Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?
Most of us can call up such pictures in our minds. We can visualize the past and summon images of the future. But for an estimated 4% of people, this mental imagery is weak or absent. When researchers ask them to imagine something familiar, they might have a concept of what it is, and words and associations might come to mind, but they describe their mind’s eye as dark or even blank.
… the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.
Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life. The findings have led to a flurry of discussions about how mental imagery forms, what it is good for and what it might reveal about the puzzle of consciousness: researchers tend to define mental imagery as a conscious experience, and some are now excited to study aphantasia as a way to probe imagery’s potentially unconscious forms.
The article itself went into a lot of past and current research into aphantasia and is quite detailed, worth a read if you are interested (especially if you are also quite high on the aphantasia scale like OP)
Try this archive.org link if it is paywalled
Edit: some of you all should take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVID). The article only gave an excerpt, there seem to be a few free ones floating on the internet
The issue with all these studies about people’s subjective experiences is that they rely on self reporting. Just because someone says that they have no mental imagery doesn’t mean that they actually don’t. They may simply be unaware of it. After all, how many people actually spend any significant amount of time learning to pay attention to their minds. The vast majority don’t.
It’s a bit like asking people whether they have an optic blind spot in their vision but not teach them how to look for it. Virtually everyone would say that they don’t and they’d all be wrong.
They don’t all do this, though - research seems to use imaging and other observational techniques, self reporting isn’t the only source. Brain imaging is one, and I know they’ve demonstrated variance in automatic pupil responses to back up self report. I think they have also used it as a research control in other studies after that, but I don’t know a ton about it. [EDIT: as someone else pointed out it seems like they literally do include that in this case]
This is what I remember reading, I think, and that…advocacy? awareness?..site also has a decent running collection of assorted research. Seems like it’s not very well understood or studied, which makes sense when it doesn’t really affect behavior or quality of life.
I guess? I’m aphantasic and I guess I don’t really understand what you mean by suggesting that I have mental imagery I’m unaware of. If someone was reporting they were blind and you told them they could see but they were just unaware of it, what would that even mean?
Edit: To elaborate, all I’m telling you when I tell you I’m aphantasic is that my imagination has no qualia of sight. I can still successfully answer spatial reasoning questions (albeit poorly). For me, being aphantasic is like using a headless browser — I can still imagine things, but it’s like everything is rendered off-screen, and I can only use language to broker the experience. I’m not sure how it would be different to say I’m just “unaware” — I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to render an image, and there is nothing to be had.
I haven’t ever claimed such a thing. The point was that when you ask someone about the state of their mind, you’re then relying on their report being accurate - with no good way to verify it.
Although in this case, people pointed out they also monitored the visual region of the brain lighting up.
If someone asked me to visualize an object, I can easily do it. If they then asked whether I can literally see it, I’d say no - but also kind of yes. It’s not a photograph I’m viewing in my mind, but there’s definitely something there. Both yes and no would be truthful answers to “can I see it?”
Still, there’s always a chance that if they could peek inside my mind, they’d find out the thing I report seeing isn’t actually there - at least not when compared to someone who really does see it.
MRI studies on aphants have actually shown corresponding lack of activity in the visual cortex which is present for most non-aphants. Yes, experience is highly subjective, but the research on this is not merely that.
But what about el-aphants…?
The article’s 3rd section (“Getting a measure”) is explicitly about alternatives to self reported vividness of experience - citing use of ocular rivalry effect, measuring dilation of pupils when imagining a bright light and sweat responses to a scary scenario. I agree that it’s a difficult thing to make sure people aren’t just experiencing similar things and reporting them differently but there does seem to be effort made to design experiments around differences in how participants form descriptions.