had imagery so vivid that she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing it from what was real. She painted intricate likenesses of people and animals; portraiture attracted her because she was interested in psychology. Then, when she was twenty-nine, she had a stroke, and lost her imagery altogether.
To her, the loss of imagery was a catastrophe. She felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. She no longer saw herself as a person. Gradually, as she recovered from her stroke, she made her way back to painting, working very slowly. She switched from acrylic paints to oils because acrylics dried too fast. She found that her art had drastically changed. She no longer wanted to paint figuratively; she painted abstractions that looked like galaxies seen through a space telescope. She lost interest in psychology—she wanted to connect to the foundations of the universe.
On the other hand, Clare Dudeney had hyperphantasia.
In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.
At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.
An interesting aspect of new research is showing that some people have aphantasia since birth, but others acquire it later in life, often due to a physical injury. Other reseach suggests that visual memory is better in children and women, and that many children might have hyperphantasia. I believe I did see mental images when I was young. And other studies suggest that taking drugs brings back the ability to create mental imagery. I can testify to that. I used to get great flashes of imagery when I got high. Other studies show that people repress the ability to create mental imagery because of psychological trauma. All of this makes me wonder if I could retrain myself to create mental pictures in my head.
It is quite common for people with aphantasia to dream with vivid imagery, although others claim their dreams are thin and dark. As I’ve gotten older, my dreams have become dark and shadowy. However, the other night I had a dream that was intensely vivid, bright, and colorful. I was even aware in the dream to a slight degree. I said to myself that I was in a dream and I couldn’t believe it was so damn real. It felt so real that I was afraid I couldn’t get back to my old life. I was on a street looking at buildings I didn’t know, and was worried that if I became stuck in the dream I wouldn’t know where to go. I was quite relieved to wake up.
Scientists who are very good at thinking abstractly often forget how to create mental imagery. And some even theorize that spending so much time reading and staring at words have ruined our capacity to create mental pictures.
At first I envied people with hyperphantasia until I read this:
Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.
I believe I’ve copied as much of this article as I ethically should.
I’m using this blog to encourage you to go read the article. I’m also encourage people to subscribe to magazines. If you want good information it costs. We need to get away from always assume information should be free. Free information on the web is corrupting our society. Subscribing to magazines supports the spread of better information.
My new effort at home schooling myself is to read one great article a day from magazines with solid editors. I look for articles that expand my mental map of the world. This one certainly has.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
This is certainly a very interesting article and I believe I just might subscribe to the magazine.
To my knowledge, I’ve never known anybody with either of these but then again it’s not something commonly talked about and we each would think we are as pretty normal.
My visual memories of the past I would say are pretty good although the further back in time, it’s like it’s just pre-stored highlighted memories.
I can remember sounds and can hear them pretty well in my mind.
But smells I can recall, that they were good smells, but I can no longer actually smell them mentally.
Same with touch I can no longer feel them.
Same with taste only since I’m a food lover, I can almost taste the taste in my mind .
When I was a young child, I had a much more vivid imagination and had some imaginary friends. I remember dreaming once that I flew and could’ve sworn and I remember telling my brother that it was true, I had flown.
To me all of this tamps down with age, but I never realized how different people are with all this and to the extremes in this article. Never knew there were people like that.
Makes you wonder if we’re all really living in an artificial simulation and we’ve been programmed by different entities or companies and that is why it’s different for some people.
I’ve always triggered memories with smells. I don’t know if I recall the smell. It feels like it, but I think what I’m doing is experiencing the present smell and it creates a sense of deju vu.
Learning that people view reality so differently is the most exciting thing about that article.
I thought of you when my wife showed me the article the other day. Like you, I discovered that I had the condition from the Guardian article years ago. I also have Severer Autobiographical Disorder, SAD, i.e. I can’t remember my life with any real personal memories, which, I gather, they are now lumping under aphantasia these days as well. I must confess that I didn’t read the whole article. I found it tedious, perhaps because I’m quite comfortable without a visual brain and personal memories. No big deal. You don’t miss what you never knew. As both a painter and as a writer, I’ve never found it to be any sort of handicap to creativity.
There is a distinction between seeing something and knowing how something looks. For example, I could sketch a picture of our house that we moved away from six years ago because I “know” what it looks like, without actually seeing it clearly in my mind. I would have to think about it and do it section by section, but I could do it. Likewise, I will have a vague idea of the scene I want to paint – and it usually doesn’t work out – but I can build something like it step by step as I go along. The same with writing scenes. I just think of all the concrete things that one might expect to find in the scene and write them in.
