PHANTASIA?
It was July 29, 2016 when I came across an amazing article written by Carl Zimmer, my favourite science writer. The piece, titled “Picture This? Some Just Can't”, had been published in the New York Times a year earlier and somehow I'd missed it. In the article Zimmer shared research on a newly described neurological disorder termed “aphantasia”. As the story goes, in 2005 a man went for minor surgery to unblock his coronary arteries. The operation was successful but four days later the man, given the pseudonym “MX” in the research and reporting, realized that when he closed his eyes he was no longer able to experience any of the very vibrant mental imagery he was accustomed to. His mind's eye, it seemed, was now blind.
Concerned, MX visited a Dr Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Exeter Medical School, in the hopes of correcting the problem. Dr Zeman had never heard of this condition and was unable to find descriptions of anything like it in any of the relevant medical literature. Intrigued, Zeman reached out to a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Edinburgh, Sergio Della Sala – someone Zeman knew was interested in how the brain deals with visual imagery. Together Zeman and Della Sala conducted a series of tests and brain scans on MX in an effort to learn more. They enlisted ten other participants, control subjects, to take part in a comparative study. This control group was made up of male architects, all around sixty years of age – men as similar to their subject as possible – all with relatively high intelligence, good visual acuity, and reliable memories. Zeman and Della Sala's tests confirmed the subject's claim that he could not form mental images. And yet, to everyone's surprise, MX was still capable of performing tasks assumed impossible without a working mind's eye. For instance, he could recall and describe landmarks and the faces of celebrities without trouble. In fact, he did so as well as the ten architects being examined. And when shown a pair of three-dimensional objects, just like the other control subjects, MX was able to rotate them in his mind, as the test required, to determine whether or not these objects were the same shape. MX was able to solve these kinds of visual puzzles and do so in the same amount of time as the other men – those reporting normal and vivid mental imagery.
Perhaps most interesting to the researchers, this incident and subsequent work suggests our thinking about how our brains work, or at least those parts responsible for mental imagery and maybe even memory, is deeply flawed. After all, it seems, the man who became blind in the mind took no time at all rewiring his brain. He didn't spend years or months or even weeks in therapy coaxing or tricking his brain into making sense of the visual world non-visually. Instead, his brain just switched over, it seems, possibly instantaneously. Or it may be that there was no switch at all, that the visual component is totally auxiliary, a kind of cosmetic enhancement to memory and not, perhaps, even important. This incident and initial research suggests there's more going on in the mind than the basic and direct visualization.
Most interesting for me was that I have the same experience as MX. However, unlike MX, I did not lose my ability to form mental images: I've never had this ability. It's possible that I did have a functioning mind's eye as a young child and cannot remember it; that I lost my ability to visualize after a some sort of trauma or something (maybe a fall from a tree or down the stairs, perhaps...), but as as far as I can recall I've never “seen” anything in my head. And like MX, I have no trouble imagining or remembering non-visually. As I had no apparent deficiency but was unable to probe other people's minds, the only discordance I ever noticed was others' use of language and their description of their internal mental experience, that of being visual. Despite having plenty of conversations with folks about this matter, about their experience and my own and trying to nail down the difference, I was never really able to get anywhere. As a result, my whole life, up until reading Zimmer's article, I was very confused when people talked about mental imagery and visualization, about “seeing” something in their mind. So, what was most shocking about reading this article was for the first time actually confirming that almost everyone on the planet has a strange kind of superpower I cannot really fathom. What was really amazing was that much of Carl Zimmer's writing felt paraphrased from conversations and experiences I've had with folks over the last two decades. In that way, and it's totally cliche to say but, it was such a relief to have this labelled and to find out I'm not the only one and not just crazy.
At the end of the New York Times piece Zimmer gave out the contact information for Dr Zeman, encouraging anyone with like-experience to contact him. Of course I did, and just a few hours later I'd filled out and returned a couple of questionnaires Dr Zeman sent me. He explained that in the time since publication he's heard back from close to six thousand folks like myself and MX, and from all around the world. People who were born with and without the ability to form mental images and with varying image conjuring abilities, from fleeting to faint to, like me, nothing whatsoever. Zeman, I'm very excited to learn, is planning to conduct more studies and more brain scans and I've been put into contact with a community of aphantasics and other interested parties. Together we may somehow be able to open a new window onto cognition. So how bad-ass is that? Weeee!
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