Mental Imagery

When Nick Watkins was thirty-five, he read a newspaper column about using mental pictures to relive the past — "the special weight of girls in autumn... when they lean against you as you walk along" — and realised, for the first time in his life, that other people meant the word "visualising" literally. He had always taken it to be metaphorical. He was a physicist. He had a PhD. His mind was clearly working. It had simply never occurred to him that remembering could be more than knowing that something happened.¹

The Spectrum

Watkins has aphantasia — the absence of voluntary mental imagery, named by the neurologist Adam Zeman in 2015. At the other end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia, where internal images are so vivid they can be mistaken for perception. Between them lies most of humanity, largely oblivious to the fact that their inner visual experience might differ radically from anyone else's.

The history of recognising this spectrum is a comedy of mutual incomprehension. Francis Galton surveyed scientists in 1880, asking them to picture their breakfast table. The majority "protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic." Galton concluded that "scientific men as a class have feeble powers of visual representation." In the 1920s, behaviourism extinguished the study of imagery entirely: J.B. Watson declared mental pictures "sheer bunk," and for half a century nobody could investigate whether he was right because the field treated internal states as methodologically untouchable.¹

Zeman's work brought the question back. His first subject, a man who lost imagery after cardiac surgery, could still answer visual questions — which is darker, grass or pine needles? — but couldn't generate the pictures. Brain scans showed faint visual cortex activation when he tried to visualize, with compensatory frontal lobe activity: he was trying, and failing, and using cognitive effort to fill the gap. When Zeman published his findings and the name "aphantasia" spread through the media, seventeen thousand people contacted him. Most had been aphantasic their whole lives without knowing it was unusual.¹

What Imagery Does

The consequences of having or lacking mental imagery extend far beyond trivia about breakfast tables.

Memory. Aphantasics generally have good factual memory but poor autobiographical memory. They know what happened but can't re-experience it. Nick Watkins knows he was given a space helmet for Christmas; he cannot feel the joy of that boy in the kitchen. Isabel Nolan, an Irish artist with aphantasia, describes her past as "kind of imaginary. I know what happened, but... one can feel a little disconnected from your own past." She keeps boxes of souvenirs because without physical reminders she doesn't recall most places she's visited or things she's done. Derek Parfit, the philosopher who argued that selves are just shifting collections of memories and thoughts, turns out to have had no mental imagery — which retrospectively makes his dismissal of personal identity feel less like rigorous philosophy and more like accurate self-description.¹

The connection between imagery and memory runs deep. Endel Tulving's concept of "mental time travel" — the ability to project yourself into past or future scenarios — depends on being able to construct or reconstruct scenes in the mind. Patient K.C., who lost both retrograde and anterograde memory after a motorcycle crash, couldn't envision the future at all — asked to picture himself somewhere, he saw "a big blankness." fMRI studies show the same brain regions active when remembering the past and imagining the future. Lose one and you lose both.¹

Emotion and trauma. Hyperphantasics are more emotionally reactive to their own imagery. Clare Dudeney, an artist with vivid mental pictures, avoids violent images because they stick in her mind for years. Reading about surgery without anaesthetic made her faint from the imagined scene. After her beloved cat died, she saw him everywhere — on the sofa, the bed, the floor — as clearly as if he were alive, and the relentless visual haunting nearly overwhelmed her grief. A 2012 Harvard study found that people with strong imagery respond more emotionally to moral dilemmas involving physical harm — the vivid mental picture of the harm overrides utilitarian calculation.¹

This suggests that imagery is a major moderator of trauma response. If you can't help but re-visualise a traumatic event in photographic detail, PTSD makes mechanistic sense. If you're aphantasic, the factual memory of the trauma persists but the re-experiencing component is absent. Several of Zeman's correspondents attributed their aphantasia to deliberate suppression: traumatic memories made imagery intolerable, so the system shut down. Whether this is actually possible — whether you can lose a basic cognitive capacity through motivated repression — is unknown, but the reports are consistent enough to take seriously.

