Picture This

Aphantasia

… is nothing to do with Walt Disney’s hippos in tutus, or not directly, at least. Aphantasia is a word coined around 2015 for a phenomenon that has only recently been properly identified and is the subject of ongoing research.

Bring to mind a “pink dancing elephant” or even a line of them trunk-to-tail. How detailed is the picture in your mind? Can you see the movement, the colour, the eyes and the flapping ears? Or just perhaps, like me, you can think about those things, imagine those things, but actually “picture” nothing at all. Yes, nothing. No pictures. Not ever. That’s aphantasia.

On this page:

• Intro – Aphantasia
• Not just a metaphor?!
• Black & white thinking
• Vision On
• Is my “red” your “red”?
• Elsewhere on the bookshelf (links)

Not just a metaphor?!

I try not to throw interrobangs (?!) around, but confusion and surprise hardly captures what I have experienced this week. One of my favourite BBC Radio 4 podcasts, The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry began a 21st Series, with an episode that changed how I think about thinking.

They explored the relatively new study of aphantasia, or rather the whole phenomenon of whether and how we can hold visual images in our mind’s eye. This includes interviews with researchers, including Professor Adam Zeman of Exeter University who coined the term.

Black & white thinking

So I did the VVIQ (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) online. It is very straightforward and takes just a few minutes. You are prompted to bring to mind an image or a scene, and then to focus on some aspects of each one. You rate the vividness of your inner projection on a five point scale from “no image at all” to “as vivid as seeing for real”. The evaluation is non-judgemental, and suggests that you are likely to fall into one of the four categories of degree of vividness, from “hyperphantasia” (you see things as clear as they are really in front of you) to “aphantasia” (no pictures at all).

Result… I see nothing. Not a thing. NUL POINTS! I am right at the limit of being aphantasic. “Move along, there’s nothing to see here.” (My lovely wifey however turns out to be a hyperphatasic and can conjure up full colour moving images at will. This is evidently useful in a dentist’s waiting room where she take a refreshing walk over Bodmin Moor without leaving the comfort of her own eyelids!)

I felt sad for a day or two, trying and failing to conjure up even a whisp of a picture inside my eyelids. But it’s an abandoned cinema, I realise. Has everyone except me known about this? And what are the implications? What am I missing? Does it inhibit creativity or recollection of past events? Does it mean I am somehow experiencing less of the world than the majority of people? And what else don’t I know about?

Of course anno domini blunts our speed of recall, and my quantum mechanics is a bit rusty after all this time, but these things are common experience. Generally the grey stuff still works quicker than the buzzer in University Challenge. An analogy is that for several years now, following some viral infection (no not that one), I have had virtually no sense of smell. Not good. I can taste perfectly well and, judging from my belt evidently getting shorter(!), I still enjoy my food just as much as ever. But no flower aromas, no delicious cooking smells, and I would be reliant on the smoke detectors in case of a fire. It’s not quite as bad as seeing the world in monochrome, but I certainly feel a pang of loss for what I remember of more complex flavours. And now for the pictures that I may never have known.

I do get glimpses of what it could be like, in half-awake states when I see clear, detailed, colour images (like the most vivid of dreams), but these offer only the occasional and unbidden still life, which evaporates away in seconds like the dot on the old CRT TV screens.

Vision On

“We will not be sending your pictures back to you” was the famous (and I thought rather sad) line from the children’s TV programme from the 1960s and 70s.

One researcher describes what is likely to be the mechanism for “seeing in reverse”. In normal vision signals from the eye pass into the visual cortex and then engage with several different systems that analyse and identify different aspects of the visual field. These are then correlated by other systems and feed memory structures. When actively recalling images, most people seem able to reverse the process and playback or newly construct images from memory, using some of the same active brain areas. As to what is different in the case of aphantasia, it’s still a matter of conjecture.

What am I missing?

This revelation left me reeling. How have I got through 63 years of life without encountering that there is a whole different dimension and diversity in the ways we think? I man, over the years I have read numerous books about consciousness, especially after being enthralled by a memorable set of Reith Lectures by John Searle in 1984 entitled “A Froth on Reality”. Around the same time I stumbled across one of the most creatively clever books ever: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (“GEB”) by Douglas Hofstadter, which is really about Artificial Intelligence and whether it could achieve some level of at least self-awareness, if not what we think of as consciousness. Yet nothing I recall then or since prepared me for the fact that my experience of consciousness could be fundamentally different from yours.

There is active research going on into visual imagery, and my mind is exploding with questions. How are the degrees of vividness of visual imagery related to a person’s imagination? Does it help or hinder a visual artist?

What about spatial reasoning? By coincidence I re-took several of the exercises in the Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT) this week: it’s a citizen science project that follows up a population of people over years to see how life-styles and aging etc. affect a person’s ability to carry out several talks in an online set of tests. My scores for spatial reasoning tests are in the top 5% of the population, so I don’t need pictures for that then. Aphantasia doesn’t appear to have hindered my mathematical ability, but I can’t play chess without looking. Does it correlate with facial recognition accuracy, or vividness in dreaming?

Is my “red” your “red”?

Or is the sky blue for you too? The question of whether we experience the same thing when we look at the same colour has been a favourite of teenage speculation. And it is the classic example of what philosophers call “qaulia”, instances of subjective experience, one of the aspects in focus in cognitive science and explorations of consciousness. So why has philosophy, the thousands of years of introspection, not picked up before on the real differences we have in our internal mental imagery? Or perhaps it has without realising, in the disputes (still ongoing) between a camp that asserts that thought is mediated primarily in images versus a camp that is sure that thought is primarily expressed in propositions. Could these analyses be correlated to different ways of experiencing the internal world?

Well actually it does appear that the notorious Francis Galton did notice the phenomenon of aphantasia in 1880. He likened the observation that many of his scientist friends did not have mental imagery in a visual sense as being like people unaware that they are colour-blind. The ghastly Galton’s discovery remained unexamined for 125 years until Adam Zeman began to study it in the 21st century.

Elsewhere on the bookshelf

• The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry Series 21: The Case of the Blind Mind’s Eye – I am a big fan of this fascinating (and playful) BBC Radio 4 programme and podcast, with the excellent Dr Adam Rutherford and Prof. Hannah Fry.
• VVIQ – the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire – try it: it’s free and it’s easy to use. The more people who contribute to citizen science projects, the more reliable and insightful the results. Go on, you know you want to!
• Aphantasia article in Wikipedia
• The BBC Reith Lectures 1984: A Froth on Reality – Prof. John Searle on the slippery concept of consciousness. I think I still have the transcripts of these talks somewhere from when they were published in The Listener magazine.
• Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT) – this links to a BBC Horizon documentary and includes links to try it for yourself! The results are much more interesting than the old style Intelligence Quotient score, which has been largely discredited.