SoylentNews

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.

Original Submission