Aphantasia: The People Who Close Their Eyes and See Absolutely Nothing

If you close your eyes and think of the table where you ate breakfast this morning, can you see the mug, the color of the tablecloth, the light from the window? For somewhere between two and four people in a hundred, the answer is no. They see nothing at all: they have aphantasia. And many only realize it as adults, almost by accident.

The word, which names the absence (or near absence) of voluntary mental images, has existed since 2015. But the story starts much earlier, with a questionnaire about breakfast.

The breakfast-table questionnaire

In 1880, the British scientist Francis Galton sent a questionnaire to a group of eminent men of science.

The request was simple: think of your breakfast table as you sat down to it that morning, and rate the picture in your mind on three points:

• Illumination: is the image dim or fairly clear?
• Definition: are all the objects well defined at the same time?
• Coloring: are the colors natural?

William James quotes Galton’s reaction in The Principles of Psychology (1890):

To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them.

They assumed “mental imagery” was a figure of speech, just a way of talking. Galton compared them to a color-blind man who has never discovered his own defect: they were missing something, and had no way of knowing it.

What aphantasia feels like from the inside

The best period description comes from James himself, who repeated Galton’s questions on his own. In the chapter on imagination he quotes two first cousins, grandsons of a distinguished man of science.

• One saw the breakfast table as “both dim and bright,” and could later read memorized verses off a mental page.
• The other wrote: “I could not possibly count the chairs, but I happen to know that there are ten. I see nothing in detail.”

That is the heart of it: knowing is not the same as seeing.

A person with aphantasia remembers what was on the table. What’s missing is the movie.

James put it plainly:

Some people undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the name.

Instead of seeing their breakfast table, they tell you they remember it, or know what was on it.

The striking part is that James was also describing himself.

In a footnote he admits he is “an extremely poor visualizer.” Elsewhere he writes that he can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet: he has to trace its outline with his “mental eye” to give it any distinctness.

Yet he was a good draughtsman, with a keen interest in pictures, statues and architecture.

Galton had noticed the same thing: people who declared themselves unable to see mental pictures could give lifelike descriptions, and could even become painters of the rank of Royal Academicians.

Visual imagination and visual talent are not the same thing.

The merchant who lost his mind’s eye

James devotes several pages to a case published by Jean-Martin Charcot in 1883.

Mr. X was a Vienna-born merchant with a prodigious visual memory: he read Homer at sight and could recite lines as if reading them off a mental page.

After an illness set in, every visual image vanished:

• He could no longer recall the faces of his wife and children.
• He once spoke to his own reflection in a mirror, taking it for a stranger.
• He stopped dreaming in pictures and dreamed only in words.
• To learn anything by heart, he had to read it aloud several times.

Today this would be called acquired aphantasia, as opposed to the lifelong, congenital kind. And the modern history of the word begins with a very similar case.

How the word was born: from patient MX to Cortex

In 2010, neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues published in Neuropsychologia the case of a patient they called MX, who had abruptly lost the ability to generate visual images.

The surprise: MX performed normally on standard tests of perception, imagery and visual memory. On fMRI, when he tried to imagine, his brain showed less activity in posterior regions and more in frontal ones than controls. He seemed to reach the answers by another route.

After science journalist Carl Zimmer wrote about the case, more than twenty people contacted Zeman. They had never had mental images at all.

In 2015, Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala described them in Cortex and proposed a name: aphantasia, from the Greek phantasia (imagination) plus the privative a-.

A year later, in 2016, Firefox co-creator Blake Ross published a viral essay describing how, at 30, he had realized that other people really do “see” things when they close their eyes.

How common is aphantasia?

Current figures are modest, but not tiny:

• Dance, Ipser and Simner (2022) screened 1,004 people: 3.9% had absent or very dim imagery, and 0.8% had none at all.
• At the opposite extreme is hyperphantasia: imagery so vivid it almost rivals perception.
• Zeman et al. (2020) analyzed questionnaires from about 2,000 people with aphantasia and 200 with hyperphantasia. Aphantasia was linked to scientific and mathematical jobs and to more difficulty with face recognition and autobiographical memory; hyperphantasia, to creative professions.

If you’re wondering how this fits with learning, the visual learning style is about learning from external material, not about seeing pictures on the inside.

What Galton got right, and what he got wrong

Galton was right about the big point: inner experience varies enormously from person to person, and almost nobody suspects it.

But his headline claim, that scientists have weaker imagery, did not hold up.

• Brewer and Schommer-Aikins (2006) repeated his study with modern scientists and found none who lacked visual imagery entirely.
• Going back to Galton’s own published data, they found that even his numbers did not support the claim. A handful of very striking replies had shaped his conclusion.

There’s a twist: Zeman’s 2020 data do link aphantasia with scientific occupations. So the connection remains an open question, just not in the form Galton gave it.

Is there an aphantasia test?

The reference tool is David Marks’s VVIQ (1973), a direct descendant of Galton’s questionnaire: 16 scenes you imagine and rate for vividness.

The aphantasia tests you find online are usually built on it, but they are self-report screeners, not diagnoses.

And researchers keep repeating the key point: aphantasia is not a disease. It is a different way of thinking, one that a brain as plastic as ours routes around in other ways. The learning style quiz lets you see your own pattern, which has nothing to do with whether you see images or not.

Sources

• Brewer, W. F., & Schommer-Aikins, M. (2006). Scientists are not deficient in mental imagery: Galton revised. Review of General Psychology, 10(2), 130-146.
• Dance, C. J., Ipser, A., & Simner, J. (2022). The prevalence of aphantasia (imagery weakness) in the general population. Consciousness and Cognition, 97, 103243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2021.103243
• Galton, F. (1880). Statistics of mental imagery. Mind, 5(19), 301-318.
• James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company.
• Marks, D. F. (1973). Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 64(1), 17-24.
• Zeman, A. Z. J., Della Sala, S., Torrens, L. A., Gountouna, V. E., McGonigle, D. J., & Logie, R. H. (2010). Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: A case of ‘blind imagination’. Neuropsychologia, 48(1), 145-155.
• Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery: Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019
• Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., et al. (2020). Phantasia: The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex, 130, 426-440.