Is our mental ability to visualize, imagine, conceptualize, recall or mock up scenes, objects and memories in our head. The detail and depth of our ability varies for individuals ranging from vivid mental movies to aphantasia, a condition where the individual has no visual imagery happening in their imagination. Their internal “screen” is blank. When we perceive something in front of us, “we try to infer meaning from an image,” Nadine Dijkstra said. Electromagnetic waves enter our eyes, are translated into neural signals and then flow to the back of the brain, where they’re processed in the visual cortex. The information then flows forward toward the front of the brain into the memory or semantic regions, a pipeline that ends with us knowing we are looking at a dog or a flower.
“During imagination, we basically do the opposite,” Nadine Dijkstra said.
You start with knowing what you want to imagine, like a dog, and that information flows from the brain’s memory and semantic regions to the visual cortex, where the image is sketched. That’s a working model of how visual imagination works; there’s still much that is not known about the process.
In reality, people’s subjective experiences vary dramatically, and it’s possible that there are different subsets of aphantasics neural explanations. Aphantasia and the opposite hyperphantasia, are on a continuum of vivid reality to an inability to mock up an image in their mind’s eye.
Neuroscientists say that aphantasia is not a disorder, it’s a different way of experiencing the world. Early studies suggested that differences in the connections between brain regions involved in vision, memory and decision-making could explain variations in people’s ability to form mental images. Many people with aphantasia dream in images and can recognize objects and faces, it seems likely that their minds store visual information that they can’t access voluntarily. It Is thought that about 1% to 4% of the general population lack the ability create a mental image while awake, and is called aphantasia.
Cornelia McCormick, a memory researcher at the University of Bonn in Germany, became curious. Knowing that mental images are intimately tied to memory, she wondered how the aphantasia people remember their own lives? She had her team
scan those with and without aphantasia while they recalled personal memories. They found that people with aphantasia tended to have weaker autobiographical memory and less activity in the hippocampus, which helps encode and retrieve such memories.
A lack of mental imagery doesn’t imply a lack of imagination. Adam Zeman has heard artists who self-describe as having aphantasia. Shomstein considers herself a creative and imaginative person. Successful people, including the novelist Mark Lawrence and software engineer Blake Ross, a co-creator of the Firefox web browser, have revealed they have aphantasia.
People with hyperphantasia see mental images that seem to them as real as the things they actually see. The images that hyperphantasics see aren’t the same as hallucinations because they know, at the time, that they’re not real. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel real.
Some hyperphantasia’s even choose to live in their imagination, rather than in real life, Nadine Dijkstra said. “They sit down on the couch, they don’t leave their house, they don’t go to school, they don’t see friends, they don’t go to their work. They just imagine their whole life just the way they want it. Because for them, it feels real.”
Our brain uses past experiences to guess what it is seeing, hearing, and feeling. Color is wavelengths and the cones in back of eye create the color that works for us. Brain PREDICTS what it will see and is useful to keep the biology alive. The brain constructs a “simulated” version of reality. Pain is a signal created by the brain to protect the body, which can sometimes be “tricked” or mismanaged. Neuroscientists explain that our perception is like a computer desktop, simplifying the complex “code” of the quantum field.