Aphantasia refers to the lack of visual mental imagery.

A new perspective is emerging that suggests people with aphantasia may have unconscious mental imagery.

Evidence from neuroimaging and behavioral studies supports this view.

Aphantasia is a relatively recent term coined by Adam Zeman and colleagues in 2015 to refer to the experience of lacking visual mental imagery. When people are asked to close their eyes and imagine a red apple, most people can conjure some mental image of a red apple, resembling one of the representations in the diagram below:

If your mental image resembles option #1, it suggests you have highly vivid visual mental imagery, or even hyperphantasia. Options #2, #3, and #4 likely reflect the typical range of mental imagery vividness, from a fairly vivid representation to a vague, fuzzy representation that might just contain the outline of the imagined apple. However, if you chose option #5, indicating that you see nothing but darkness when you close your eyes, you might have aphantasia.

Scientific debate on the nature of aphantasia

In the last decade of research on aphantasia, researchers and philosophers have disagreed about the nature of the........

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