The formal recognition of aphantasia in 2015 was a pivotal moment in our understanding of mental imagery, though scientists have been fascinated by it for nearly 150 years. From 19th-century studies to the research happening today, aphantasia reminds us how much remains to be discovered about the human mind and how we each experience the world.
What is Aphantasia?
Aphantasia is the inability to form voluntary mental images, best understood as a distinct cognitive experience rather than a disorder or impairment. While it can affect reading, memory, creativity, and dreaming, people with aphantasia (often called ‘aphants’) excel in many creative and intellectual pursuits. Most don’t even realise they have this until they stumble across an article or discussion about it.
19th–20th Century: Early Research on Mental Imagery
Galton’s Study: The Breakfast Table Experiment
In 1880, Francis Galton conducted a study, “Statistics of Mental Imagery,” where he asked 100 men to picture their breakfast table. His findings revealed a wide spectrum of vividness in mental imagery, and he was astonished to discover that some participants reported no imagery at all. Galton also noted that vivid mental imagery was more common in non-scientists, while scientists and mathematicians often had weaker or absent imagery. His theory has since been contested. Nonetheless, Galton’s study laid the groundwork for recognising individual differences in cognition and understanding that mental imagery is not a universal experience.
Behaviourism’s Impact on Imagery Research
For much of the 20th century, mental imagery research focused on general visualisation capabilities, with occasional mentions of imagery deficits. Edward Titchener used introspection to study individual differences in mental imagery, helping establish a foundation for later research into subjective cognitive experiences. Though when behaviourism rose to dominance in psychology, the study of inner experience was dismissed as unscientific. Research into mental imagery largely stalled between the 1920s and 1950s.
Key Theories and Experiments in Mental Imagery
The Cognitive Revolution
From the late 1950s into the 1970s, the cognitive revolution brought mental processes back into focus. Two studies from 1971 were particularly significant:
Shepard and Metzler’s experiment involved showing participants pairs of 3D shapes rotated at varying angles, asking whether the shapes matched. The time it took to decide increased in direct proportion to the degree of rotation, as though people were mentally turning the objects in real time, much as they would physically. This showed that mental imagery operates under real-world physical constraints and could be measured rigorously. It’s worth noting that decades later, in 2018, Pounder et al. used this experiment to determine how aphantasia affects spatial reasoning and found that participants were slower yet more accurate, suggesting a reliance on alternative cognitive strategies to problem solve rather than visualise.
Paivio’s dual-coding theory proposed that humans process information through two separate systems, verbal and visual, and that mental imagery plays a meaningful role in memory and learning.
The Imagery Debate
In the 1970s and 1980s, two researchers went head-to-head on what exactly happens with visualisation. Kosslyn’s research explored how people ‘see’ in their mind’s eye, finding that mental imagery activates the same brain regions involved in actual visual perception. Pylyshyn argued that mental imagery is a series of abstract, propositional descriptions, more akin to internal language than a picture in the mind. The debate was never fully resolved, but it drew attention to the breadth of individual differences in how people imagine.
Insights from Brain Injury Case Studies
Case studies from the 1980s and 1990s brought the neuroscience of visualisation into sharper focus. Farah studied patients with damage to the visual cortex and surrounding areas, finding deficits in spatial and visual reasoning that supported the idea that mental imagery draws on the same neural pathways as vision. Goldenberg et al. (1995) found that patients with posterior cortical damage could retain visual perception while losing the ability to form mental images altogether, suggesting imagery is a distinct cognitive function. Levine et al. (1985) noted that patients often retained non-visual memories even when their visual memory was impaired. Kosslyn (1980) had already proposed a theoretical framework for this with the concept of a ‘visual buffer’ in the visual cortex, where images are temporarily held and manipulated during visualisation.
Modern Recognition and Research of Aphantasia
Tools and Methods
In 1973, David Marks developed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), now one of the most widely used tools in aphantasia research. Advances in neuroimaging, particularly fMRI, later allowed researchers to study mental imagery in far greater detail.
