Do you have trouble visualising things? Maybe you have aphantasia

On social media, English teacher Jak Kurdi often shares his love of books and writing. Growing up in a household that prioritised reading, he could vividly picture the worlds on the page, his imagination carrying him into each scene. “I remember as a kid having a very, very vivid imagination,” says Kurdi, 28, who teaches at Wilson Middle School in Plano, in the US state of Texas. “I was an avid reader, and then slowly I started to realise that, I think in my adulthood, I’ve lost it.” He later learned that the change was likely linked to head injuries he sustained in car accidents and while on his college’s equestrian team. Kurdi is among a small group of people worldwide with a condition called aphantasia, or the inability to recreate mental pictures in the mind’s eye. Anywhere from 1 to 4 per cent of people are estimated to have aphantasia, which is typically present at birth or, more rarely, acquired later in life because of medical conditions or head injuries, as in Kurdi’s case. Aphantasia was first described more than a century ago, but the term has only gained wider recognition in the past decade. Mental imagery is the ability to visualise objects or scenarios in your mind – such as picturing a family member’s face or imagining yourself making a penalty kick in football. Scientists believe this involves the primary visual cortex, located at the back of the brain. In people with aphantasia, researchers believed this brain region might not function properly. But recent studies suggest the primary visual cortex still activates when people with aphantasia try to conjure an image in their mind’s eye. For reasons not yet fully understood, that activity may be too weak to reach conscious awareness. View this post on Instagram A post shared by TED Talks (@ted) Aphantasia is not a one-size-fits-all condition. It exists along a spectrum, with some people able to recreate more mental detail than others. Kurdi says when he tries to visualise, he can see hints of colour but nothing concrete. If a printer were to print a picture of what he sees, he says, “it would be nothing recognisable to anyone else”. Aphantasia can also affect other forms of mental imagery, including sound, smell and touch, says Zoe Cronin, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington who is studying how aphantasia affects spatial navigation. “When people typically say they have aphantasia, they’re referring to one self-report measure called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire,” Cronin says. “That’s typically the gold standard for determining whether or not someone has aphantasia. It really just looks at visual imagery ability, as opposed to other domains. But I know currently researchers are looking into those other domains.” Much of the research on mental imagery relies on asking participants to describe their experiences. But such methods are subjective and cannot distinguish differences in mental imagery from differences in how people interpret or report their experiences. To address this, some researchers are developing more objective measures, such as the binocular rivalry test created by neuroscientist Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales in Australia. In this test, two differently coloured images are layered and shown simultaneously to each eye. Pearson found that when participants imagined one of the colours beforehand, they tended to home in on the image of that colour. This effect did not happen in people with aphantasia. Growing awareness of aphantasia As awareness of aphantasia has grown, so have online communities like the CureAphantasia subreddit on Reddit, where people share their experiences and swap strategies to strengthen mental imagery. Some researchers are exploring whether imagery can be trained over time, though the science is in its early stages. Other lines of research have looked at whether psychedelics might reverse aphantasia, but findings are mixed, and scientists caution that more study is needed. For Kurdi, aphantasia is not something he sees as needing to be fixed. He uses social media to share his experience, which he says has led people to reach out with questions, some realising that they, too, might have aphantasia. “It’s almost like a type of blindness in that your other senses strengthen to accommodate for the lack,” he says. “I don’t know if other people who weren’t raised in literacy-rich households would feel differently than I do, because I am surrounded with literacy. Like, that’s my whole career. It’s my whole hobby.” There is no evidence that aphantasia is linked to lower intelligence or that it limits creative careers. Some people with aphantasia work as illustrators or write fantasy novels. But Cronin says more research will help better understand how to support students with aphantasia and develop effective learning strategies. “I’m hoping to eventually work with educators to develop how we can tap into the strengths of students who have aphantasia,” she says. She notes that abstract, highly spatial concepts, such as those in subjects like linear algebra, can be difficult for most people to imagine, especially so for those with aphantasia. She hopes her research can reveal more inclusive ways to teach complex concepts to students with varying visual imagery abilities.

Do you have trouble visualising things? Maybe you have aphantasia

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Aphantasia is the inability to visualise objects or scenarios in the mind, a condition affecting up to 4 per cent of people

Aphantasia is the inability to visualise objects or scenarios in the mind, a condition affecting up to 4 per cent of people