Life With No Mind's Eye

Some people cannot imagine their best friend’s face, or even their own house. This lack of mind’s eye is called ‘aphantasia’, and researchers are only just starting to unravel the science behind it

- Dr Lucy Maddox

Picture an apple. What colour is it? What about calling to mind your mother’s face? What is her expression? How about your last holiday? Can you picture where you stayed? For some people, this is impossible. They cannot recall images of familiar objects or people to their ‘mind’s eye’. In effect they don’t have one. This crucial difference in the way people see the world has only started to be researched in the last few years. How have we gone for so long ignoring this variation in how we experience our internal worlds?

MIND BLIND

Aphantasia is the name given to the inability to call an image to mind. The name was coined in 2015 by Prof Adam Zeman, a cognitive and behavioural neurologist at the University of Exeter. Zeman first became aware of the phenomenon when he was referred a patient who had ‘lost’ his visual imagery after a heart operation.

“He had vivid imagery previously,” recalls Zeman. “He used to get himself to sleep by imagining friends and family. Following the cardiac procedure, he couldn’t visualise anything, his dreams became a visual, he said that reading was different because previously he used to enter a visual world and that no longer happened. We were intrigued.”