Creativity. The relationship between imagery and art is more complex than you'd expect. Both aphantasics and hyperphantasics can be brilliant artists, but they work differently. Sheri Paisley painted detailed portraits using vivid imagery; after a stroke eliminated her mental pictures, she switched to abstract painting inspired by deep-space imagery and said her art got better. Isabel Nolan, aphantasic from birth, makes art "not from anything external but from" — well, not images in her head. She works intuitively, never knowing how a piece will end up. Hyperphantasic Clare Dudeney could replay entire Harry Potter movies in her head during a meditation retreat and often designed pieces mentally before picking up materials.¹

There may be an Einstein-versus-Kekulé split in scientific creativity too. Einstein visualised riding a beam of light; Kekulé dreamed the structure of benzene as a snake eating its tail. But many of Galton's imagery-free scientists were at the top of their fields, and some mathematicians regard drawings as distracting from pure analytical proof. Perhaps there are multiple cognitive styles that reach the same destinations through different routes, and the aphantasia spectrum is one of the axes along which these styles vary.

Three Kinds of Minds

Temple Grandin's taxonomy of autistic thinking styles extends the imagery spectrum into something more structured. She identifies three cognitive types: visual thinkers (who think in photo-realistic pictures and can test-run equipment designs in their imagination like a virtual reality program), verbal/logic thinkers (who excel at languages and memorize verbal facts compulsively), and pattern thinkers (who think in abstract mathematical and musical patterns, like Daniel Tammet seeing numbers as shapes and colors). Most people lean toward one category but mix elements of two or three.²

What makes this more than a personality quiz is the neural evidence. Brain scans of Grandin herself show the tract connecting visual object recognition to motor and frontal cortex is ten times the volume of a control subject's — her visual thinking isn't metaphorical, it's anatomically visible. Meanwhile, the tract connecting heard speech to visual processing is one-tenth normal volume. Her brain is literally wired for thinking in pictures at the expense of auditory-verbal processing.

The taxonomy maps suggestively onto the aphantasia-hyperphantasia spectrum but cuts across it in an important way. Grandin is a hyperphantasic visual thinker — she sees everything. But a pattern thinker like Tammet experiences vivid imagery too, just not pictorial imagery; his numbers have colors and textures and spatial positions. And a verbal/logic thinker might have minimal visual imagery but rich verbal inner experience. The spectrum isn't one-dimensional.

The most provocative claim is about autistic cognition more broadly. People with autism tend toward bottom-up processing — details before concepts — while neurotypical cognition runs top-down, fitting details into prior frameworks. This makes autistic thinkers less susceptible to the framing effect (the bias where presenting identical options as "gains" or "losses" changes decisions) and more prone to generating novel solutions. Research shows autistic individuals are up to 40 percent faster at certain problem-solving tasks. The predictive processing framework would describe this as weaker priors — less top-down prediction, more bottom-up signal — which produces both the sensory overwhelm that autistic people report and the unusual perceptual acuity that can accompany it.²

The Self Without Pictures

The deepest implication is for selfhood. People with aphantasia consistently report a weaker sense of self, less emotional intensity, fewer grudges, and a more philosophical, detached relationship with their own history. Several studies found that people with vivid imagery are more inward, more absorbed in the drift of their own minds. Isabel Nolan: "I don't think I have a very strong sense of self, and it's not something I'm super interested in."¹

The hyperphantasics report the opposite problem: too much self. Clare Dudeney's mind skitters with "images and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn't sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans." It's hard to get to sleep. It's hard to focus on what's actually in front of her. She went to Antarctica partly for the novelty — a landscape so alien that her brain couldn't match it to stored imagery, forcing her to actually see for the first time instead of perceiving through the "cluttered, obscuring scrim" of visual memories.¹

This spectrum maps suggestively onto the questions about introspection and the constructed nature of experience. If the brain is a prediction engine that generates perception from internal models checked against sensory data, then mental imagery is what those internal models look like when they're running without sensory input. Aphantasics can still make predictions — they answer visual questions correctly, they recognise faces, they navigate — but the predictions don't rise to conscious experience. The machinery works; the phenomenology is absent. This is eerily similar to blindsight, where people who can't consciously see still avoid obstacles, or to the philosophical zombie thought experiment made mundane and real.

The world does not disappear when you close your eyes. Unless you're aphantasic, in which case it does. And you might never have known.