Aphantasia: the inability to visualize mental images.

This strange mental disorder causes some people to be unable to think in images.

In 2016, a phenomenon that had gone virtually unnoticed until then, except for a pioneering study conducted by the famous Francis Galton at the end of the 19th century, began to become popular. It is about the inability to visualize mental imageswhich has been baptized with the name "aphantasia".

In this article we will describe exactly what aphantasia is and what has been its historical development.. To do so, we will focus on the contributions of Galton and Adam Zeman, as well as the case of Blake Ross, who contributed greatly to the awareness of aphantasia thanks to the intervention of social networks.

What is aphantasia?

In 1880 Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a pioneer in the use of statistics in psychology and eugenic ideas, published the results of a psychometric study on individual differences in the ability to generate mental images. Galton found great variability in this aptitude, including some cases in which it was absent.including some cases in which it was absent.

During the 20th century, research on this phenomenon was very scarce, although there are some references under Anglo-Saxon terms that can be translated as "defective revisualization" or "visual irreminiscence". Studies by Adam Zeman's team (2010, 2015) and individuals such as Blake Ross have popularized it under the name "aphantasia".

The limited data currently available suggest that between 2.1% and 2.7% of the general population is unable to generate mental imagery, and therefore may be considered cases of aphantasia (Faw, 2009). It also appears that the disorder may be more common in males (Zeman et al., 2015), although it is not yet possible to say for sure.

It is believed that aphantasia may be neurologically associated with synesthesia and associated with synesthesia and with congenital prosopagnosiawhich consists of a marked difficulty in recognizing people by their faces. People with synesthesia score very high on visualization tests, and the opposite is true for cases of prosopagnosia.

Contributions from Adam Zeman's team

The term "aphantasia" was coined by a team at the University of Exeter, UK, led by Adam Zeman (2010). These authors published an article about the case of MX, a man who reported a loss of the ability to visualize as a consequence of coronary angioplasty.. After this milestone aphantasia started to become popular.

Zeman et al. further raised awareness of aphantasia with their second text on the subject (2015). The Exeter team relied on input through questionnaires from 21 people who had contacted them after reading the previous article and identifying with the description of this peculiar "imaginative blindness."

The study by Zeman et al. revealed that there are varying degrees and forms of presentation of this phenomenonThus, some people are unable to produce visual images voluntarily but can experience them spontaneously, both in wakefulness and during sleep. On the other hand, in other cases, these capacities are not even preserved.

The interference of aphantasia in the lives of those who experience it seems to be rather limited in general, although a significant proportion of the participants reported problems in autobiographical memory associated with this deficit, which they tended to compensate for through the verbal format or what Zeman et al.They tended to compensate through verbal format or what Zeman et al. call "subvisual models".

The case of Blake Ross

In April 2016, software engineer Blake Ross, co-creator of the web browser Mozilla Firefox and former product manager at Facebook, published a text in this social network in which he recounted his experiences with aphantasia. It was a New York Times article analyzing MX's case (Zeman et al., 2010) that inspired him to share his account.

Ross stated that he did not know he experienced this phenomenon until he read about its existence. Until then, he said, he believed that concepts such as counting sheep to promote sleep consolidation seemed like metaphors to him. He was not able to visualize the face of his deceased father, and believed that no one could really generate clear mental images..

Of course, Ross's text went viral and led many more people to the same revelation than it did him. Since then we have witnessed a rapid and remarkable increase in awareness of this curious imaginative deficit; consequently, it is to be expected that the coming years will also see an increase in scientific knowledge about this curious imaginative deficit, scientific knowledge about aphantasia is also expected to increase in the coming years. about aphantasia will also increase in the coming years.