Aphantasia ( AY-fan-TAY-zhə, AF-an-TAY-zhə) is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images. Aphantasia can be considered the opposite of hyperphantasia, the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880, but it has remained relatively unstudied until recently. Interest in the phenomenon was renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 by a team led by the neurologist Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter. Zeman's team coined the term aphantasia, derived from the Ancient Greek word phantasia (φαντασία), which means 'appearance/image', and the prefix a- (ἀ-), which means 'without'. People with aphantasia are called aphantasics, or less commonly aphants, or aphantasiacs.
History The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880, in a statistical study on mental imagery. Galton wrote:
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, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words "mental imagery" really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of colour. In 1897, the psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot reported a kind of "typographic visual type" imagination, consisting in mentally seeing ideas in the form of the corresponding printed words. As paraphrased by Jacques Hadamard,
The first discovery of this by Ribot was the case of a man whom he mentions as a well-known physiologist. For that man, even the words "dog, animal" (while he was living among dogs and experimenting on them daily) were not accompanied by any image, but were seen by him as being printed. Similarly, when he heard the name of an intimate friend, he saw it printed and had to make an effort to see the image of this friend... Moreover, according to Ribot, men belonging to the typographic-visual type cannot conceive how other people's thought can proceed differently. The phenomenon remained largely unstudied until 2005, when Professor Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter was approached by a man who seemed to have lost the ability to visualize after undergoing minor surgery. Following the publication of this patient's case in 2010, a number of people approached Zeman reporting a lifelong inability to visualize. In 2015, Zeman's team published a paper on what they termed "congenital aphantasia"—a form of aphantasia in which individuals have never had the ability to generate voluntary mental images— sparking renewed interest in the phenomenon. One way of considering aphantasia is to ask a person to imagine a red apple (or red star) and rate their "mind's eye" depiction of it on a scale from 1 (photographic visualisation) through to 5 (no visualisation at all). Such a test was popularised on social media in 2020. Many people are shocked to learn that their own ability or inability to visualise objects is not universal.
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