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Can you picture an apple? If the answer is no, you might have aphantasia. New research is shedding new light on to the purpose of visual imagination, helping us understand empathy, memory, and maybe even consciousness itself.
What does your mental image of an apple look like? Is there a leaf in the stem? Is it red or green? For about 4% of people reading this, you might not have imagined anything at all. In this case, you have something called aphantasia – you are partially or fully unable to produce mental images. Aphantasia can come in many forms: some have vivid dreams but can’t imagine something when asked, some have difficulty imagining visuals only, and some have problems imagining smells, tastes, sounds, or touch.
The science of aphantasia is quite new, with the first studies investigating this phenomenon starting out only about 15 – 20 years ago. From this young research, we know people with aphantasia generally don’t have problems with the fact that they can’t produce mental images. They can remember important instructions, manage tasks of daily life and social situations and are able to navigate spaces with no problems. Aphantasic people don’t even perform any worse than typical imagers when asked about visual information (color or shape of certain objects) during experiments. And there is no correlation with mental illness, with some researchers even theorizing that aphantasia can be protective against certain disorders.
However, there are some differences. People with aphantasia have a worse autobiographical memory (they remember their own lives in less detail). They also have less empathy when reading a description of an emotional event (for example a news story), but the difference is small and disappears when confronted with an image depicting the event. People with aphantasia are also more likely to occupy certain professions such as mathematics or engineering.
Can the brain explain these differences?
A new study sheds light on what might be happening in the brain (Liu et al. 2025): Researchers scanned the brains of ten typical and ten aphantasic individuals. While being scanned, each of the participants completed some tasks, like imagining two vegetables and answering which of their leaves is darker. Both groups were able to easily answer the questions. Surprisingly, the results show no difference in activation of brain areas. For example: both groups showed activation in the fusiform imagery node (FIN). This is a small area of the brain previously shown to be active during mental imagery regardless of content of the image.
But there was one very important difference which may explain aphantasia. Typical imagers showed a strong connection between the imagery node and another area of the brain located in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for organizing information from different parts of the brain, making decisions, and directing actions based on the information. The aphantasic people did not have this connection when trying to image something.
This is how the researchers behind the study interpret what they found: When a typical person is trying to remember something, like maybe a phone number, they will try to picture it (in this case maybe a phone call) and recall the information that way. An aphantasic persons brain actually produces the image – it just doesn’t ‘tell’ the control center of the brain about it. This means that aphantasic individuals have access to the content of mental imagery, but have no conscious subjective experience of a picture.
The research is young, but it suggests something interesting: A lot of what is happening in our brain might not be consciously accessible by us. There is a lot of information that we are possibly producing, but we don’t know we are producing it. The key to understanding consciousness or awareness may not lie somewhere specific in the brain, but on the highways that connect these regions.
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