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Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

People with aphantasia can’t mentally visualize things. Mental imagery is a spectrum, and we lie outside it, in the dark

But it wasn’t until 2003 that the University of Exeter’s Adam Zeman published the first case report on aphantasia, after meeting a 65-year-old who lost the ability to mentally visualize familiar people and places after a surgery. Illustration: Rita Liu/The GuardianBut overall, people with aphantasia don’t seem to have serious problems navigating their day-to-day lives, unlike those with more severe memory conditions like episodic amnesia. Andrea Blomkvist, a researcher in philosophy of cognitive science at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow, said that her group had met aphants who are not just skilled at non-visual jobs and hobbies, but are artists, writers, animators.

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