The one downside is with reading. I used to read detailed action/battle/fight scenes in books, and come away with only a vague notion of what happened. They created no pictures, no movie, in my mind. These days, I just skim through those parts. All that is important is the end result. I don’t need to see how the sausage is made.
I sometimes wonder if the condition is somehow a choice. I don’t feel any need or desire to remember my past so I never try to dig out the past. And while I do see images in dreams, but I’m just comfortable without them. I’m just fine the way I am.
Bottom line; I believe it was the Doors who sang; “People are strange.” We certainly are.
Your experience and mine sound similar. I can draw something but its not because I see it in my mind’s eye. I just “know” what it looks like.
I can read a description of a scene in a book, and feel like the author is created something visually epic, but I don’t see it.
I am unsure if I qualify as having aphantasia, but if not, I’m close. I did not know the association with a lack of personal autobiographical memories, but I definitely have that as well. I can only visualize things when I’m very tired, which probably puts it in the realm of lucid dreaming, but I’ve never been able to maintain that state long enough to be sure. I do have vivid visualizations when reading though. I lose complete track of words on paper when reading, and instead have movie-like memories when I come up for air a chapter or two later.
I don’t visualize what I read. I was talking with friends about that yesterday. That’s also disappointing. Both of my friends say they visualize books so well that movies annoy them because they don’t look like what they imagine.
I also have vivid dreams, so my mind is capable of creation mental images. And on rare occasions my mind will flash me an image. One time, while I was completely awake, I suddenly felt I was high over the Golden Gate bridge. It startled the hell out of me.
I’ve delved into this, and I honestly have doubts Aphantasia is possible. For one, in a previous article of mine, I present my thesis that all thought is visual. That our brains are extremely fast simulation machines working with massive parallel processing – but entirely visual.
Pre-language, man visualised the stream when he was thirsty, or his weapons at mouth of the cave and the lucrative hunting area when he was hungry. I just now visualised [I feel quite certain] the next word I was going to type – and how it fit into my response. Constant simulations – too fast for us to see [with some exceptions] are running through our brains – driving our movement, cognition and decisions.
I feel certain I’m right. And I feel, if your brain were not able to simulate [visually] you would be in a vegetative state. Unable to think.
Have you ever looked ahead while walking, put your eyes on a spot of ice and decided to walk delicately around it? Why would you have unless your brain had run a near instantaneous [perhaps 120 m/s] simulation of you slipping and falling or perhaps someone else slipping and falling – maybe a sim of an old, stored memory.
Anyway… just thought I’d share.
Your theory sounds very logical but I don’t know if it’s covers everything. But I have a theory that might work with your theory.
I’ve been paying attention to how I recall the past. And sometimes I have the feeling that an image has flashed in my brain. But it’s like a subliminal message. Awhile back I tried remembering the office I worked in with fourteen other people back in the 1980s. I feel like I can recall what it looked like and what the people look like, but the image doesn’t stay in my mind long enough to see if. My theory is my unconscious mind does see images and it imparts a sense of recognition. I was able to draw the layout of the office on paper. I laid out where all the desks were position, and what was on the walls. But I couldn’t see it. I have a friend who also worked there. He has very good visualization skills. He invents pictures to illustrate the books he reads. But Mike said I remembered more than him.
I also have a very good sense of direction and spatial awareness. I’m good at seeing how mechanical things work. But I don’t see how they work visualually. I just have a sense of knowing. Saturday I met a couple who just got a new dog and they couldn’t figure out how to put on a harness. Just looking at the harness told me immediately how it worked.
I have some kind of sight analyzer that see in a nonvisual way. I have a kink optic nerve in my right eye, so I see mostly with my left eye. I should have poor 3D vision. Eye doctors have told me my brain automatically compensates and I see a fake 3D view of the world. Maybe my unconscious mind sees and remembers visual images.
You should read The Inheritors by William Golding, the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies. It’s about Neanderthals, and he theorizes about intelligence and sight like you have.
I feel you’re still running insanely fast sims – too fast for you to even ‘see.’ And I meant to place quotes around that word ‘see.’ They’re too fast for you to ‘see’ but they’re happening – constantly.
1. You mention having good spatial awareness and a good sense of direction. To me that validates your mind is running simulations of your surroundings – associating everything to stored sims in your memories.
