Aphantasia: I don’t see images in my head. Can training give me a mind’s eye?

Last December, I closed my eyes and tried to visualise a potoo. This tropical bird has a “round, kind of pill-shaped head”, my mental imagery coach described to me, and is covered with brown feathers. Its cartoonishly large mouth opens like a gaping smile to reveal a pink, fleshy colour, and its large irises can make its eyes seem entirely black.

Perhaps an image is appearing in your mind – a fuzzy outline of a bird’s body or a clear picture of its face. But I struggled to see anything. I have aphantasia, a phenomenon in which people don’t have a mind’s eye.

I had always known I wasn’t a visual thinker, but didn’t hear the term aphantasia until I was in my early 30s. I spent decades unaware that anyone actually saw images in their head. Since we don’t have access to each other’s minds, these internal differences often go unnoticed. But, as research on mental imagery has increased in recent years, so has media coverage. More people have learned that they are low or no-visualisers and have decided they want to do something about it. Online communities have formed, like the group Cure Aphantasia on Reddit, where nearly 3000 people share their strategies to improve mental imagery.

These groups were created outside of academia, though some members have ties to the research community. They believe the questions they are asking are worthy: can people who can’t see with their mind’s eye better their vision? Is anyone’s mental imagery changeable? While scientists stress that aphantasia is a mental difference and not a disorder, determining whether imagery can be improved could inform understanding of the condition. If aphantasia can be undone, for example, that suggests it is a trait that develops rather than an innate, permanent difference. And for everyone else – those with various shades of mental imagery – aphantasia training raises questions about whether they can change their mind’s eye too.

I was intrigued, so I reached out to one of the well-known coaches mentioned in aphantasia online communities to sign up for training.

TRYING TO CHANGE the mind’s eye is a recent endeavour, which isn’t surprising given aphantasia itself was only scientifically named 16 years ago. In 2010, Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Exeter, UK, and his colleagues published a case report about a man who lost the ability to mentally visualise after a surgery on his coronary arteries. People reached out saying they had never been able to see images at all.

In 2015, Zeman and his colleagues published a study of 21 people who had had aphantasia since birth, prompting tens of thousands to get in touch. Since then, mental imagery has been understood to be a spectrum. Some see crisp visualisations of their childhood memories, what they ate for breakfast or any object they are told to imagine. A UK study found roughly 4 per cent of people have always seen nothing, like me, while many fall somewhere in between.

Aphantasia studies must grapple with the fundamental difficulty of describing what is happening within the mind. Before I started my training, trying to visualise an object like an apple felt like someone was playing a prank on me. I saw darkness and found myself simply thinking the word “apple” or listing its qualities: round, red, firm. But even when I reflected on my own image-free thoughts, I sometimes wondered if aphantasia existed or if we were all describing the same interior landscape in different ways. Then I would hear people say they could see vivid imagery on command – rotating a red, shiny apple in circles and plucking off its stem – and I knew that was something I couldn’t do.

The coach I met with, Alec Figueroa, doesn’t have aphantasia himself, but became interested in enhancing mental imagery through his meditation practice. He offers his exercises for free and charges for individual coaching. More than 90 people have completed his programme and he has recorded 87 “breakthroughs”, which range from low (a few seconds of visual thought, such as seeing the colours of a sunset) to high (achieving a clear and complete visual image of a scene or object). Though he isn’t a scientist, he has collaborated with researchers on aphantasia studies.

Trainees assess their imagery using the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), a research tool developed in the 1970s that asks you to report how vividly you can picture familiar people, places and generic scenes. The scale relies on subjective reports, which creates the risk that two people who visualise an object the same way are giving it different ratings. Figueroa says he has seen people change their answers as they are told more about what mental imagery is.

This has been a conundrum for aphantasia researchers: how much of our experience of our mind’s eye is determined by metacognition, our ability to think about and reflect on our own thoughts? Joel Pearson, an aphantasia researcher and neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has been developing measures that are more objective, like the binocular rivalry method, an illusion that only works if the viewer is able to visually imagine a colour. Two images are layered on top of each other, one in red and the other in blue. Viewers close their eyes to focus on a colour, which then primes their brain to see that image – but only if they have mental imagery. For those with aphantasia, no image will dominate.

People with aphantasia show no changes in pupil size when they imagine light and dark objects, while people without the condition respond as they would if they were actually seeing the objects. Those with aphantasia also don’t have physiological fear responses when reading scary stories in a dark room, presumably because they aren’t able to visualise the stories.  measures suggest that aphantasia is a distinct difference, and not simply an unusual way of talking about internal experiences.

SEVERAL PEOPLE TOLD ME that Figueroa helped improve their mental imagery, but such stories should be considered with caution, says Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, UK, who has collaborated with Figueroa. No research has fully assessed any methods to improve mental imagery. There are a few case reports of people gaining imagery after taking psychedelics, but many others who have used these drugs haven’t experienced the same effects. In one study, Pearson and his colleagues increased or decreased the strength of mental imagery by sending electric currents to the visual cortex, but only in people who had some level of mental imagery already.

The ability to open up the mind’s eye could potentially reveal different types of aphantasia, says Pearson. Some might form images in the visual cortex of their brains, but “it just remains unconscious for some reason that we don’t yet know”, he says. “And then the others are 100 per cent pure aphantasia, where there is no image, there’s no unconscious image, there’s nothing.”

Pearson told me he is wary of the ethics of turning on mental imagery. What if people don’t like it? Those with aphantasia are divided. Harry O’Connor, one of Figueroa’s clients, told me he is desperate to see his loved ones’ faces in his mind. “I want to fix it,” he says.

