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

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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  • (Score: 1) by GoodBookOfTaunts on Thursday August 27 2015, @06:03AM

    by GoodBookOfTaunts (3804) on Thursday August 27 2015, @06:03AM (#228482)
    Same here, a complete inability to visualize while conscious. Occasionally there might be something in a dream, but it's hard to be sure that isn't just "knowing" the idea of the image in the dream versus actually "seeing" a visual image.

    This lack of visual ability and moderate face blindness (prosopagnosia) are two things which I only realized were uncommon among around my teenage years. I'm curious whether there might be a correlation with face blindness for others who have limited or complete inability to visualize.
  • (Score: 1) by evk on Thursday August 27 2015, @09:16AM

    by evk (597) on Thursday August 27 2015, @09:16AM (#228533)

    I used to think that I didn't dream in pictures, but nowdays I'm more or less convinced that it's only the memory of the dreams that lack any visual imagery (just as all my memorys).
    I started to suspect that this was the case after waking up from dreams with a very clear experience of just having seen something. The actual picture was gone but it was almost like an after image (just like you've looked at something bright and close your eyes).