“People watch a movie, and then they can watch it again in their mind, and it’s indistinguishable.”īased on their surveys, Dr. “It’s like having a very vivid dream and not being sure if it was real or not,” he said. Joel Pearson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales who has studied mental imagery since 2005, said hyperphantasia could go far beyond just having an active imagination. Zeman and his colleagues were also contacted by people who seemed to be the opposite of M.X.: They had intensely strong visions, a condition the scientists named hyperphantasia.
Another said it was “thinking only in radio.” One described the condition as feeling the shape of an apple in the dark. Zeman and his colleagues invited their correspondents to fill out questionnaires. Zeman’s trickle of emails into a torrent. I reported on this second study for The New York Times, as did other journalists at their own publications. In a 2015 report on those findings, he and his colleagues proposed that those readers all shared the same condition, which the researchers called aphantasia. in a remarkable way: They had never had a mind’s eye to begin with. Afterward, I got emails from readers who had the same experience but who differed from M.X. I came across M.X.’s case study in 2010 and wrote a column about it for Discover magazine. could even solve problems that required mentally rotating shapes, even though he could not see them. could answer factual questions such as whether former Prime Minister Tony Blair has light-colored eyes. thought of people or objects, he did not see them. Zeman aware of aphantasia was a retired building surveyor who lost his mind’s eye after minor heart surgery. “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.” Zeman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Exeter in Britain. “This is not a disorder as far as I can see,” said Dr.
Eventually, that research might even make it possible to strengthen the mind’s eye - or ear - with magnetic pulses.
And they’re beginning to explore how some of that circuitry may conjure other senses, such as sound, in the mind. Zeman and his colleagues are gathering clues about how these two conditions arise through changes in the wiring of the brain that join the visual centers to other regions. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one.
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