Some people claim to have no mental imagery

Actually they do — they just need to use their imagination

Non-mental imagery generated by me using Midjourney.

You’ve probably heard that people have very different experiences of mental imagery. Some people have no mental imagery, they don’t picture things in their head. For them, “the mind’s eye” is not only a metaphor but a hugely misleading one. With their eyes closed they have nothing like their sight with eyes open.

Aphantasia is the name for this quite common way of thinking.

(If aphantasia is old news for you skip down to the “Here’s my point” heading below.)

You there, reading this post, might have aphantasia. No big deal. It’s not related to intelligence and aphantasics, as they’er known, recall memories, solve maths problems, and do most other cognitive tasks without incident¹ — they just don’t have an imagistic experience of these thoughts.

For people with aphantasia, it often comes as a shock that others can literally see things in their mind that aren’t in front of them. 

For what I’ll call neurotypicals (meh, I know), who do have mental imagery, it comes as a shock that others don’t.

Some people even have hyperphantasia: the ability to conjure extremely rich mental imagery and even, sometimes, to superimpose it upon a waking visual scene. 

Here’s the standard image that gets shared on Twitterr, Reddit, etc. whenever this discussion blows up:

Image ripped from Reddit… it seems to be public domain.

And here’s a typical discussion of the topic on Twitter, where the novelist John Green discovers he has aphantasia, i.e. he’s a 1.²

If you read some of the comments and quoted retweets you’ll see that people delight in identifying their own abilities and in expressing doubt that others are different. “Well I can’t picture anything like an apple seen with the eyes. It’s an abstract idea of the apple. People who claim to see a lifelike apple are exaggerating.”

The level of disbelief is asymmetric: people usually find it harder to believe that others have richer mental imagery than they do. Hyperphantasics, true to form, seem easily to picture what it’s like to have fainter mental imagery.

I’ve seen lots of threads on Reddit and Twitter where “experts” — philosophers of mind — chime in. These are the kinds of people one might expect to:

(a) know about aphantasia

(b) be across the normal span of human mental life and

(c) perhaps even have some kind of explanation or at least framing of what’s going on here. 

One would be mistaken. Philosophers of mind (I sort of am one so I can badmouth them) express just as much incredulity towards others’ self-reports as do random out-of-town jaspers on the internet.

Here’s my point

There’s an easy way to think about mental imagery that should allow everyone to imagine everyone else’s experience. It clarifies the differences and dispels suspicion that others are lying or embellishing.

This is not enough to warrant an academic paper, though it is a gap in the literature. I’m not speculating about the actual neurological processes causing mental imagery. I hope to make things conceptually clear.

First, I address neurotypicals, who are able to conjure up at least some shadowy form of mental imagery and who experience vibrant mental imagery when they dream (unlike those with full-blown aphantasia).

I myself am something like a 3 on the above scale, so I’ll relate my experience as a typical neurotypical:

When I dream, I see the dream environment in full daylight HD. In fact, I’ve lucid dreamed and scrutinised the visual detail and found it equal to waking vision. But when I’m awake and I close my eyes and try to picture my childhood home, although I can remember many details, the picture quality is impoverished: a shifting and inchoate set of impressions. Although I can summon up enough to use it as a memory palace, this arena is undeserving of the name “mind’s eye”, because it is at best a photocopy of a photocopy of waking vision.

But at night, as I nod off, the honey of sleep trickles in and the slippage occurs. Gradually, whatever scene I was voluntarily thinking about becomes more than just a faint remembrance. It takes on the qualities of experience, like waking vision or dreaming.³ Indeed, unless I arrest the process, it transitions into a dream.

If you’re a sceptical neurotypical trying to grasp what it’s like to be hyperphantasic, simply imagine if your own ability to produce ghostly mental imagery was amplified to the vividness of dreams. You may even experience this amplification in realtime in the onset of sleep like I do. For the hyperphantasic, mental imagery is always cinematic. Yes, they literally see things in their mind’s eye as though they were looking with their eyes open. You, neurotypical, perform this same feat involuntarily in your sleep; they do it at will. 

Now I address those with aphantasia. You lot can easily comprehend what it’s like to be a neurotypical, or even a hyperphantasic.

You have waking vision, which is nothing more than mental imagery. It is 100% confected by the brain. The visual centres of the brain are in the dark. They’re landlocked inside the skull, enveloped in other bits of brain. What we see when we look at the world is not a direct camera feed from the eyes (and anyway, who would be watching it?) It is a fiction that is only inspired by real events, i.e. events in the world that happen to cause waves of light to reflect off them and into our retinas, which only notice if they’re in the rainbow’s frequency. The radiant energy of the light is transduced into other forms of energy and this signal is compressed and combined with a top-down prediction of what you’re seeing.⁴ Vision is imagination. 

It may sound outlandish to you, dear aphantasic, but neurotypicals experience what is indistinguishable from waking vision while they’re in REM sleep. And hyperphantasics do so while they’re awake.

It’s simple. Mental imagery is at full power for everyone with their eyes open. Neurotypicals can kindle a faint glow by concentrating with their eyes closed. Hyperphantasics can close their eyes and see living fire. 

Caveats 

People aren’t in three buckets, the whole thing’s a spectrum. There are some people with aphantasia who sometimes have visual dreams. There are people with hyperphantasia who aren’t quite seeing photorealism in their mind’s eye, but near enough. 

