An estimated 1 to 4% of people have aphantasia, a condition where they don’t experience mental imagery or a ‘mind’s eye.’ Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia is now revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.
Read the Quanta article: "What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images"
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/
PAPERS
- "Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: A case of ‘blind imagination’" | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0028393209003418?via%3Dihub
- "The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia" | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33715433/
- "Hippocampal-occipital connectivity reflects autobiographical memory deficits in aphantasia" | https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/94916v2
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Chapters:
00:00 What is it like to have aphantasia?
01:29 How aphantasia was identified and named - Adam Zeman
02:32 How the brain forms mental imagery - visual cortex
03:25 VVIQ Questionnaire
04:03 Joel Pearson's new research techniques
04:55 Emotional response and aphantasia
05:52 Cornelia McCormick and memory research
06:26 Memory-aphantasia connection
07:09 Aphantasia spectrum and hyperphantasia
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