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"Aphantasia": Human Visual Imagination is Not Universal

posted by takyon on Thursday August 27 2015, @02:20AM   
from the what-do-you-see dept.

fritsd writes:

BBC News has an article about a newly described condition called "aphantasia", where people can't visualize an imaginary scene:

Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the journal Cortex [paywalled].

Prof Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that they find hard to convey to others."

How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury. He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people. But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to time, it's a variability of human experience."

If you think you have aphantasia or hyperphantasia and would like to be involved in Prof Zeman's research he is happy to be contacted at a.zeman@exeter.ac.uk

If this is true, isn't it fascinating that we have apparently always had two groups of people: those (majority) who could "count sheep" in order to fall asleep, and assumed that everybody could, and those (minority) who thought that "counting sheep" was just some weird expression, surely not something actual people could actually do.

Personally, my mum once advised me to count sheep; I could visualize them jumping over the fence, but it didn't help much in getting me to sleep. Clearly the genes for this "aphantasia" are not linked to those for insomnia.

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Original Submission

• Re:One wonders Re:One wonders (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:04AM

  by c0lo (156) on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:04AM (#228418) Journal

  Huh, it wasn't to be!

  Apologies in advance for the spoiler (give your fantasy a break!), it seems that the place I work does have access to TOFA (the original FA). My selection:

  21 individuals contacted us because of their lifelong reduction of visual imagery. We explored the features of their condition with a questionnaire devised for the purpose and the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) ( Marks, 1973 ) (see Supplementary Material for further details). Participants typically became aware of their condition in their teens or twenties when, through conversation or reading, they realised that most people who ‘saw things in the mind's eye’, unlike our participants, enjoyed a quasi-visual experience. 19/21 were male. 5/21 reported affected relatives. 10/21 told us that all modalities of imagery were affected. Our participants rating of imagery vividness was significantly lower than that of 121 controls (p < .001, Mann Whitney U test — see Fig. 1).
  Despite their substantial (9/21) or complete (12/21) deficit in voluntary visual imagery, as judged by the VVIQ, the majority of participants described involuntary imagery. This could occur during wakefulness, usually in the form of ‘flashes ’ (1021) and/or during dreams (17/21). Within a group of partici- pants who reported no imagery while completing the VVIQ, 10/11 reported involuntary imagery during wakefulness and/ or dreams, confirming a significant dissociation between voluntary and involuntary imagery (p < .01, McNemar Test). Participants described a varied but modest effect on mood and relationships. 14/21 participants reported difficulties with autobiographical memory. The same number identified compensatory strengths in verbal, mathematical and logical domains. Their successful performance in a task that would normally elicit imagery — ‘count how many windows there are in your house or apartment’ — was achieved by drawing on what participants described as ‘knowledge’, ‘memory’ and ‘subvisual’ models.

  ...

  We suspect, however, that aphantasia will prove to be a variant of neuropsychological functioning akin to synaesthesia ( Barnett & Newell, 2008 ) and to congenital prosopagnosia ( Gruter, Gruter, Bell, & Carbon, 2009 ). Indeed, aphantasia may have some specific relationship to these disorders, as congenital prosopagnosia is associated with unusually low ( Gruter et al., 2009 ), and synaesthesia with unusually high ( Barnett & Newell, 2008 ), VVIQ scores.

  [my emphasis here] The participants described here were self-selected and some of our findings, such as the male predominance, may reflect the readership of a science magazine like Discover. There is a need, therefore, for further study in a more representative sample.

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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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• Re:One wonders (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:17AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:17AM (#228425)

  Here is the questionnaire: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/MarksVVIQ.htm [berkeley.edu]

  Parent