The brain is the most complex part of the human body. While there is much that we have learned about its workings, it is clear that we have only scratched the surface of understanding its complexity so it should not be surprising that we keep discovering new aspects of it.

In the November 3, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar discusses something that had only been dimly perceived in the past but came into the awareness of the scientific research community within the last two decades. It has been given the name of aphantasia. The word phantasia was defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure up an image in the imagination, so aphantasia is the inability to do so.

The reason that this feature of the brain remained under the radar for so long is because the people who had been born with it did not realize what they were missing because why should they? It must be like people born with color-blindness. They would assume that the world of color that they see is the same as what everyone else sees, until something happens that makes them realize that there is a difference.

So with aphantasia. The article describes a physicist Nick Watkins who could recall the events in his past but did not relive them in his memory. It did not occur to him that others could so. Then, while reading a newspaper article in 1997 in which the author vividly described recalling the images of his past, he had an epiphany.

For some reason, these sentences revealed all at once to Nick what in the whole course of his life he had not realized: that it was possible to see pictures in your mind and use those pictures to reëxperience your past.

This was startling information. He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally. And then there was the notion of using those mental images to revisit a memory. It was an astonishing idea.

When Watkins asked people whom he knew if they could recall imagery from their past, all of them said that of course they could. His lack was not a hindrance to functioning in life as such (after all, he had got a PhD in physics and was doing quite well) but it was disconcerting to discover that he could not do what everyone else seemed to be easily able to do. He doubted that he was unique and looked into the literature and found that there had been reports here and there in the past but no systematic study. Francis Galton in 1880 came the closest to studying it by querying scientists as to whether they could. Galton reported:

To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words “mental imagery” really expressed what I believed everybody to suppose them to mean. . . . They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who were normally endowed, were romancing.

Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh, encountered a patient named Jim who said that, after having a cardiac procedure, he noticed that he could no longer picture anything in his head. Zeman decided to do an MRI study.

He recruited a control group of men of similar age and put them and Jim through cognitive tests in an MRI scanner. Here, he found the neurological correlate that he was looking for. Although Jim’s brain responded normally to tests of recognition (being shown images of famous faces), when he was asked to generate a mental image the scanner showed only faint brain activity, compared with the brain activity in the control group. Instead, there was activation in areas of the frontal lobe that were typically activated in situations of cognitive effort or dissonance. Jim was trying, but failing.

Once an article about Zeman’s work on this phenomenon appeared in major media, thousands of people contacted him saying that they recognized themselves in it.

Most were congenital aphantasics, and most not only lacked visual imagery; they could not mentally call up sounds, either, or touch, or the sensation of movement. Many had difficulty recognizing faces. Many said that they had a family member who was aphantasic, too. Most said that they saw images in dreams.
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Some people who wrote had once had imagery but lost it. About half of these had lost it as a consequence of physical injury—stroke, meningitis, head trauma, suffocation. The other half attributed their loss to a psychiatric cause—depersonalization syndrome, depression.

But it turns out that some people contacted him having the opposite quality, who had extraordinarily vivid imagery, graphic and inescapable. This has been given the name hyperphantasia. This turns out to be enormously beneficial to artists. There was a portrait painter who used this ability to paint three hundred portraits in a single year. This was because all he needed was for one sitting where he stared at the sitter for half an hour, absorbing as much detail as he could, while he made a sketch. He could later prop the sketch in a chair and recall every detail and complete the portrait in about eight hours.

As with some things, what initially seems to be a binary split turns out to be a continuum and most of us lie somewhere in between the two extremes.

Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.

Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books—since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull—or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling—because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.

That struck home. When I read novels, I tend to be focused on the story and plot and not pay much attention to the descriptions of places and people. I put that down to personal preference and habit, to being analytical, and thus choosing to skip over the descriptive parts, since they did nothing for me. But I can recall imagery from past experiences even quite vividly and I do have vivid dreams every night that involve people and places that I have not encountered before. Hence I do not think I am aphantastic but, according to the above description, think I am closer to the aphantasia end of the spectrum because I cannot create such imagery out of nothing. This may be why, though my own experience is not as extreme as that of Watkins or the scientists described by Galton, I feel comfortable in the world of science..

During my younger days I was a voracious reader of fiction and at one time thought of writing a novel but found that I could not conjure up verbal images of people or scenes like the authors I loved did. The best I could do was create word portraits of people that I knew personally and even those were flat and uninteresting. Although those descriptions did not do much for me, it seemed like a necessary part of writing fiction that I was rotten at. So I gave up and adopted what is now my writing style, which is journalistic, bereft of literary flourishes that require creating scenes in my mind out of whole cloth. But well known writers of fiction are able to generate images in their minds of people and places that they can then translate into words. Jane Austen, for example, was able to visualize in great detail the characters she created for her novels, so much so that she could recognize people like them if she encountered them in real life.

Presumably, novelists who invented characters also had a variety of responses to seeing them instantiated in solid form. Jane Austen wrote a letter to her sister in 1813 in which she described going to an exhibition of paintings in London and searching for portraits that looked like Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Bingley, two main characters from “Pride and Prejudice.” To her delight, she’d seen “a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her . . . exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her.” Austen did not see Elizabeth at the exhibition but hoped, she told her sister, to find a painting of her somewhere in the future. “I dare say Mrs D.”—she wrote, Darcy being Elizabeth’s married name—“will be in Yellow.”

Aphantastics tend to regret the lack of memories of people and events in their past. They might even sometimes worry that the lack of memories can signal dementia. Researchers tend to avoid classifying this as a disorder or even as a bad thing, and more as an interesting variant of human experience. But some people with aphantasia do see it as a curse and try to find ways to deal with it, even to the extent of trying drugs, even hallucinogens. But being hyperphantastic, while enabling creativity in artists, was not altogether a positive thing either. Like being aphantastic, it has its drawbacks. Being constantly flooded with imagery can make it hard to focus on any single thing. Being somewhat aphantastic may be an advantage for people who work in more abstract fields like science and mathematics since it might reduce distractions.

There is so much room for variations in brain activity that we should not be surprised that we keep discovering new features.