When the Mind’s Eye Is Blind

Scientific American
By Anna Clemens on August 1, 2018






Credit: Getty Images

In 2003 a 65-year-old man brought a strange problem to neurologist Adam

Zeman. The man, known as “MX,” claimed that after an accident, he could no
longer “see” images in his head. Zeman has given the condition a name –
Aphantasia. (Greek for “without imagination”)

Zeman and his colleagues began testing MX’s visual imagination. MX scored
poorly on questionnaires assessing the ability to produce visual imagery.
Surprisingly, though, he was able to do tasks that usually involve visualization.
For example, when he was asked which is a lighter color of green—grass or
pine trees—most people would imagine both objects, then compare them. MX
correctly said that pine trees are darker than grass, but he insisted he had used
no visual imagery to make the decision. “I just know the answer,” he said.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) supported MX’s claimed

inability to produce a mental image. Generally, when people are asked to
visualize a person, place or object, various brain regions are activated. Some of
them are involved in decision making, others in memory or vision. In MX, the
visual regions showed very little activity, whereas those responsible for
decision making and error prediction were more active.

The first mention of aphantasics – people with aphantasia - was in 1880. The
British naturalist Francis Galton asked 100 men to describe their breakfast
table. To his surprise, 12 of his subjects were unable to tell him much: they
assumed that the phrase “mental imagery” was not meant literally. The
phenomenon was more or less forgotten until 2010, after Zeman’s team
published its study of MX. A number of people came forward, saying they had
never been able to create mental images, unlike MX, whose problem was new.
The research has raised a number of questions. One is whether aphantasia
exists at all. Could people who think they are not making mental images
simply be describing their images differently from the way other people do?
After all, surveys elicit subjective descriptions, not objective measures of what
is going on in the brain. Zeman admits that a certain amount of error is
possible, but he is convinced that aphantasia actually occurs. For one thing,
there are the neurological findings; for another, people who lack a mind’s eye
sometimes have other anomalies related to visualization. For example, some
individuals with aphantasia report weakness in autobiographical memory,
remembrance of events in their lives. In addition, many with aphantasia also
struggle to recognize faces.

Then there is the other extreme - hyperphantasia. Many people with

hyperphantasia have told him that they easily get lost in daydreams about the
past or the future. In contrast to aphantasia, hyperpahantasia has not yet been
found to have links to face recognition or memory, nor has it been extensively
studied.

Zeman used to believe that visualization was central to the creative process.
Yet many aphantasics work successfully in creative professions—as artists,
architects and scientists. Jonas Schlatter, for example, creates Web sites for
his start-up. His business partner thought it a bit odd that he used paper and a
pencil in the design process. But Schlatter now understands that this approach
is the only way that he can imagine how the Web pages will eventually look.

MX eventually got back some of his ability to visualize. Presumably, his brain
re-created connections that were damaged by the stroke or built new ones.
How born aphantasics deal with this condition differs from person to person.
Some would like to learn to visualize, but no one has managed to do that yet,
according to Zeman. Schlatter, for example, has experimented with his mind’s
eye. “For two weeks I stared at the same pencil over and over again and tried
to memorize it. But in the end I couldn’t do it,” he says.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/