Picture this:
You’re at the beach on a day when the space above you is filled with cottony clouds, the sky is bluer than blue. Sunlight glints off the waves like a million diamonds as white and black seagulls levitate inches above the breakers. A small blond boy with a blue bucket and red trowel makes a sand castle in the amber sand.
Did you see it? Did you look around inside this scene, a snow-globe of imagination created at will, projected on the screen of your mind?
If you use your brain like 97-98% of the human population, you were capable of seeing what you were thinking when you imagined the beach scene here. But—probably some people that you know—do NOT conjure such pictures in the mind the way you just did, and yet they are seemingly quite capable, with many in the sciences and math. They have what is now known as APHANTASIA: the inability to create images in the mind. It means NOT having a “mind’s eye.”
HISTORY
This way of knowing the world was first described in 1880 by polymath, Francis Galton, in a study about VISUAL IMAGERY. ↩ He found some outlier individuals in these studies that seemingly did not think like the majority of humanity. And after lifting this matter into the public and academic radar, he went on to find that it was common among his academic peers:
“To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of colour.”
The condition received little attention until 2005, when professor Adam Zeman was approached by a patient who claimed that, post-surgery, he was no longer able to “see things in his mind”. In 2015, Zeman published a paper on subjects (who approached the researcher by the hundreds) who had this condition since birth. The condition was given a name: aphantasia, from the prefix a- meaning without and phantasia (like the Disney Film) meaning imagination.
WHERE I CAME IN
I first read about this in May of 2020, at a time when I was digging more deeply into the biology of memory. The notion that we don’t all use our brains from birth in the same general way made me wonder: How to aphantastics (we’ll call them) successfully remember stories from memory if they see nothing as they roll the mental film? Would the re-run be sound-only?
It turns out that this “condition” is shared by 2-3% of the population, while another smaller percentage of people show hyperphantasia, with extremely strong visualization abilities. (Where do you think you fall on this continuum from A- to hyper- ?)
NOTE: this is not considered a derangement or illness but only a variable of human cognition, though the full implications of the unique way of thinking are still being considered. Numerous new studies and articles have been published recently. Here are a couple.
Aphantasia: When You Are Blind in Your Mind
Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE APHANTASTIC?
📌 A simple test will measure your thinking style regarding visualization. Take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire ↩
📌 A support group has been created for those affected or interested in the phenomenon. It is quite informative, and it continues to add to its research vault. ↩
📌 And, turns out, it might be that a common connection exists between those who lack a mind’s eye and also have no inner voice like most of us do. This matter of NOT HAVING AN INTERNAL DIALOGUE is a whole other room to explore. ↩
The OH YEAH and SO WHAT of aphantasia remain to be fully elucidated. Is it a real phenomenon, and if so, how might the thought-worlds within this minority of thinkers help us understand and maybe improve on human memory, imagination, and creativity? Knowing more would expand our understanding of the psychological diversity of “normals” within our species.
PS: I have a notion that there are married couples and business partners whose communication trainwrecks might be better put back on track if one of the two realizes that when the other says “I just don’t see it” she is accurately describing her world versus yours.
Hi from Ecuador! A search for 'Cuckoos and Caterpillars' led me on an interesting trail to Fragments from Floyd and then to your new site, which has been a joy to peruse. Your writings at time remind me of Skutch's - so pensive and poetic, yet also balanced with important data.
The title to this post suggested (to me) several serious or perhaps fun options - or there was a small chance that it was about aphantasia. I also wrote about it here: https://playamart.wordpress.com/2022/05/18/aphan-whatsia/
In another post you addressed the declining songbirds, and many of those migratory birds in the list have graced my field of vision here on the equator. Thanks for the link to that Stanford article. A few weeks ago I 'threatened' to climb a tree and call 'prensa/the press' to prevent more widening of a one-lane dirt road in an almost 3,000 acre refuge! It was in the exact spot where several rare species call home. Luckily others were equally concerned and took legal measures to halt the work. Whew.
Recently another rare cuckoo showed up - the Pearly-breasted, which is a South American migrant, and extremely rare for this part of Ecuador. In order to hopefully spot it again, I'm trying to absorb as much data as possible about all cuckoos, their diets, what the nests might look like, etc. The bonus from this research was finding your writings.