Imagine a sunset, now imagine you can't

Aphantasia is the inability to see with your mind’s eye. And its discovery has made scientists ask a surprising question: What is the mind’s eye even for? (First published in 2022.) Guests: Alice Coles, artist; Adam Zeman, cognitive neurologist at the University of Exeter Medical School; Joel Pearson, professor of neuroscience at the University of New South Wales; Emily Holmes, professor of psychology at Uppsala University For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 1:21Speaker 02

  When I close my eyes and let my mind wander, I start to see images. The green canopy of redwood trees, or the mushroom risotto I ate last night for dinner, or my sister's face. Like, I can picture all this in my head. And that's something that I've always taken for granted, until I spoke to Alice Coles.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  There's just a lot of words going in my brain all the time.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Words, but not pictures.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  You know, there's a song going, there's like TikTok audio down there, there's like the running to-do list of stuff that I haven't done. There's the guilt over something I said in sixth grade, you know? And then there's like all the other stuff just on top.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  When she was in college, Alice started to realize that some people could imagine more than just words, which was a little shocking to her.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  I think a big part of it was when I started doing yoga. In yoga, there's a lot of like, visualize yourself in your happy place and stuff like that. I've always heard that kind of stuff before and like, I've tried it. And I'm always just like, I don't know what this means.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  But the people in Alice's class kept telling her about these visions that they could almost literally see.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  One of the girls was talking about this beautiful visualization that they had had that these ravens were bursting out of their stomach and flying away. And they felt like this amazing release because they finally felt like they were embracing their body. And it was so beautiful. I was so happy for them. But I also was like, you saw that? I, is that normal? I was, I, is that what's supposed to happen? Because that seems worrying. I was like, what, what? What are you talking about?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  As she started thinking about it, Alice realized that this happened to her all the time.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  You know, I'd always read about things like picturing your loved one's face. And I was like, why can't I picture anyone's face? Why can't I picture my old house in England, even though I can remember, even though I can remember my room was yellow and it had a mural on the wall. And when you came in, you went to the left and out the window was a park. And I can remember all that. And I can remember the layout and everything, but I can't see it.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  For a long time, this was just a mystery to Alice. But one day, she came across a video on YouTube.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Whenever I'd read self-help books that required you to visualize your ideal self, or even guided meditations that asked to imagine sitting on a private beach at sunset, I could understand the concept, but I couldn't believe that anybody could actually see a beach in their head. It's just fantasy talk, right?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Someone else couldn't visualize images either.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  To put it simply, if the brain is like a computer that can store and access data, mine seemingly runs perfectly fine, except for the fact that the screen is switched off.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  And I was like, that's me. That is me 100%. I am a zero. It is all black light. I can't, I can't see anything. And I called my mom and I was like, Mom, can you, can you visualize? And she was like, yeah, I can overlay stuff into the real world if I want to. And I was like, excuse me?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Alice called up the rest of her family. She called up her friends. She grilled everybody she knew about whether they could see images in their mind. And she was a little shook that so many of them could.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  When you kind of put a name to it, there is a sense of...

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Loss or missing out of, oh, well, I'm supposed to be able to do this and I can't. And then for me, there was almost an immediate sense of jealousy that, oh, my God, this is why it's so hard. Why can't I be like them?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I'm Mandy Nguyen, and this week on Unexplainable, why can't some people see things with their mind's eye? And what's going on in the brain when the rest of us can?

• 5:15Speaker 05

  All knowledge must come through the senses, all that we perceive and all of the awareness of our daily existence. Light? Double rainbow. Oh, my God. Sound?

• 5:26Speaker 06

  Listen to me, listen to me.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  Touch?

• 5:28Speaker 06

  Sweethees?

• 5:29Speaker 05

  Odors?

• 5:30Speaker 06

  Ew!

• 5:30Speaker 05

  And tastes. What are your thoughts concerning the human senses? As meat and wine are nourishment to the body, the senses provide nutriment to the soul. All that we perceive, seeing, all of the awareness. Hearing, all knowledge must come through the senses. I have an incredible sense of touch. All that we perceive, tasting, all of the awareness. Smelling, all knowledge must come through the senses. Doesn't make sense. Sinner we love. Please, sinner we love.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  The inability to picture an image in your mind only got its name a few years ago.

• 6:11Speaker 07

  We felt there was a phenomenon to describe and that it deserved a name.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  This is Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Exeter Medical School in the UK.

