What is Aphantasia (Mind blindness)?
Aphantasia is the state of being in capable of visualizing the images seen in the outside world. It is estimated that 2% to 5% of the society suffer from this disorder throughout their lives. There is an increasing prevalence of aphantasia among family members. In aphantasia, how deficiencies in visual imagery affect abilities, such as memory, fantasizing, dreaming, creativity, is an important topic of research.
What is the neurobiological foundation of aphantasia?
In a study (2021) carried out by Doctor Wilma A. Bainbridge of the Brain and Cognition Laboratory of the American National Institutes of Health, along with her team, it was found that aphantasic individuals have no spatial problems, though having problems in creating the contents of visual images.
In a study published in the journal Cortex, 61 aphantasic individuals and matched healthy participants were shown three pictures of a living room, a kitchen, and a bedroom, and they were asked to draw each one out of memory. In the other phase, the drawings of the participants were subjected to evaluation on the Internet from two aspects: Object details (what the objects look like) and spatial details (dimensions and locations of the objects). The drawings were objectively interpreted on the Internet by more than 2700 online raters.
Of the study, the researchers expected that people with aphantasia would have difficulties while drawing the pictures out of memory as they could not gather these pictures in their minds. The data obtained from the study partially confirmed this expectation. Bainbridge, head author of the study, said “Our findings showed that aphantasic people drew the objects in their correct dimensions and locations, though having achieved fewer visual details like colors while drawing fewer objects compared to typical viewers (non-aphantasic individuals).”
Are aphantasic individuals able to make up for the visual blindness in their minds?
Doctor Zoe Pounder, the other head author of the study and a researcher on the field of Visual Neuroscience from the University of Westminster, London, said “Some aphantasic participants verbally noted what the object was instead of drawing it; for instance, writing down the word “bed” or “chair”. This shows that aphantasic individuals can use alternative strategies like verbal representations, instead of visual memory.”
In the study carried out with aphantasic individuals, the researchers also had the opportunity to make research on whether it is necessary to use the visual image in image-related memory tasks. In a memory task that required the images to be rotated in the mind, aphantasic individuals were able to perform on the same level as non-aphantasic individuals. This performance shown by aphantasic individuals demonstrated that it is not necessary to see through the mind’s eye for a task of rotating things in the mind.
Lives of Aphantasic Individuals
According to a survey study (Zeman et al., 2020), which was carried out with approximately 2000 aphantasic individuals and published in the same journal, it was seen that aphantasic individuals have high rates of working professionally in mathematics-related or scientific jobs. In this study, a certain portion of the aphantasic individuals reported that they had difficulties in recognizing faces and that they had a weak autobiographic memory (memory of life events). Nearly half of the aphantasic individuals reported that they had dreams, although these dreams consisted of conceptual and emotional contents with no vividness in visual sensation or in other sensations (auditory, tactual, olfactory).
Even though research cannot categorically reveal the underlying causes of the diversity of the mental sensations like those in aphantasia, most of our mental experiences are not universally experienced the same way, as shown by aphantasia.
REFERENCES:
– Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A. F., & Baker, C. I. (2021). Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Cortex, 135, 159-172.
– Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., … & Winlove, C. (2020). Phantasia–the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex, 130, 426-440.
