Aphantasia: What If You Cannot Picture Things in Your Mind?

Close your eyes and picture the table where you last had breakfast. Is the image bright or dim? Can you see the colour of the cup, the light on the surface, the crumbs?

For most people there is something there, even if it is faint and flickering. For a minority there is nothing at all - no picture, no colours, just the knowledge that there was a table and a cup. Many of them only discover this in adulthood, usually when they realise that when other people say they can picture something, they mean it literally.

A question asked in 1880

The breakfast table is not our invention. In 1880 the Victorian scientist Francis Galton published a paper called Statistics of Mental Imagery in the journal Mind. He asked his respondents to think of their breakfast table as they had sat down to it that morning, and then to describe the picture that rose before their mind's eye: how bright it was, how sharp, how coloured.

His main analysis drew on returns from 100 adult men, 19 of them Fellows of the Royal Society. What surprised him was how much the answers varied. He wrote that many of the men of science he first approached protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and treated the very idea as fanciful. Some people described images almost as clear as the real scene; others reported nothing they would call a picture.

Galton's sample was small, all male and anything but typical, so his proportions tell us little. But the basic observation - that people differ enormously in what they experience when they imagine - was right, and it was then largely forgotten for more than a century.

The man who lost his mind's eye

The modern story starts with a single patient. In 2010 the neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues described a man they called MX, who had abruptly lost the ability to generate visual images. He rated his imagery as almost absent on standard questionnaires, yet he performed normally on tests of perception, visual imagery and visual memory. Brain scans suggested he was solving imagery tasks with a different strategy from other people.

When the case was reported in the media, people began to contact Zeman's team with a different story: they had never had visual imagery at all. In 2015 Zeman, Michaela Dewar and Sergio Della Sala described 21 of these people in the journal Cortex and gave the trait a name. Aphantasia comes from the Greek phantasia, image or appearance, with the prefix a-, without. Because it had been lifelong rather than caused by an injury, they called it congenital aphantasia.

It is worth being clear about what that 2015 paper was: a short report on a self-selected group of people who had recognised themselves in a news story. It named and described the phenomenon. It did not, and could not, say how common it was.

How common is it?

That question was taken on by Carla Dance, Alberta Ipser and Julia Simner who published their estimate in 2022 in Consciousness and Cognition. To avoid recruiting only people who were already interested in aphantasia, they screened two general samples with the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, a standard measure developed by David Marks in 1973.

• In 502 undergraduate students, 4.2% met the criteria for aphantasia.
• In a new sample of 502 people from an online survey platform, the figure was 3.6%.
• Combined, that is about 3.9%, with no difference between men and women.

Two caveats matter. First, the definition the study used covers imagery that is entirely absent or markedly impaired, so it includes people with very faint images, not only people with none. Second, everything rests on self-report: people describing their own inner experience, which nobody else can check directly. Different questionnaires and cut-offs give somewhat different numbers, so treat "around four percent" as a reasonable estimate rather than a fixed fact.

What changes, and what does not

The most detailed early profile comes from a 2020 study in Scientific Reports by Alexei Dawes, Rebecca Keogh, Thomas Andrillon and Joel Pearson, which compared people with aphantasia to people with typical imagery.

• Other senses - on average, people with aphantasia also reported weaker imagery for sounds, smells, touch and so on, although not all of them lacked it completely.
• Memory and the future - they described their autobiographical memories and imagined future events as less vivid and less rich in detail.
• Dreams - they reported fewer dreams, and less vivid ones. This is interesting because many people with aphantasia still dream in images, which suggests that voluntary and involuntary imagery are not the same thing.
• Spatial ability - this appeared unaffected. People with aphantasia could still reason about space and layout.

This fits what MX showed back in 2010: you can remember what something looked like, and answer questions about it, without the experience of seeing it inside your head. The knowledge is there; the picture is not.

Aphantasia is not a diagnosis in the major psychiatric classifications, and nothing in this research suggests it is an illness. It is better understood as one end of a spectrum. At the other end researchers describe hyperphantasia, imagery so vivid it can feel close to real perception. Most people sit somewhere in between.

What this means for you

If you have just realised that other people literally see things when they imagine, you are in good company, and there is nothing to fix. A few ideas that follow from the evidence:

• Notice how you actually think. Many people with weak imagery rely more on words, facts or spatial relationships. Our visual-verbal test explores whether you tend to think in pictures, diagrams or words, and our memory type test looks at how you remember.
• Do not assume advice fits you. Techniques built around visualisation, from memory tricks to some relaxation exercises, simply assume a mind's eye. If they do not work for you, that is information, not failure.
• Be curious about others. Ask the people around you what they see with their eyes closed. The answers are often surprising in both directions.

If you want a rough sense of where you fall, our mental imagery test asks how vivid your inner pictures are. It is a self-report measure, like the research ones, so read it as a description of your experience rather than a verdict about your brain.