The Mind's Eye
Exploring how our imagination works
I want you to picture a little green goblin wearing a gray nightcap, a pair of pointy brown shoes, and a gold-plated monocle perched atop its left eye.
Can you see it?
If you couldn’t conjure up even the faintest image of this creature (for better or worse), you may have aphantasia. Derived from the ancient Greek for “without imagination”, aphantasia renders approximately one percent of people completely unable to create mental imagery.
Surprisingly, over four times as many have hyperphantasia: an astonishing condition that causes people to have imaginations that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. This phenomenon isn’t always limited to the sense of sight; there are reports of people who can “hear” songs as if they were playing aloud or imagine the scent of a flower as if it was right under their nose. As someone with a relatively ordinary imagination, it wasn’t until recently that I learned that these capabilities existed.
Several months ago, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about recording music. He told me that he had gotten an idea for a song while riding his bike home, which I assumed meant that he had a rough sense of the melody, lyrics, and so on. I didn’t understand that he meant he could hear the song in his head — complete with drums, synths, and any other instruments he’d wanted to add.
It was then that I realized just how much the act of thinking can vary from person to person. I was reminded of this when reading What Do You Care What Other People Think?, a memoir by famed physicist Richard Feynman. In the book, Feynman describes an experiment he devised to find out more about people’s “time sense”, or time perception, in other words. His question was simple: are there any activities that can distort your perception of time?
To answer this, Feynman would perform a task such as reading silently while counting in his head for exactly one minute. He found that although he could easily read a newspaper, it was impossible to talk and count at the same time. Interestingly, his friend John Tukey had no difficulty talking, but when it came time to read the newspaper, he failed miserably.
Despite the simplicity of the task, it turned out that both scientists had employed wildly different strategies to keep track of time. On one hand, Feynman silently spoke to himself — a method known as subvocalization. On the other hand, Tukey simply visualized a tape with numbers on it going by and waited until it hit sixty. In terms of accuracy, neither method seemed to have a clear advantage over the other.
Feynman remarked:
And so it struck me therefore, if that’s already true at the most elementary level — that when we learn the mathematics, the Bessel functions, the exponentials, the electric fields, and all these things — that the imageries, the method that we’re storing it all, and the way we think about it could be entirely different.
He speculated that these fundamental differences in thinking might explain why when someone has a “great deal of difficulty understanding a point which you see as obvious, it may be because it’s a little hard to translate what you just said into their particular framework.”
The science of visualization
Why is it that we think differently from others in the first place? Consider the biological traits that are responsible for hyperphantasia and aphantasia. People with hyperphantasia tend to have a larger frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, planning, and other functions that are critical in day-to-day life.
You might think that the portion of the brain dedicated to vision is also larger for people with photorealistic imaginations, but in fact, the opposite is true. The larger the visual cortex, the smaller the frontal lobe, and vice versa. Since genetics plays a significant role in determining the size of the visual cortex, people who inherited a smaller visual cortex from their parents are actually more likely to have hyperphantasia.
On the other hand, the cause of aphantasia is still unclear. You also don’t have to be born with it to experience “mental blindness” in your lifetime. Brain injuries and even COVID-19 have been known to induce aphantasia in some people. The most surprising part is that, similar to the case of Feynman and Tukey, there is no obvious difference in the cognitive performance of people with and without aphantasia.
A 2021 study that tested participants’ visuospatial reasoning abilities concluded that people with aphantasia can perform visual tasks just as well, and in some cases, better than the average person. The only difference between the two groups was the method they used to store and manipulate information. For example, when asked to remember a sequence of images, participants with aphantasia assigned the images labels and recalled them later on — a strategy which turned out to be more efficient than using visual memory.
According to the authors of the report:
These data demonstrate that an inability to visualize does not make it impossible to remember visual stimuli. Anecdotally aphantasic individuals report very few impairments in daily life due to their lack of visual imagery. This begs the question, what is the utility of imagery?
It is amazing to me that creating imagery, a fundamental ability of most humans on the planet, is still in the process of being understood and will continue to be a source of scientific inquiry for decades to come.
The same can be said for countless other topics in neuroscience, which is what makes the brain so exciting to study. Most of the time, we take this three-pound piece of gray matter in our skulls for granted, despite it being the culmination of several million years of evolution.
We get annoyed when it doesn’t remember the name of the person we just met, or can’t seem to figure out how those IKEA pieces possibly fit together like in the instruction manual. However, we tend to forget that every thought, every decision, and every sentence uttered requires the coordination of millions, if not billions of neurons tucked away in the intricate tangles of our brains.
So the next time you forget something important or feel like you’re struggling to understand a new concept, take a second to remember how remarkable your mind is. As Feynman pointed out, every person has a completely unique way of thinking — it’s what makes you who you are, and it’s something that nobody else will ever experience again.
Oddly enough, I have total aphantasia, and have never been able to conjure an image, a smell, a taste, a sound or a touch. Instead, all my memories are descriptions. I also tend to recall the gist of things rather than long lists of vivid details, which means I’m awful at remembering quotes, names or nuanced scenes, and can watch the same film a dozen times and still be surprised 🤣. That said, it works for me, and isn’t something I think about on a daily basis. There’s a ton of new research coming out on the spectrum of memory these days, a lot of it fascinating for folks like me.