• 6:20Speaker 07

  We borrowed Aristotle's term for the imagination or the mind's eye, which is fantasia, and tagged an A on the end to denote the absence of that capacity. And so that was how the term aphantasia was coined.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Adam first came across aphantasia in 2005 with a curious medical case.

• 6:39Speaker 07

  The patient was referred to me who His GP said, his general practitioner said, had lost the ability to imagine.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  This man, who the case study just called MX, used to love getting lost in his imagination.

• 6:51Speaker 07

  He used to get himself to sleep by imagining places he'd visited and faces of friends and family.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  But after getting cardiac surgery, something changed.

• 7:00Speaker 07

  He said, "When I read a novel, the descriptions in the novel no longer conjure a visual scene which I used to enter. If I lose my keys, I used to be able to visualize where I'd put them down and I can no longer do that."

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Adam and his colleagues gave MX a range of tests and found that his vision was fine, his working memory was also fine. So Adam gave him another test to figure out whether he could visualize something in his mind.

• 7:22Speaker 07

  So for example, if I ask you to tell me which is darker, the green of grass or the green of a pine tree,

• 7:29Speaker 07

  you will probably call the two shades to your mind's eye an answer on the basis of visualization. MX could answer questions like that without any difficulty. And when you asked him how, he said, "Well, I just know. I can't see anything. I just know."

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Here was a patient presenting a symptom that he'd never come across before, but who seemed to be fine on most measures of psychological testing. Adam was stunned.

• 7:51Speaker 07

  I realized that I knew very little about visualization. And so it sent me both to the neurological literature about people who've lost the ability to visualize and also to the neuroscientific literature about what happens in our brains when we visualize.

• 8:05Speaker 08

  A general definition of a visualization or a visual image is forming an image in your visual cortex that is detached, so it's not coming from the outside world.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  This is Joel Pearson. He's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and he specializes in visual imagery.

• 8:26Speaker 08

  It's not coming from your eyes, from your retina. You're not seeing something perceptually. You're voluntarily creating that.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  But visualizing is still related to how you see.

• 8:38Speaker 08

  When you look around the room now and you're seeing, you know, or you're driving a car or whatever you're doing, you're seeing things. A lot of information is hitting your eyes, your retina. It's shooting back to your visual cortex. And so that's going upwards, if you like, from your eyes up into your brain.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  When we visualize, similar parts of the brain are activated, but at a lower intensity. So it's almost like we're having the experience of seeing something in real time, even if we're just imagining it.

• 9:04Speaker 08

  I think a good way to think about this is that imagery is like a a virtual reality engine, that we simulate things.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  But visual imagery has historically been really hard to study.

• 9:14Speaker 08

  It's something that's inherently private. It's inside someone's own mind. And no one else knows what they're doing with their mental imagery.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  In order to measure affectation, scientists can use something called the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire.

• 9:27Speaker 08

  And it runs people through a bunch of questions. And it's simple things like, think of the last time you saw a sunset. Now try and imagine that sunset as best you can. Rate that sunset in terms of vividness.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  But self-reports aren't really rigorous enough to base a whole science off of. And Joel realized that there weren't a ton of good tests to measure visual imagery. So he started working on some.

• 9:47Speaker 08

  So we've been on a mission to develop objective, reliable techniques.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Like, there's one where you can observe people's eyes and tell them to imagine looking at something really bright, like the sun.

• 9:57Speaker 08

  So the pupil, right in your eye, when you look at a bright light, it contracts. It shrinks down to very tiny, so it's letting less light through. Turns out, when you imagine bright things, something very similar happens. Your pupil changes. You imagine dark things, it relaxes and opens up again.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  And you can also put sensors on people's skin to see how they react when you tell them a story with visual details.

• 10:20Speaker 08

  So I could ask you to imagine something very scary and see what your emotional response to that is. The stronger your imagery is, the stronger that response.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Scientists can also use brain imaging technology, like fMRI, to see which parts of the brain light up when someone visualizes. And that's exactly what Adam did to study his patient, MX.

• 10:43Speaker 07

  In a brain imaging study, whereas you or I, assuming that you have imagery, activate visual areas of our brain when we visualize. He was unable to do so. So when he looked at a famous face, his brain activated quite normally. But when he tried to visualize it, he failed to activate those visual regions of the brain.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Adam thinks that MX lost his ability to visualize because of a stroke that happened during his surgery, which damaged parts of his brain. And other kinds of injuries can lead to aphantasia, too. But something like 2% to 3% of people have aphantasia, and injury isn't the only cause.

