"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."
"He and his colleagues were trying to understand how certain types of hallucination come about, and were discussing the vividness of mental imagery. "When I close my eyes, there's absolutely nothing there," Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. "Whoa. What's going on?" Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes."
An estimated 4% of people experience weak or absent visual mental imagery, a condition called aphantasia. Individuals with aphantasia often retain concepts, words and associations about objects but report a dark or blank mind's eye. Systems neuroscientist Mac Shine recognized his own differing mental experience in 2013 during conversations about imagery vividness. Many people with aphantasia only recognize their experience after chance conversations, classes or reading about the phenomenon. Mental imagery variation has been noted for more than a century, and the term aphantasia emerged about a decade ago. Aphantasia serves as a valuable phenomenon for studying cognition alongside synaesthesia and prosopagnosia.
Read at Nature
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