The effects of struggling with visual imagery are mixed. Those with aphantasia can have worse autobiographical memory, and perform worse on some memory tests – but the memory levels required for daily life. 

There can be some emotional blunting in people without a mind’s eye, and empathy can be dulled, says Merlin Monzel, a psychologist at the University of Bonn, Germany, who studies aphantasia. But there is no evidence that aphantasia leads to deficits in overall intelligence, or even prevents a career in the arts: there are illustrators and fantasy novel writers with aphantasia. A lack of imagery also leads to less vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks and visual hallucinations, plus other intrusive, negative thoughts like intense depression.

Reeder attended a large mental imagery meeting in 2019 where people with aphantasia were asked if they wanted a cure. “At the time, about half of the audience raised their hand, but then the other half was very vocally against it,” she says. Zeman recalled some saying they would like to see what it is like, but “just for a day”.

I was hesitant at the prospect of radically changing my internal experience. As a journalist, I take photos while I am reporting to help me describe people or scenes. Physical attributes aren’t sticky to me and I don’t find them especially interesting. But, rather than being a hindrance, I feel my aphantasia heightens my sensitivity to people’s emotions and allows me to focus on ideas. I worried it would be overly busy to have a flood of images in my head. Wouldn’t it be terribly distracting?

I began my first training session with trepidation, but Figueroa’s friendly enthusiasm put me at ease. Our time together, over six hour-long meetings, consisted of aphantasia education and a series of similar exercises: he encouraged me to relax and to try to visualise objects, my surroundings or other scenes. Then, I picked out an aspect that might be related to visual or other sensory domains. Sometimes, we worked from real life, like when I walked outside my apartment building to describe my street, then closed my eyes and did it again. Other times, Figueroa detailed images to me while my eyes were closed, like with the potoo bird.

During our fourth session, before Figueroa showed me the picture of the potoo, he asked me to identify anything visual in my mind. I thought carefully. I wasn’t sure I could see colours or the likeness of the bird. Perhaps the physical shape of the head, I replied.

When Figueroa shared a picture of a potoo on the computer screen, I felt a jolt of surprise. “Whatever I was doing in my head, it was facing the other way,” I said. The bird in my mind was facing to the left, instead of the right. Figueroa was excited, and took this to be a sign of my visual acuity progressing.

As the lessons went on, my sense of spatial orientation, position and movement seemed to get stronger. When imagining my living room after I had sold my couch, I could sense internally that the room was missing an object. I somehow “felt” the empty space in my mind. In another exercise in which I listened to a random word generator, I had a strong response to the word “ceiling”. I wrote in my notes afterwards that I felt the “empty space above my head, leading to a stopping of space”.

AFTER MY SESSIONS ENDED, I called Zeman with questions. I still didn’t know if I had seen anything visual. How could I have known what direction the bird was facing, without picturing anything? Was this my breakthrough?

Zeman told me that, actually, what I was experiencing was in line with a leading idea in aphantasia research. A dominant model of visual processing is that it is divided into two streams: one deals with object imagery (the details of what something looks like) and the other with spatial imagery (where an object is in space and if it is moving). On questionnaires that measure spatial imagery, people with aphantasia score highly, sometimes even higher than those with typical mental imagery. This suggests aphantasia might be caused by a deficit in the object-imagery stream, but spatial processing is spared. Zeman says it sounded like I was becoming more conscious of spatial imagery. “It doesn’t really have much visual content, does it?” he says. “It’s to do with the arrangement of things in space, and it’s quite closely linked to movement.”

Zeman says he is open to the possibility that people can improve their imagery. In 2018, he and his colleagues looked at the brain activity of people with high and low imagery abilities and found that the latter group showed more widespread brain activation while trying to visualise, whereas the former group had more focused brain activation in areas in the back of the brain that include visual regions. Zeman took that to mean the good visualisers were more efficient. If visualising is a skill, it could be improved.

Still, he would be surprised if a few sessions of training could completely change a person’s internal experiences. “My gut feeling would be that if you have imagery, you should be able to enhance it,” says Zeman. “If you don’t have it at all, that may reflect some possibly biological, possibly inherited limitation.”

Later this year, Monzel will put Figueroa’s programme to the test in a study of people with and without aphantasia. If the training works on those with no imagery, Monzel says he would conclude that aphantasia probably isn’t a structural problem in the brain, but has to do with how brain networks are used. Maybe people rely on other methods of internal representation, while mental visualisation collects dust.

The research could reveal how flexible everyone’s imagery is, even in those without aphantasia. “We don’t even know whether people with mental imagery can train their mental images,” says Monzel. “This will be interesting to see whether it’s really a skill that can be developed, or whether you cannot change it all.” If mental imagery can be improved, it could theoretically be reduced too, he says, which could be useful for those with distressing mental imagery like that seen in PTSD, though research on suppressing mental imagery suggests the effects may not be permanent.

I am uncertain whether my spatial processing improved or whether I learned how to notice it better. My scores on the VVIQ before and after my training improved by three points. My hunch is that it isn’t because I could see more. Rather, I think I got better at thinking about how I think – and became aware of other sensory aspects of my internal representations.

I am pretty sure I won’t continue to train my mental imagery. I don’t think I will ever be like those who can watch a movie in their head. But, in trying to improve, I discovered how complex my representations are of the world around me. An inner world can be rich with other senses and emotions too, even one that is shrouded in darkness.