This is all consistent with mental imagery being a capacity that evolved to better navigate the world with our eyes open. Probably later, it was incorporated into episodic memory: recalling experiential episodes from the past and imagining possible future scenarios, often called mental time travel. The machinery for weaving a rich visual scene from threads of motion, shadow, edge, and colour was repurposed from vision and switched on during mental time travel. Except for some people it still only works for waking vision (aphantasics) and for others it’s never turned off (hyperphantasics).

Drug-induced mental imagery is another bridging phenomenon. E.g. while using psilocybin, I’ve experienced vivid mental imagery continuing after I closed my eyes. Although it was involuntary imagery, I can easily imagine hyperphantasics having a voluntary version.

Some lifelong aphantasics report taking LSD or similar drugs and having their first ever mind’s eye experience. For some, it seems to flip the switch permanently, transforming them into neurotypicals, as they dream in imagery thereafter.

Also, some people don’t have waking vision. However, most vision-impaired people still have mental imagery — except the subset who happen to be aphantasic and blind.

Finally, there’s blindsight: a rare, distressing condition caused by stroke or traumatic brain injury. The patient thinks they are blind. They report seeing only blackness. But if you throw a ball at them they duck. Ask them what colour the wallpaper is and they say they don’t know; press them to guess and they invariably “guess” correctly. Their brain is accepting visual information from the eyes. But they lack what philosophers call phenomenal vision: shapes, objects, colours — the actual mise en scène of conscious visual experience for a sighted person. Blindsight is a poetic term but it’s perhaps more accurately known as unconscious vision.

Do people with blindsight also necessarily have aphantasia? It’s so rare, not much is known. But there’s some evidence that it depends on precisely which visual pathways are damaged as to whether a blindsight patient retains their voluntary mental imagery or loses that too along with phenomenal vision. 

The real failure of imagination

What irks me about the memes and debates on Twitter and Reddit is the lack of ability to imagine someone else having a different private experience. Specifically, I’m annoyed by philosophers who can’t do this.⁵ They should have to hand in their badge or something.  

Scientists studying the brain are no better. I remember reading that the guy who “discovered” rapid eye movement during sleep did so in about 1953.⁶ So apparently, thitherto in human history, no one had ever noticed that their kid’s or their lover’s eyes would dart around after they doze off and then noted that when they woke back up they said, “I was just dreaming.”

As a species, do we just suck at imagining what’s happening in other minds? When people relate dreams, insufferably, including specific visual details, did no aphantasic ever interrupt and say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” It’s like before the advent of memes and social media, we never properly compared notes on mental life.

More likely we did, in ordinary conversation, but it never propagated to psychologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers and so never become codified as official or common knowledge. (This explanation also implies these experts never noticed anything outside the lab or possibly never had friends.)

But despite the whole tone of this piece so far, I have faith in our capacity for wondering about other people’s experience. The majority of us, by the time we’re adults, living in this information-rich modern world, have just enough of a sampler of different experiences to be able to extrapolate what it’s like for people far unlike ourselves.

I don’t have hyperphantasia but I do have rich dreams; so I simply extrapolate from my limited experience to a more extreme one. This should work along other dimensions.

Which is important because mental life is largely undocumented and contains much more variance than we realise. See for instance a recent meme on TikTok asking men, in particular, how frequently they think of the Roman empire. For me? A couple of times a week, which might be something like the median for my demographic. An historian of Rome presumably thinks about it several orders of magnitude more.

A more serious example is something like feelings of lust. I had a friend who once described being helplessly enamoured with her workmate. She described an almost irresistible urge to touch or kiss this person, especially his neck. For her, and maybe most people, it was a once or twice in a lifetime thing. I myself have passing familiarity with this feeling; there’s probably a gender difference on average. I can imagine someone for whom it happens almost daily. The ratio of such experiences between these two people is like 2000:1. If my friend and one of these hypothetical horndogs both referred to having strong romantic and sexual urges, there’s a sense in which they’re not even talking about the same thing. If they actually compare notes they would see the yawning chasm separating their inner lives.⁷

There are hundreds of examples. I know depressed people who just don’t quite believe that there are others out there with a sunny outlook who literally jump out of bed and feel good every day; they assume they’re lying to themselves or others. And I know people who think chronic depression isn’t a big deal. They’ve had a day here or there where they felt despair. All they need to do is think about what it would be like to have a life with hundreds or thousands of days like that.

I half believe it takes just a smidgen of extra effort to have real empathy for people that are different to us. Admittedly, that’s only step one. Merely acknowledging or understanding different experiences doesn’t automatically engender love or even tolerance. But, all else being equal, knowing something of other people’s private interface with reality must be helpful.

1. There’s some evidence that it affects certain visual puzzle solving tasks and some memory tasks.

2. Update [11-04-24]: I see that the author Peter Watts, who wrote the novel Blindsight (which deals with, you guessed it, consciousness) also has aphantasia and… doesn’t quite get it! He doesn’t see that all waking vision is mental imagery, just like the vision in dreams (which he does have).

3. This imagery on the borderlands of sleep is called hypnagogic imagery.

4. The details are glorious. Just skim the Wikipedia article.

5. It’s still not even recognised in the literature that there’s a smooth continuum between fuzzy mental imagery and the rich mental imagery of dreams. And, weirdly, still a kind of resistance to the idea that this is the same faculty responsible for phenomenal vision.

6. It’s ridiculous. Everyone who’s ever had a pet mammal has seen them doing REM too.

7. Isn’t fiction meant to do this? The psychological novel is supposed to let us vicariously experience other lives. Personally, I think I’ve gotten more insight from Twitter threads, documentaries, testimonial or life story videos on YouTube, and, like, talking to people who aren’t similar to me.