2. Just now while reading this you may have reached for a cup of coffee. How would / could you have done that without your mind simulating and visualising it first – drawing the coordinate grid for you? Can you imagine only audio going off in your head directing you to it in some kind of cognitive Cartesian Coordinates? With audio directions? “Move your hand to x=2.1456 y=4.897 z=41.567 in relation to your position in the kitchen James. Now to x=3.98746 etc etc That seems weird to me.
3. You spoke of memories – recalling the past. It would be difficult to imagine memory recall being solely audio/verbal.
Anyway… it’s just a theory of mine. I think all thought is visual and our brains are massively parallel simulation machines. And if you could not simulate, you’d be a vegetable.
Oh, I agree. When I say things are happening on an unconscious level I include simulations like what you are talking about.
I would guess our conscious minds are much less than one percent of our brain activity. That’s why I don’t believe in free will.
I think our minds are much like AI minds. A tremendous amount of intelligent activity is unconscious.
An interesting point. However, I’m with James on this. You can “know” how something should look or act, without consciously being able to picture it in its entirety in your mind. I know I see images in my dreams, but due to aphentasia, I’m not able to recall the images when awake, save for a murky awareness that I do see images in dreams. This is what makes aphantasia so curious. The ability exists, but it is not accessible when I’m awake.
Hi, Chuck.
Re your comment “You can ‘know’ how something should look or act… without consciously…. etc”
I’m not saying you / we are seeing vivid movies in our heads. They’re fast – way too fast for us to actually ‘see’ them. But, like I wrote to James above – how could you reach a hand to a cup unless your mind were simulating it? You couldn’t. You’d never achieve it.
Good conversation.
Our entire awareness is a simulation. We aren’t little beings peering out our senses. Our brains simulate reality and we react to the simulation.
We have no idea what a cup of coffee looks like. And the same cup of coffee will look different to every individual.
I think some people get to see the simulations and others don’t.
One lady with hyperphantasia in that article was so bored trying to meditate that she rewatched all eight of the Harry Potter movies in her head. Some people can see movies.
My dreams are very movie like. I do see in my dreams. Sometimes they even have plots.
Hi Mark,
I take your point. But what makes the condition interesting is that though we can see and remember images, we can’t reconstruct them in our mind. The data is stored, but not in a format we can access in our waking lives. In my case, the same can be said for my personal memories. The data may well be there, I just can’t (or care to) access it. There is no trauma to explain this phenomena, I’ve lived a nice, uneventful life. I realized that I had a poor memory of that sort of thing, and anything that requires rote memory like spelling. I joked that I needed to rely on my sisters for my memories. I’ve never really missed the ability. Unlike James, I’ve no desire to unearth those memories. I have no interest in my past. I guess I’m living in the moment:)
It’s interesting Chuck, that you and I share the same handicap but neither of us feel disadvantaged. And we’ve both adapted in different ways.
I remember reading an Oliver Sacks book about blind people. I had always assumed blindness meant the same thing to all blind people. But Sacks described many different kinds of blindness and many different ways of adapting.
The people I thought the most mind blowing were those who had a simulated world of vision in their heads. That as they learned about their external reality they added those details to their simulation. They claimed to see the world like we do.
But even more mind blowing is the fact that we sighted people do that too. We just confuse the external reality with our simulation.
I assume aphantasia people still have a visual simulation we use even though we can’t see it when we close our eyes.
I didn’t know that about blind people. You have far more curiosity about things that I have, James. But that’s why I read your blog.
If It wasn’t for that article in the Guardian, would we have ever realized that our minds worked significantly different than most peoples’? I just thought that there was a spectrum; some people had could picture things more vividly than me, others had better memories. And some people liked reliving events in their lives more than me. So it never struck me my mind was different enough to have it’s on syndrome with a cool name. I guess don’t see it as a handicap at all, as I don’t see where it has kept me from doing anything I wanted to do.
One curious thing is that while I can’t picture faces of living people, I’m not even sure I see the people I know who appear in my dreams, I do see the faces of strangers in dreams. Weird.
I always noticed that if I wanted to summon some sort of image of someone, I had better luck recalling a photograph, rather than any real memory of them. It seems that for me, inanimate objects are easier to get a at least an impression of something. And for that reason, I always avoided the open casket at wakes, fearing their inanimate corpse will the the default image/impression of that person in my memory.
All very strange, but interesting.
I have better luck recalling photos too. When I think of my mother I get a feeling I’m seeing a photo of her that hung on the wall of all the houses I lived in growing up.
I didn’t know I was different until I read that article.
My goodness, that piece is food for thought.