Okay, there’s something I want you to visualise, so, if it helps, perhaps close your eyes.
In your mind, I want you to imagine the sky.
It’s really blue and suddenly…
it becomes brighter.
Then.. a rainbow appears.
You turn your head and… another rainbow appears.
It’s... a double rainbow.
It so vivid and… intense.
Now, how clear is this mental image?
Can you see each colour in the rainbow?
Can you picture a bird flying in front of it?
When some people are asked to picture something with their mind’s eye – they... just can’t.
Hey Andy, it’s Vanessa!
How are you?
I’m quite well, yourself?
I’m well...
Now, Andy believes he has Aphantasia – a condition where you have little or no mental
imagery.
It’s been referred to as “blind imagination” or having a blind mind’s eye.
I asked Andy to imagine his breakfast table, and, well, his brain uses different strategies
to imagine these visual problems.
It’s more akin to a word cloud.
Like a long list of adjectives that describe the table.
If you were to take me out of my kitchen and ask me to describe my dining room table, I
could tell you things about my dining room table, but if I wasn’t told the word was
imagine, like image, I wouldn’t use visual metaphors.
When I imagine a coffee table, I more imagine concepts about coffee tables.
Now I came to learn about Aphantasia a few weeks ago, when Andy commented on my last
video...
“I don’t have any visual memory or imagination”
And people commenting on articles…
was exactly how this condition came to be studied.
Now, we’ve known that some people have a “blind imagination” since the 1880s, when
Sir Francis Galton asked people to visualise things about their breakfast table.
One of the subjects – actually Charles Darwin – said it was “as distinct as if I had
photos before me”.
But a few people couldn’t visualise the table at all.
Fast forward to the early 2000s when neurologists at the University of Exeter encountered patient
MX – a Scottish man who lost his ability to visualise things after surgery.
When MX was in an fMRI machine, researchers showed him a picture of then Prime Minister
Tony Blair and asked questions like, Does he have large ears?
(Well, yes).
As expected, they saw normal activity in his visual areas.
Next they asked him to imagine Blair’s face – they expected to see similar brain activity
– But instead, many brain areas were active, including those used for semantic retrieval.
MX was trying to imagine a face, but in a non-visual way, using words instead of images.
When that research was published in 2010, Carl Zimmer wrote this article for Discover
Magazine… and emails starting rolling in from people who experienced the same thing…
some since birth.
The blind imagination of this group of emailers was the focus of a new paper – published
by the same researchers in 2015 – who officially named this “Aphantasia”.
They found the majority of the group couldn’t conjure up a mental image at will, but they
still had ‘flashes’ perhaps in dreams, most said they had some trouble remembering
past events and most discovered their aphantasia in their teens or twenties.
I didn’t realise until recently, like I’m a grown up, and I didn’t realise until recently
that visualise, in terms of mind’s eye, I thought they were euphemisms, maybe a quirk
of the English language.
It felt like not realising I was colour blind.
From here, Carl Zimmer wrote about the article again, SciShow posted a video on it and the
researchers received close to a thousand emails from people who had just heard of Aphantasia
and believed they have it – similar to Andy.
As the lead researcher put it, “attesting to the popular interest and relative obscurity
of this fascinating variation of human experience”
But why is the human experience so varied?
We don’t know.
But scientists are digging deeper into Aphantasia using brain imaging.
The story of Aphantasia shows us how we can all contribute to a better understanding of
how the brain works, how you work...
And soon we’ll know more about how, exactly, some of us can visualise a double rainbow
in the first place.