Some people just have no imagination.
Hey brainiacs, Jules here for DNews.
If I asked you to count the windows in your house right now without getting up, you’d
probably have no problem recounting them all, unless you live in a glass house, in which
case you just have one giant window and have to get dressed in the basement.
But when you’re tallying up all the windows, can you practically see each room?
Do you feel as though you’re standing in your kitchen or your living room as you count
them?
That’s the experience most people have, but for a small percentage of you, that’s
not the case at all.
And this may be the first time you’re learning that your brain works differently.
Some people have no imagination, and I mean that in a literal sense.
While others can read a book and hallucinate a magical world of wizards and friendship,
these people “see” nothing.
The condition isn’t unheard of; it was first identified in 1880, but it’s unexplored
enough that it didn’t have a name until 2015.
Dr. Adam Zeman is Ze-Man who coined the name aphantasia.
The prefix a- means “without,” and phantasia is the classical greek term for imagination.
Zeman and his colleagues first began studying the phenomenon in 2003 when a 65 year old
man approached them complaining that he had lost the ability to picture things after a
heart surgery.
How a heart surgery could do this?
No idea.
Anyway the patient, given the codename MX, was a unique opportunity for science.
Zeman and team ran him through numerous tests.
His brain was examined in an fMRI machine while he looked at pictures of famous people
and was asked to name them.
At this point everything in his noodle was unremarkable, but when he was only given their
names and asked to picture their faces, the visual areas in the back of his brain went
dark.
Forming an actual picture in your mind requires regions all across your brain.
To call up a mental image the frontal and parietal lobes think about what you want to
see while the occipital and temporal lobes provide the actual visuals of the objects.
If one of these areas functions differently than normal or gets damaged, it can result
in aphantasia.
MX seemed like a rare find…
Until his story was covered by Discover Magazine, and some of the readers wrote in to say they
had never been able to picture things since birth.
Even stranger, for some of them they were just discovering that they were different.
Their whole lives, they were under the impression when someone asked them to “picture” something,
it was a metaphor and there were no actual pictures in their mind.
Biologist and aphantasiac Craig Venter says it’s like a computer without a screen.
There’s memory, processing, and inputs, but no way to see what’s happening.
It doesn’t have to be just visuals either; when programmer Blake Ross thinks of a beach
he doesn’t hear the waves, smell the salt, or feel the warmth.
He just thinks of facts about beaches.
While a lack of imagination may seem like a drawback, people with aphantasia seem to
have developed ways around it.
MX showed increased brain activity in his frontal regions when asked to picture faces,
and could still solve puzzles that require most people to mentally rotate an object.
Zeman surveyed 21 people who claimed to have this problem and asked them to count the windows
in their house.
14 of them could do it.
Because they can work around their lack of visuals, people with aphantasia lead normal
lives and run the gamut from engineers to artists.
No one knows how many there are but surveys estimate it’s around 2 to 3 percent of the
population.
The real number could be higher though, as many don’t realize they’re different until
it’s pointed out to them.
They just need one thing to tip them off, like a news article… or this YouTube video.
Whether or not you can visualize things, you might be interested in how things are made.
I am, and I like to binge watch on the show How It’s Made.
Now you can watch that and other Science Channel shows on the Science Go App!
Check it out and download for free at your local App Store.
Some of you can’t picture things, but others may see more than you intend to.
If you want to know more about hallucinations, Trace and Julian cover them right here.
So -- after watching this, are any of you just realizing you might have aphantasia?
Technically 2% of you should!
Let us know down in the comments and don't forget to like and subscribe for more DNews
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