In 2016, a phenomenon that had gone virtually unnoticed until then began to become popular, with the exception of a pioneering study carried out by the famous Francis Galton in the late 19th century. It is about the inability to visualize mental images , which has been named “aphantasy”.

In this article we will describe what exactly is aphantasy and what has been its historical development . In order to do so, we will focus on the contributions of Galton and Adam Zeman, as well as on the case of Blake Ross, who contributed greatly to the awareness of aphantasy thanks to the intervention of social networks.

What is aphantasy?

In 1880 Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a pioneer in the use of statistics in psychology and eugenic ideas, published the results of a psychometric study on individual differences in the ability to generate mental images. Galton found a great variability in this ability , including some cases in which it was absent.

During the 20th century, research on this phenomenon was very scarce, although there are some references under Anglo-Saxon terms that can be translated as “defective revision” or “visual irreminiscence”. Studies by Adam Zeman’s team (2010, 2015) and individuals such as Blake Ross have popularized it under the name of “aphantasy”.

The limited data currently available suggest that between 2.1% and 2.7% of the general population is incapable of generating mental images, and can therefore be considered cases of aphantasy (Faw, 2009). It also appears that the disorder may be more frequent in males (Zeman et al., 2015), although it is not yet possible to say for sure.

It is believed that aphantasia may be neurologically associated with synaesthesia and congenital prosopagnosia , which is a marked difficulty in recognizing people by their faces. People with synaesthesia obtain very high scores on visualization tests, and the opposite is true in cases of prosopagnosia.

Contributions from Adam Zeman’s team

The term “aphantasy” was coined by a team from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, led by Adam Zeman (2010). These authors published an article on the case of MX, a man who reported a loss of visualization ability as a result of coronary angioplasty . After this milestone, aphantasy became popular.

Zeman and collaborators further increased awareness of the fantasy with their second text on the subject (2015). The Exeter team relied on input from 21 people who had contacted them through questionnaires after reading the previous article and identifying with the description of this peculiar “imaginative blindness”.

The study by Zeman et al. revealed that there are different degrees and forms of presentation of this phenomenon ; thus, some people are unable to produce visual images voluntarily but can experience them spontaneously, both in wakefulness and during sleep. In other cases, however, these capacities are not even preserved.

The interference of aphantasy in the lives of those who experience it seems to be generally quite limited, although a significant proportion of the participants reported problems in autobiographical memory associated with this deficit , which on the other hand tended to compensate through verbal format or what Zeman et al. call “subvisual models”.

The case of Blake Ross

In April 2016, software engineer Blake Ross, co-creator of the Mozilla Firefox web browser and former product manager of Facebook, published a text on this social network in which he recounted his experiences with aphantasy. It was a New York Times article that analyzed the case of MX (Zeman et al., 2010) that inspired him to share his story.

Ross said he didn’t know he was experiencing this phenomenon until he read about it. Until then, he said, he believed that concepts such as counting sheep to encourage the consolidation of the dream seemed like metaphors to him. He was unable to visualise the face of his deceased father, and believed that no one could really generate clear mental images .

Of course, Ross’ text went viral and led many more people to the same revelation as him. Since then we have seen a rapid and remarkable increase in awareness of this curious imaginative deficit; consequently, it is to be expected that in the coming years scientific knowledge about aphantasy will also increase.

Bibliographic references:

  • Faw, B. (2009). Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities – evidence from mental imaging research. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16: 45-68.
  • Galton, F. (1880). Statistics of mental imagery. Mind. Oxford Journals, os-V(19): 301-318.
  • Zeman, A. Z. J.; Della Sala, S.; Torrens, L. A. A.; Gountouna, V. E.; McGonigle, D. J. & Logie, R. H. (2010). Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: A case of ‘blind imagination’. Neuropsychology, 48(1): 145-155.
  • Zeman, A. Z. J.; Dewar, M. & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73: 378-380