Visualizing a memory is something that a lot of people do. If you smell cinnamon and ginger, you might remember having freshly baked cookies in the kitchen as a child. If you hear a certain song, you might remember dancing with someone special. Mary Wathen has never been through that. The 43-year-old lawyer from Newent, England, can’t remember any pictures of baking with her mother. She can’t picture herself opening presents as a child, seeing her husband’s face when he asked her to marry him, or even the birth of her children.
Wether said, “When people say they can bring up images, that sounds really strange to me.” “I can’t relive any of the things I see.” At the time, I only see it once. Feelings and thoughts guide me more than what I see. “I can’t remember how my boys were born right now, but I can tell you all about it,” she said. “I remember how I felt and can give you a detailed account of the room and each birth, but I will never see it again.”
Wethen learned a year ago that she and her mother have aphantasia, a rare form of processing in which their brains don’t make mental pictures to remember or imagine things. “Phantasia” is the Greek word for ideas. “I didn’t know that other people saw pictures until recently.” She said, “I just thought everyone was like me.” Experts say that aphantasia is not a disability or sickness, just an interesting difference in the way people live their lives, like being left-handed.
“I understand ideas, I understand things, and I have memories, but I don’t have any pictures to back them up,” Wathen said. “I read that the best way to describe aphantasia is as ‘You have all the same computer hardware as everyone else, but the monitor is off.'” “That really hits home for me.”
An Artist’s Encounter With Aphantasia
Geraldine van Heemstra is an artist from the Netherlands who works in a very different way. She has hyperphantasia, which means she can remember things very clearly, often as if they were happening again right now. Van Heemstra thinks that numbers and letters have colors and that people often have colorful auras around them. For her, remembering the birth of her daughter is like seeing warm colors and bright lights.
Heemstra smiled and said, “I remember a blue screen and then our daughter’s head popping up with a little sunrise over her head. I think she was screaming her lungs out.” “It’s just a beautiful memory with warm colors.” This kind of explicit image can help an artist, but it can also be very bad. Van Heemstra, who lives in both London and Edinburgh, Scotland, said, “Having too much imagination can also be a problem because you can overthink things and feel very insecure.”
For example, if she’s scared about going somewhere, she might think about it too much and have déjà vu. She said, “I think that happens because I’ve thought about it so clearly.”Van Heemstra can’t turn off her brain sometimes. “My son got me to watch a scary TV show last night about a woman who brought cocaine into Miami illegally and shot a child in the head,” she said. “Then all night, every time I tried to sleep, it was like cameras were going through all these very, very vivid and scary images in my head.”
Aphantasia Is Not A Disease Or An Impairment
Adam Zeman, a neurologist who is a professor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter in England and a special fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said that about 4% of people in the world may have aphantasia. In 2015, Zeman came up with the phrase after meeting a man who used to remember things very well but couldn’t after heart surgery.
The brain scans showed that when he looked at things, his brain worked properly, but when he tried to imagine them, visual parts of the brain were not active, Zeman explained. That’s when a lot of study on aphantasia started, according to Zeman, who wrote an article about it that came out Wednesday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. One of the progresses is a way to objectively measure not being able to picture.
When you think about looking into the sun, Zeman said, “your pupils actually get a little smaller.” “Just picture yourself looking into a dark room, and your pupils will get a little bigger.” But that doesn’t happen to people who have aphantasia. He went on to say, “People with aphantasia don’t sweat when they hear a scary story, but people with imagery do.” “But they get cold when you show them scary pictures. In this case, it means that you need images to get a gut reaction from an emotional story.
Some people with aphantasia also have memory problems, autism, or a condition called face blindness where they can’t recognize most faces, even those of people they know. Additionally, Zeman said that people who have aphantasia are more likely to work in science, math, or IT. Some people, like Wathen and her mother, are born with aphantasia, while others get it after hurting their brain. Zeman said, “We found that it seems to run in families. If you have aphantasia, your first-degree relatives are about 10 times more likely to also have it.”
Another finding is that a lot of people who have aphantasia dream graphically. How is that possible? Zeman said this is because the processes involved in making images when you’re awake are very different from those involved in making imaginary things when you’re dreaming. The person with aphantasia knows what imagery is, but they can’t bring it up during the day, he said. “For most people, that lack of imagery affects more than just their mind’s eye.”
That’s definitely true for Wathen, who can’t bring back a sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. Wathen, on the other hand, said that she is “led by emotions and feels things quite intensely” and that she could explain a smell, taste, or sound by how it made her feel. According to Wathen, who is a successful lawyer, she is very good at getting complicated ideas across: “I’m not really relying on images in any way, shape, or form, and don’t assume another person does.”
But she doesn’t like reading magical books. “It’s just some words on paper.” She says, “I don’t go on a journey and visit places in my mind.” This makes it hard for her to play pretend with her kids. She often sees her husband, who she now knows has hyperphantasia, do it without any trouble. “When I see them playing make-believe, like on a tractor or in a car race, I feel a little jealous,” she said. “I’m much better at playing a real game or helping people with their homework.”
But for Wathen, the worst thing about aphantasia is “not being able to see my children when I’m not with them.” I can’t find a picture of them. There’s no picture of them in my mind, but I can tell you exactly what they look like, how they act, and even what clothes they wore this morning. “It scares me to think that when I lose someone I care about, like my mom, I won’t be able to close my eyes and see a picture of her.”
Too Much Sharp Seeing
Zeman thinks that up to 10 percent of people in the world have hyperphantasia, which is the opposite of aphantasia in terms of how the brain processes information. Zeman said that people who have extra-vivid images are often artists and may feel strong feelings.
People have said that imagery can make emotions stronger, so he said, “It seems likely that people with hyperphantasia have more unstable emotions than people with aphantasia, though this hasn’t been well studied yet.”