• 11:16Speaker 07

  There are a number of ways in which you can arrive at aphantasia, which makes sense, given that we know quite a complex network of regions in the brain is involved in visualization.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Other people have also developed aphantasia because of psychological reasons.

• 11:29Speaker 07

  It can occur in the context of depression, of depersonalization disorder, and of psychosis.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  But the largest group of people with aphantasia are people who have had it for their entire lives. And this is where things get a little mysterious.

• 11:43Speaker 07

  We don't know very much yet about the mechanism of lifelong aphantasia.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  We know it's associated with certain conditions.

• 11:50Speaker 07

  It's sometimes associated with difficulties with face recognition, sometimes with difficulties with autobiographical memory, sometimes with autistic spectrum disorder, and sometimes with none of the above.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Adam also thinks that there might be a genetic component.

• 12:02Speaker 07

  If you have aphantasia, there's a roughly tenfold increase in the likelihood that a first-degree relative of yours will have it.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  But scientists don't really know what causes someone to be born with it. And there doesn't seem to be any singular part of the brain that we can point to and say, yes, I see this person has aphantasia.

• 12:22Speaker 07

  I'm sure aphantasia is more than one thing. I think it's a variation in experience, a feature of experience, and it can occur in a number of contexts.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  People with aphantasia can have really varied internal lives. Not everyone is bothered by it. And like we heard at the top, a lot of them don't even realize they have it until well into their lives.

• 12:42Speaker 07

  So it raises the question of why we have imagery if we don't need it?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  What are these mental images really even used for? That's after the break.

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• 16:27Speaker 11

  Imagination.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Unexplainable, we're back. I'm Manning Nguyen. Before the break, we were talking about people who don't have the ability to picture images in their minds. And a lot of them live perfectly healthy lives, which raises a bigger question. What is imagery even for?

• 16:51Speaker 12

  One really important thing that imagery does is allows you to imagine things that aren't there, either in space or in time.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Emily Holmes is a psychology professor at the Uppsala Institute in Sweden, and she studies imagery. Emily's found that the world inside our heads is really closely tied with our emotions.

• 17:08Speaker 12

  The more you use imagery, the more it kind of cranks up the volume on your emotional amplification.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Emily and her team have done studies where they tell one group of people to think of a concept in words, and then they tell the other group to imagine the same concept, but using an image instead.

• 17:23Speaker 12

  People who imagined the scenarios had a far stronger emotional effect than people who merely thought about them in words. So if those scenarios were negative events, like slipping on the stairs, they'd become, for example, more anxious. And also the converse, if those scenarios were positive events, like a picture of chocolate cake and the word eat, then people also had more positive emotions.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  It's similar to Joel's experiment, where people with sensors on their skin heard scary stories. That study shows the same thing.

• 17:59Speaker 12

  Simply by manipulating instructions to think in imagery rather than words, those people who think in imagery have a far more powerful impact on their emotions, both to make them more negative, but also to make them more positive when exposed to the same information.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  The question is, why?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Why would our brains be wired to use images to intensify emotions?

• 18:22Speaker 12

  There are all sorts of reasons in mental imagery where having a mental imagery might be really powerful, and that might be, that might be something we want to happen. Like, we want to read a poem, imagine a sunset, and feel moved.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  But Emily's found that intensifying emotions can also have a downside.

• 18:39Speaker 12

  There are studies going back, for example, to the 1990s, that show that people who use imagery a lot tend to score higher on measures like anxiety or tendency to feel fears and phobias. If imagery causes a powerful impact on emotion, it's actually, can be really disruptive and cause, like, microfoculations all the time in daily life.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Emily's also a clinician, so she works a lot with patients struggling with PTSD. And there, a key to finding symptom is intrusive imagery, the kind that just pops up where you don't want it to.

• 19:11Speaker 12

  And in that case, people can have images of difficult events, stressful events, and traumatic events have happened in the past. When those images pop to mind, they might just be milliseconds long, but they can cause a huge emotional reaction.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  In this case, aphantasia could be particularly helpful.

• 19:28Speaker 12

  If someone had a difficulty forming mental images, then it would stand to reason it would be very difficult to have intrusive images, which could be protective, actually.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  The idea that having little or no visual imagery could actually be protective against PTSD or help dull traumatic memories, it's just a hypothesis. But it's an interesting question.

