"Cure" Aphantasia - where to start

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Heads up:

This post is adapted from a recent YouTube video. The written version is useful, but the full experience happens when you hear the exercise spoken out loud. You can watch the video here:

https://youtu.be/LVwLP0AEywc

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If you’ve recently found out about aphantasia, or you’ve realized that your visualization feels weak, inconsistent, or confusing, you’re probably asking the same questions most people ask at the beginning.

What do I practice?

How do I know if I’m doing it right?

How long is this supposed to take?

I’ve been working in this space for a little over seven years now, coaching people one on one and doing my own independent research into mental imagery and visualization training. People come to me from all over the spectrum. Full aphantasia. Hypophantasia. People who visualize but don’t realize they do. And people who can imagine vividly but feel blocked in other ways.

What I want to do here is slow things down and walk through the main patterns I’ve seen again and again when people are just starting out. Let's explore the things that actually seem to matter early on, especially if your goal is to cure aphantasia or at least make meaningful progress with mental imagery.

First, get clear on what kind of imagery you actually have

This is the part that trips people up the most.

A huge amount of confusion around aphantasia and visualization training comes from mixing up different types of imagery. The big one is mind’s eye imagery versus projected imagery.

Most visualizers do not see anything physically when they close their eyes. I want to be very clear about that. Visualization, for most people, is a sense of imagery that occurs in thought, not in the visual field. It’s more like the feeling of sight than actual sight.

Projected imagery is different. That’s when you close your eyes and there is something that feels visually present in front of you. Dreams are a good example. They feel like you’re seeing something, even though your eyes are closed. So dreams would be a great example of projected imagery.

I’ve worked with people who believed they had aphantasia for years, only to realize they actually had a very active mind’s eye and simply lacked projected imagery. Once that distinction clicks, everything changes. And it seems to immediately unlock more access to the mind's eye!

If you’re trying to cure aphantasia or improve mental imagery, you have to know what you’re actually working with. Otherwise it’s like trying to hit a target without knowing where the target is.

Don’t let yourself off the hook too early

This part can be uncomfortable, but it’s important.

When I ask people how an exercise went, a very common answer is “nothing happened.” On the surface, that sounds clear. But when we slow it down and dig in, something almost always did happen. Maybe not always visual. But something did happen. And other times, it just didn’t match the person’s expectation of what visualization was supposed to feel like.

If you’re only looking for movie-like images, you will miss progress as it’s happening. And if you miss progress, it might as well not exist. That’s one of the reasons visualization training feels so slippery compared to learning a physical skill.

This is where metacognition comes in. Not what you’re thinking about, but how you’re thinking. How does a memory show up? How does an object exist in your mind when you think of it? What changes when you pay attention to that process instead of the content?

Without this, people can make real progress and still report that nothing happened.

Watch the internal narrative running in the background

This is a big one, and it’s subtle.

I’ve seen people make genuine breakthroughs in mental imagery, only to lose access to them later because their internal narrative never changed. The “I can’t visualize” story keeps running, quietly overriding new experiences.

That narrative doesn’t always show up as words. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. A heaviness. A sense of futility. But it aligns you with the outcome you don’t want.

If your goal is to cure aphantasia, or even just explore visualization training, you can’t ignore this layer. You don’t fight it. You don’t push it away. You notice it, acknowledge it, and then gently adjust how you relate to it.

Even a small shift matters. “I can’t visualize” becoming “I’m not able to yet” cracks the door open. That’s often enough for progress to start showing up.

Practice the right thing for the right goal

This sounds obvious, but it’s where a lot of people waste time.

Mind’s eye imagery and projected imagery are trained differently. Exercises that help one do not necessarily help the other. If you’re trying to develop mental imagery in thought, staring at afterimages may not get you very far. If you’re trying to develop projected imagery, purely conceptual exercises might feel useless.

I’ve seen people practice diligently for months with the wrong type of exercise, then finally switch approaches and notice changes within a few sessions. That’s not because they suddenly got better at effort. It’s because the practice finally matched the goal.

Visualization training is more like sports training than people expect. If you want to shoot free throws, you don’t train with a tennis racket. The brain is plastic, but it’s also specific.

Write things down or you will forget them

Progress in mental imagery is subtle, and the mind is very good at erasing subtle things.

I can’t count how many times someone has told me nothing happened all week, only to suddenly remember a significant experience once something jogs their memory. If it wasn’t written down, it might as well not have happened.

Journaling anchors progress. It gives your mind evidence that something is changing. It also protects against the default narrative wiping the slate clean every few days.

If you are serious about curing aphantasia or improving mental imagery, writing things down is not optional.

A final thought

Visualization training is a strange skill to learn because it’s internal, subjective, and hard to measure. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means the approach matters.

Most people who don’t make progress aren’t broken. They’re misaligned. Wrong expectations. Wrong exercises. Wrong framing. Or a narrative that quietly shuts the door before anything has a chance to grow.

If you’re willing to slow down, pay attention to how your mind actually works, and stay with the process long enough to notice small changes, a lot more is possible than most people realize.

And if nothing else, at least you’ll stop chasing an idea of visualization that was never accurate in the first place.

"See" you soon!

-Alec