Are you one of those people who are unable to easily imagine different scenarios or visualise memories from their past? Then you might be affected by a rare condition known as aphantasia. It means that you were born without what’s commonly known as the ‘mind’s eye’.
As visualisation is enabled by activities in a network of regions widely distributed across the brain, an alteration of function at several points in this network could be the reason behind the inability to do so. The condition was first identified by Sir Francis Galton in 1880.
New interest about the condition was sparked recently when 21 people contacted Professor Adam Zeman at the University Of Exeter Medical School after reading an article on his previous research and realising that they had an inability to imagine, according to reports by the Daily Mail.
The condition had significantly impacted the lives of these patients because of their inability to visualise memories of their partners or departed relatives. Some of them found exercises like descriptive writing to be meaningless and that careers like architecture and design were not for them because they wouldn’t be able to visualise an end product.
Dr Zeman explained that the participants of the study mostly had some first-hand knowledge of imagery through their dreams, according to the Daily Mail. “Our study revealed an interesting dissociation between voluntary imagery, which is absent or much reduced in these individuals, and involuntary imagery, for example in dreams, which is usually preserved,” he added.
Reportedly he and his team plans to conduct further studies with those affected by this condition to find out why some people have inherent poor or diminished visual imagery ability.
