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What It’s Like to Be ‘Mind Blind’

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BY NAYANTARA DUTTA
MARCH 8, 2022 10:50 AM EST

W hen you close your eyes, what do you see? For me, it’s always been a
black screen, sometimes with the static of a crackling TV. My dreams
are tangles of thoughts, but when I try to remember them, I can’t actually see
anything. I don’t need to pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming, because my
dreams never resemble reality. I have a condition called aphantasia, mind
blindness. I can see clearly with my eyes but not in my mind.
When I think of a memory, I can conceptually understand and answer questions 3 MONTH
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about it, but cannot project it into my mind or imagine myself in it. I hold all Fo
the projector slides and have all the information, but can’t see the actual
picture. Four percent of people are estimated to experience aphantasia, but we
can go our whole lives without knowing we have it.

I only realized when I was 21, sitting at a coffee shop with my best friend. She
animatedly spoke about an article she had read on aphantasia and how she
couldn’t imagine what it would feel like. Suddenly, I realized that I saw the
world differently. I had always assumed that daydreaming, counting sheep, and
picturing myself on a beach were metaphors. I couldn’t imagine what mental
imagery would feel like.

Read More: The Importance of Daydreaming

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After telling my family, we discovered that my mom has it too. Aphantasia is

familial, with research showing that if you have congenital aphantasia, there is
a 21% chance that your first-degree relative (parent, sibling, or child) will also
have it. At first, it was hard to not see this as a loss, but over time, I’ve
developed a new appreciation and interest in how I learn and experience the
world.

The concept of aphantasia traces back to Aristotle, who described a sixth sense
of visual imagination called phantasia. Aphantasia indicates the absence of
mental imagery, but about 10% to 15% of people are at the other end of the
spectrum with extremely vivid imagery or photographic memories, which is
called hyperphantasia. Even though knowledge of these invisible differences in
cognition dates back to 340 B.C., both terms were only named by Dr. Adam
Zeman, professor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the University of
Exeter in the U.K., in 2015.
Mental imagery, as a research topic, was considered taboo in the second half of3 MONTH
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the 20th century because of behaviorism, which rejected introspection as a way Fo
to understand behavior. Now, however, “It’s been embraced by scientists of all
types now because we can measure it. People are realizing that we don’t know
much about it, and we should,” says Joel Pearson, professor of cognitive
neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The experience of having aphantasia is difficult to describe because it varies

from person to person and there is no conscious equivalent. “People say that
they feel that the imagery is there but they just can’t get to it,” Zeman says.
“We know that, in a certain sense, [people with aphantasia] must have a very
detailed knowledge of how things look because [they] can recognize them. The
sensory information is all in the brain [but they find it] hard to use that
information to produce a visual experience in the absence of the item.”

Aphantasia is often described as a visual condition, but it’s actually

multisensory. People who experience a lack of mental imagery can have a
reduced capacity to access other mental senses (imagining sound, movement,
smell, taste, and touch). For example, I am unable to imagine most senses. I
cannot conceptualize the taste of my favorite meal or the feeling of a hug, but
have a strong inner voice and can hear and remember songs in my mind. This
makes me a multisensory aphantasic, since I have a reduced mental ability
across more than one sense, but not all.

Some people experience a complete absence of mental senses, which Zeman

refers to as global aphantasia. In a 2020 research study published in Scientific
Reports, only 26% of aphantasic participants reported no internal mental
representations, which shows that most aphantasics experience unique
combinations of the other senses. Even though people with aphantasia share a
lack of voluntary visual imagery, we cannot assume that everyone has the same
experience.

Scientists have primarily studied aphantasia in terms of visual imagination,

instead of other senses, so a lot is still unknown. Even among visual
aphantasics, people can have completely different experiences—some have no
concept of visual imagery, but 63% can see vivid images in their dreams. “Most
people with aphantasia are pretty confident that they do dream visually. It’s
just that they’re experiencing it in a brain state that’s involuntary,” Zeman 3 MONTH
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says. Fo

Read More: Why We Can’t Ignore Our Dreams

There are advantages and disadvantages to having aphantasia. People with

aphantasia tend to have a higher average IQ (115 compared to the 110 score of
the general population) and are less affected by scary stories since they cannot
visualize them. As Zeman explains, “it’s clearly not a bar to high achievement
… You might have thought it would interfere with creativity, but that clearly
isn’t the case either.”

Aphantasics experience lower levels of sensory sensitivity, overwhelm from

“sensory inputs that might be bright lights, loud noises, or the smell of
perfume,” says Carla Dance, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex in
the U.K. Despite this, they do have more difficulty with autobiographical
memory and face recognition.

People may not realize they have aphantasia because they’ve developed
shortcuts for how to process the world. “In visual working memory, we see their
performance is about the same [as the general population]. But once you start
looking under the hood and see how people are holding this information in
memory, it’s a different mechanism and a different strategy, even though the
performance on everyday tasks looks the same,” Pearson says. “Most people
with aphantasia will have very good spatial skills … but they can’t put any
objects into that space.”

At work, in an exercise to explore neurodiversity, my colleagues and I were once

asked to draw our brains to visualize the way we think, but I couldn’t do it,
because I don’t think in images. I felt frustrated and self-conscious, because
there was no alternative for me to participate—I had to sit and wait while other
people completed the exercise. I was reminded of a way in which I’m different
from others, even though I don’t like to see it as a weakness. There are easy
ways to work around this and be inclusive of people who think differently. For
example, my coworkers could have reframed the exercise from drawing what
our minds look like to simply representing how we think. That way, I could have
written a list of words or emotions to explain how my mind works, rather than 3 MONTH
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trying to come up with images. Fo

Read More: These Are the Best Ways to Improve Your Memory

“Aphantasia is just another way of experiencing the world. It comes down to

figuring out what learning style you have and what works for you, given your
imagery profile,” Dance says. “If somebody has really good auditory imagery,
perhaps [they can use] that sense as a gateway to remembering things.” We can
all benefit from deeply considering how we think and what this tells us about
ourselves.

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