Joel Pearson developed methods to measure mental imagery objectively, without relying on self-report. In one notable series of experiments, he connected binocular rivalry with mental imagery, demonstrating that people with aphantasia showed no visual interference when imagining images, unlike those with typical imagery. This provided a concrete, measurable marker for the condition.
Case Studies: From MX to Public Awareness
2015: Adam Zeman coined the term aphantasia after studying patient MX, a man who lost his ability to visualise after a cardiac procedure. An fMRI scan of MX’s brain was conducted while he attempted to imagine various objects. The results revealed reduced brain activity in the posterior regions but an increase in frontal cortices, indicating different cognitive methods were being used for typically imagery-reliant tasks. In Zeman’s subsequent paper, Lives Without Imagery, he formalised aphantasia as a specific phenomenon described as ‘the inability to voluntarily summon mental images’.
2016: Blake Ross, co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, shared his experience with aphantasia in a viral and highly entertaining Facebook post. “Nearly all of you have a canvas. I don’t. I’ve never visualised anything in my entire life.” His essay struck a chord with an enormous number of people, sparking the growth of online communities around aphantasia and bringing the experience to a far wider audience.
A Spectrum of Visualisation Abilities
2018–2020: Research during this period expanded significantly into memory, creativity, and the full range of visualisation experiences. Pearson’s team identified a spectrum of mental imagery, with aphantasia at one end and hyperphantasia (exceptionally vivid mental imagery) at the other. Zeman et al. explored memory differences, finding that aphants tend to rely on semantic memory (facts and concepts) over episodic memory (visual or emotional recollections). Dawes et al. found that while aphants may find imagery-dependent tasks harder, creativity thrives in conceptual and logical domains.
Collaborative Efforts and Global Awareness
In recent years, research has expanded into aphantasia’s effects on daily life, career choices, relationships, emotions, and dreams. Studies by Pearson and others have found that many aphants report dreamless sleep or non-visual dreams, though anecdotally this is also a spectrum as some say the veil falls as they drift off and can still experience vivid dreams.
A 2025 study by Chang, Shuai et al. used advanced neuroimaging to discover that the primary visual cortex still showed activity when people with aphantasia attempted mental imagery. Algorithms were able to decode image-specific representations from that activity. This suggests that visual information is processed at a subconscious level but never becomes conscious experience. As Pearson put it, it’s as if the brain does the maths but skips the final step of projecting the result on a screen. Though this is still debated, as the visual cortex activity doesn’t look quite like typical mental imagery activity.
Aphantasia and Reading
How Aphants Experience Reading
Reading with aphantasia looks different for everyone, but a few patterns emerge from the research. Many readers rely on mental imagery to stay emotionally engaged with the characters and plotline, picturing a described landscape or holding a character’s face in mind. On the other hand, aphants tend to engage with the story’s logical structure or thematic thread instead.
Zeman’s research suggests they lean more on semantic memory (facts and concepts) than episodic memory (visual or emotional recall), which can make detailed descriptive passages feel harder to read. Anecdotally, many aphants are drawn to non-fiction, conceptually rich reading, or external aids like audiobooks and graphic novels that bring in visual and auditory cues from outside the text.
Key Studies on Reading and Aphantasia
Pearson’s research showed how visualisation supports memory and comprehension during reading and, by extension, that aphants rely on alternative cognitive strategies to engage with texts. Dawes et al. (2020) found that aphants often excel in abstract and logical thinking, suggesting some genuine strengths in how they approach and process what they read.
A 2023 study found that aphants may struggle with the motor simulation involved in reading. When most people read action language like ‘he kicked the ball,’ the motor system activates in a small but measurable way. This implicit physical engagement shapes how readers connect with action-heavy texts, and the study found it was absent in aphants, pointing to a distinct experience for this kind of language and a tendency to rely on other cognitive strategies for comprehension.
The Future of Aphantasia Research
As awareness of aphantasia grows, several areas are drawing particular research interest: understanding the neurological and genetic origins of the condition, developing inclusive teaching methods that support diverse cognitive profiles, and examining how aphantasia shapes career choices, relationships, and creative pursuits.
This is still a young field, which is part of what makes it so compelling.