• 19:51Speaker 12

  One of the things to say about mental imagery is that we need to do so, so, so much more research. We really are at the base camp of our understanding.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And studying mental imagery can help scientists learn how our brains make sense of the world.

• 20:03Speaker 12

  By opening up the doors to the science of mental imagery, it starts unlocking keys to, OK, could we think about this problem in a different way? Could we create a technique that isn't just talking to somebody, but actually working with this problematic imagery? I think that's really exciting. I think it means that there are all sorts of innovations, particularly for mental health treatments, that are on the horizon and out there yet to be explored and implemented.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Imagination is a powerful tool, but it's not just limited to visual imagery.

• 20:36Speaker 12

  It's like smelling with the mind's nose or hearings with the mind's ears. We can imagine the sound of the tune "Happy Birthday", for example, even though someone's not actually singing that.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Our brains can also use abstract symbols, concepts, verbal thoughts, all sorts of strategies to imagine the world.

• 20:54Speaker 12

  It's a bit like using a navigation app on your phone. You could either choose to have the map of the world and navigate it, or you could choose to take the written list of instructions. But a lot of times, we can solve the same task in different ways. And there's no right or wrong. You know, the human brain is exquisitely wired up to solve problems.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  This is why I wanted to talk to Alice, the woman I spoke to in the beginning of the episode. She doesn't just have aphantasia. She's actually a professional artist.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Like, I was drawing before I could talk, before I could walk. Like, you know, I was, I had a, I've had a pencil in my hand for as long as I can remember.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  When she first found out about her aphantasia, she started doubting herself as an artist.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  This is why I can't get anatomy yet. This is why I can't picture what this pose would look like in my head. This is why I feel like I'm so reliant on references. If I could visualize, I would be a better artist. You know, and I sat with that for a while. And then I realized that's simply just not true. Because first of all, all the masters throughout all of history have used references.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Alice relies on references, too. She's also built up knowledge over time about anatomy and human proportions and what colors go well together that she doesn't need to visualize.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  It's more about muscle memory and knowing the different relationships between proportions and things like that than it is about drawing a picture that you see in your head.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  So it's kind of like the analogy of using Google Maps versus reading the directions. When Alice is figuring out what to illustrate, she's using the written directions.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Someone else might see their image, but my brain will say, okay, I'm going to do an eight and a half by 11 piece. I'm going to use my friend Momo as a reference. I want her to be facing to the left. I'm going to incorporate amethyst crystals coming up from the bottom left and spiking upwards towards her. And the whole piece is going to be pale lavender, pastels, and some like light gold, light silver tones.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Over time, Alice started seeing that aphantasia wasn't something that she had to overcome. It can be a strength.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  I think one of the beautiful things about that is I'm not generally tied to an image that's popped up in my head. So there's a lot of exploration. And I always like to think of it as the characters, they come out of the page. I'm not putting them there. I'm just kind of releasing them from the page.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Aphantasia is also something that helps her quiet her mind.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  When I'm stressed, I'm struggling, especially with art, I can just take a deep breath, close my eyes, and it's just black.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  It's like this void that I can just sink into and allow thoughts to come to me.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  And as she's leaned into her own unique creative process, Alice doesn't really stress on what she's missing anymore.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  I'm pretty glad I don't visualize, honestly. I think I have an overactive imagination and like, I would rather not visualize. I'm okay with it.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Every single one of the researchers that I've spoken to has emphasized that aphantasia isn't a dysfunction, it's not a lack. Some researchers didn't even want to call it a condition. It's just a variation of human experience. People live fine, full, creative lives without visual imagery. Because there's more than one way to think.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  If we start opening the conversation of, I don't visualize, where else can we start recognizing each other's differences? Being someone that's like neurodivergent, like having ADHD or autism, or somebody that struggles with mental illness, I have bipolar, or people that deal with anxiety, depression. Our brains are different, but everyone's brain is different.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  This episode was reported and produced by me, Manning Nguyen. We had editing from Brian Resnick, Noam Hassanfeld, Catherine Wells, and Meredith Hodnot, who scored the episode along with Noam. Richard Seema did our fact checking and Christian Ayala did our mixing and our sound design. The rest of the Unexplainable team includes Bird Pinkerton and Tori Dominguez. To read more about some of the topics we cover on the show or to find episode transcripts, check out our site at vox.com/unexplainable. And if you have any thoughts about the show, you can always email us at [email protected]. Or you could leave us a review or a rating, which we would love to. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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