Alec Figueroa
Mar 9, 202265 min read
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Aphantasia - What is it?
Aphantasia is defined as the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present.
Aphantasia is a peculiar phenomenon. There is still so much that the scientific community is discovering about the mind's eye. What is it? How do we define it? Is the experience of the mind's eye the same across the board? That there are so many questions which we're still answering, this makes defining the lack of a mind's eye very challenging.
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What we do know is that fMRI data displays a difference in how an aphantasic's mind works compared to a visualizer's. Yet what does this tell us about the benefits of a visual imagination or lack there of?
Aphantasia is a fairly new term, only being coined in 2015. But the research around mind's eye vividness goes all the way back to Francis Galton in the late 1800's. While he didn't actually mention aphantasia, his "breakfast study" did attempt to take measurements of people's varying ability to visualize. After that, David Marks created the VVIQ in 1973. Marks work is still used today as a helpful tool in determining visual imagery vividness. Flash forward to 2010, and patient MX asks Dr. Adam Zeman and team to attempt to figure out why he lost the ability to visualize. Check out the full timeline of aphantasia below.
Aphantasia - do I have it?
How to know one has aphantasia for sure?
Answering this question for oneself is definitely a challenge. Research is still sparse and our understanding of the visual imagination in general is constantly growing. This makes self diagnosis of aphantasia tricky. How does one step outside ones own thought-life to know for sure that they indeed are experiencing aphantasia?
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One question to ask is this: do you only experience thought in words? If so, you may be aphantasic.
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Even so, asking the right questions is only part of challenge. There do exist methods to somewhat test for aphantasia, one being the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), though this questionnaire does not directly removing subjectivity.
I've also released new testing methods to help bring objectivity to the diagnosis process. To see more info on what studies and experiments I'm currently running, click the link below.
Aphantasia: Open
Source Info
In 2022, I decided to do something radical: I'd release all of my mind's eye content and information in a giant guide. This essentially caused us to take an open-source approach to how I operate.
Check out my latest blog post on the left.
And for my open source mind's eye training materials, click the button below.
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