No Pictures in the Mind — A Belated Recognition of My Aphantasia

The term aphantasia is hardly new to me. Several years ago it enjoyed a brief vogue on social media, where the question of whether the mind can display images became a minor sensation. In the flurry of posts and personal tests, many wondered aloud whether they, too, belonged to the imageless sort. I encountered the discussion then, yet never granted it serious attention.

Part of my distance arose from a habitual caution: I dislike attaching labels to myself on the strength of online chatter. To self-diagnose without solid medical knowledge strikes me as unwise—especially when a label may serve as excuse for behaviour and the truly afflicted risk collateral suspicion. Depression provides an example: many who sorely need help (I have had such moments myself) hesitate to speak, fearing disbelief. Aphantasia, I told myself, was likely another modest internet fad, a convenient banner for those disappointed in their own imaginative reach.

A second reason, I admit, was pride. I have long considered imagination and memory two pillars of my intellect. Blindness of the mind—the phrase reeks of deficiency; how could it pertain to me? I prided myself on rendering scenes vividly, whether poetic vistas or narrative tableaux; I could enter them at once and dwell there. Only now do I understand that fluent description and the presence of an inner image are not the same.

My memory, too, has been a quiet boast. Distant events and immediate facts alike tend to remain clear. I jest at my occasional lapses—say, forgetting for days to charge the mouse, so that the evening’s first act is a brief emergency recharge—yet these foibles never shook my core confidence. I still recall, at three years old, dropping a beloved die-cast helicopter: how my grandfather soldered its broken rotor, the rising fumes, the metallic tang. In secondary school I could recite long textbook passages and knew precisely where they lay upon the page—left or right leaf, upper or lower quadrant. That vaunted photographic memory, I now see, was exact record of words and spatial layout, not genuine visual replay. Even in recent research work I summon technical minutiae or past conversations with such precision that collaborators occasionally grow uneasy. All this made me reluctant to associate myself with aphantasia; between us there seemed a veil too dense to pierce.

Still, the world has a talent for surprise. Some days ago I was roaming the vast corridors of Wikipedia, link leaping from topic to topic, when the familiar yet distant word Aphantasia came once more into view. An inexplicable intuition bade me pause and read.

Figure: The first apple appears bright and lifelike; the second through fourth grow progressively simpler and vaguer, while the last—representing complete aphantasia—shows no image at all.

The deeper I read, the tighter my brow knit, especially upon seeing the now-famous apple test, blithely ignored by my earlier self. A cold thought drenched me: Wait—when people say they “imagine,” do they mean they actually see something inside their heads? In that instant my long-settled notion of imagination overturned.

What I had always termed imagination was the marshalling of attributes, features, and circumstances. Take an apple: I can construct an inventory of its traits—the curve or flatness, the little hollow by the stem, the skin’s polish or faint roughness, the muted gloss of its natural wax under light, the cool smoothness to the touch, the scent upon approach, the flavour upon biting. All these I can articulate at leisure. But none of this is seeing. Close my eyes, and what greets me is the customary darkness, perhaps tinged rose by stray light behind the lids. The field remains a passive canvas, never a picture self-painted. My imagination is, at core, a highly developed system of verbal organisation and logical inference, not an internal cinematograph.

To test the sudden suspicion I sought further testimony. The nineteenth-century polymath Sir Francis Galton startled me anew. He wrote:

To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them … They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man … has of the nature of colour.

These lines echoed across the decades to my present bewilderment. For the first time I felt, bodily, how arduous it is to comprehend a sense one does not possess—precisely as a congenital achromat, hearing endless talk of green, can grasp nothing of its essence. I even wondered: if one sees what is not before the eyes, is that not a hallucination?

I asked a friend what imagination felt like. He said it was almost like seeing, yet one knows the eyes are not involved. Rather than clarify, his reply deepened the fog, as though I were groping in a mist.

So I tried experiments of my own. See the sun: I can describe in detail molten sunsets and opalescent clouds, city skylines under cobalt dusk, or, at noon, streets shimmering in heat, even the furious fusion within the solar core. Lend me a poet’s line—“a lonely plume of desert smoke, a long river swallowing the round sun”—and I conjure the austere boundlessness of a desert plain. Yet however exhaustive my rhetoric, the mental backdrop stays blank. Language labours; the visual channel is still.

Then a simpler task: reduce the sun to a unit circle. I stared at a black dot on the screen, then shut my eyes and tried to retain it. Nothing. Even sliding my eyes in an imagined tracing of the circle produced no picture.

By now I had to concede: if ordinary imagination entails such inner vision, I cannot do it. I cannot see the shape of things within the mind. This, it seems, is what imagination has long meant.

Systematic study of aphantasia, I learned, began in earnest only around 2015. Instruments such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire rely heavily on self-report, which poses a quandary: how is one to gauge vividness who has never experienced a vivid image? It is like asking a colour-blind person to rate the brightness of red. Accordingly, I treat such findings with caution.

Neuro-imaging, for its part, shows that when an aphantasic attempts to imagine, the visual cortex nonetheless activates. The signals, however, never translate into conscious pictures—sensible enough, else our ordinary sight and spatial reasoning could scarcely function.

This discovery altered my conception of memory as well. I see now my recall is largely a narrative reconstruction based on fact, logic, and semantics, not the scenic replay many enjoy. I was astonished to learn that some truly relive an experience, re-seeing it. I can place a textbook paragraph on its exact page quadrant, yet cannot see the open book—the hue of the paper, the shape of the type.

To recognise a congenital absence, long overlooked, is disconcerting, especially when it unsettles one’s entire self-portrait. A fleeting wish even crossed my mind: that I had never revisited that article, that I might continue like Truman Burbank within his constructed dome—unenlightened, yet untroubled.

But life moves on. Thankfully, this mind-blindness has imposed no practical hindrance upon study, work, or living. I still apprehend the world, grasp intricate reasoning, and conduct orderly thought. In that sense it is a hidden blessing. This late self-knowledge, rather than a lamentable lack, feels more like a quiet reconciliation with the peculiar contours of my cognition. It reminds me that the landscapes of the mind differ as widely as those of the earth.

This piece recounts personal experience only and does not constitute medical advice. If you share similar concerns, please consult a qualified healthcare professional.