When the Mind’s Eye Sees Nothing
Take a moment to close your eyes, focus on the backs of your eyelids, bringing all of your attention to the task of conjuring an image in your mind. More specifically, I want you to imagine an apple. Once you are done open your eyes. What did you see? Was it a blurred muddied sphere? Or was it an almost life-like depiction of the fruit? Pictured below is a way to rate how vivid this image was in your mind’s eye, and no, it makes no difference if the apple was green or red, or any other color shown below.
A lot of people may score fairly high, seeing the apple somewhere between the scale of 1–2, some may see it as less clear and score in the 3–4 range. Others score a 5, total darkness, an absence of imagery, that’s me. This moment of realization from this simple exercise was mind blowing to me, all my life I had assumed that when people said they could picture scenes or people’s faces in their minds that they meant metaphorically. I thought everyone saw nothing in their minds like I did.
There is a name for this phenomenon, aphantasia, which Webster’s dictionary officially defines as “the inability to form mental images of real or imaginary people, places, or things.” This occurrence was first studied by Francis Galton, a British naturalist, in 1880 and was not extensively looked at again until 2015. Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Exeter in England studied an elderly man dubbed “MX”. This man could not mentally visualize the faces of loved ones or recently visited places, but he could dream vividly until his mind’s eye went blind after a heart surgery. Zeman and his colleagues published their studies which were then covered by Anna Clemens in the article, When the Mind’s Eye is Blind. Zemen and his fellow researchers studied MX finding that he “scored poorly on questionnaires assessing the ability to produce visual imagery. Surprisingly, though, he was able to accomplish tasks that typically involve visualization.” Zeman and his colleagues then expanded their sample size in their tests and began reaching out to the public to fill out visual experience questionnaires, chiefly the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ). Shortly after the survey was made available to the public Zeman and his colleagues drew the conclusion that “based on the first 700 or so surveys, it is estimated that aphantasia affects about 2 percent of the population”.
Now what does this rare phenomenon mean for those select few (myself included) that are affected by it? For me it was a bit distressing as I pursue creative outlets like writing and graphic design, and I consider myself competent enough at both. But, how much better could I be if I were able to vividly imagine the things I want to write about or create inside of my head? The easy answer is not much, because I have found a way to compensate for this lack of a mind’s eye. When I was prompted to visualize the apple, I did not see the almost super-imposed red apple represented by the number 1 on the scale. Instead, I saw its’ characteristics flashing in my mind like a teleprompter almost. I cannot visualize objects but I know what they are made of, flashes of thought like: red, round, stem, leaf, and that little sheen in the upper left of the apple crossed my mind and allowed me to describe the apple, to write about the apple, but not to picture the whole thing in my head. Dustin Girnnel, author of My Mind’s Eye is Blind — So What is Going on in my Head? spoke with a cognitive neuroscientist, Stephen Kosslyn who described this adaptive form of visualization as “piggybacking on neurons involved in controlling physical movements rather than using the visual brain circuitry.”
Because of this inability to imagine things within my head reading is a weird experience. I’ve listened to my fellow English majors talk time and time again about how they can get lost in a book and almost visualize what they are reading in their heads. Again, I thought this was purely metaphorical as I have never experienced that. Instead I know what things are supposed to look like, I’ve seen apples, rainy streets, people, and most anything else in a fiction book thanks to life, art, movies, and TV. So, rather than visualizing the words I attribute them and the scenes set within them to my general understanding of the world. These scenes then become represented to the closest thing that I have witnessed myself. So, while I cannot visualize these descriptive elements laid out in books as actual vivid scenes, I still have a rough estimate of what they should look like. I read in a unique way and the same goes for my creative processes in writing and creating designs on the computer.
This alternate way of imagining objects has been used by other creatives and people affected by aphantasia other than me. In a video titled “I Have APHANTASIA (and you may too…without realizing it)” by YouTuber, AmyRightMeow, she discusses what I explained in the above paragraph and then goes on to talk about her own creative process for creating art. She describes it as “If I’m trying to create something new and imaginative, I have to look at copious amounts of references, but I can’t retain any of the images in my head, which can make being visually creative an absolute chore.” Whenever I sit down to write a scene or create a new design for a book cover at my job I go through the same process. For the book covers I look at the author’s previous work, scroll through a database of book covers, and check out royalty free image sites. Once I’ve done my research and I have a general idea of what I want to design in my head I keep all my tabs of references open to compulsively switch back and forth from them and to the design software until my design is complete. I need a constant stream of visual aides to get these covers done since I am incapable of picturing anything in my mind.
Now, all of this is not to say that you are creatively inept if your mind’s eye is blind because the YouTuber I previously mentioned, AmyRightMeow’s videos are all animation and speaking personally for myself, I’ve had plenty of my cover designs moved onto final print to show off the book in stores. That’s not to say having a blind mind’s eye isn’t frustrating because it is, I wish that I could picture things like so many other people do. Thankfully, in my research I’ve come across a brain exercise that has the potential to bring back or inspire visual imagery within your brain. It’s a technique called “Image Streaming”.
Image streaming is a mental exercise first described in Win Wingers book The Einstein Factor as a way to raise ones IQ, but Mark Martelli who wrote the article Using Image Streaming to Learn Visualization has adapted it to developing the mind’s eye to see again. Martelli describes image streaming as a 15 minute exercise similar to watching a movie and describing it to a blind person, “While watching that movie, you’d tell him exactly what’s happening on the movie screen so that he too can experience as much as possible. The more information you can convey to him, the better his experience.” There are three steps you must accomplish to do this exercise properly. Step one, preparation, you must find a comfortable, relaxing space where you will not be disturbed. Step two, relaxation, for five minutes fully relax any tense muscles in your body with your eyes closed, starting at your head and working your way down to your feet. Step three, vocalizing streams of images, describe what you see on your mental movie screen (mind’s eye) without interruption and in as much detail as possible. At first you may only see blotches and vague shapes but through patience and repetition eventually “As you describe the images of your mind, these images will grow in intensity, gain in color, and clarity. Your visual experience will flow much natural, become more vivid and more vibrant.”
This exercise while it may seem brief and too simple to perform such a complex task as allowing people to visually conjure images again has seen results for people affected with aphantasia. James Somerset in his article Better Photography and a Good Night’s Sleep describes a time where he attended a photography training course in London. During that course a man, Michael Neil showed him the positive effects of image streaming on people with aphantasia like himself. After a few months of daily practice in image streaming Somerset experienced the following results, “if I was aphantasic, Image Streaming cured it. I could see bright, vivid images in my head. I haven’t practiced the technique since — but I still see beautifully clear images in my mind’s eye.” While this may sound like a basic exercise it seems that through dedication and repetition (like most other skills) people affected by aphantasia will be able to reopen their mind’s eye and visualize objects, scenes, people’s faces, and anything else that they could think of almost effortlessly.
