Instant Genius - Aphantasia: How people with no mind’s eye see the world

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

When you hear the word ‘horse’ do you find it difficult to conjure up a mental image of what a horse looks like? If so, it sounds like you’re an aphantasiac. Those with aphantasia have no ‘mind’s eye’ and are unable to form visual imagery in their heads. So how do they think, how do they remember events, and do they even have an imagination? In this episode we catch up with Professor Julia Simner, a neuropsychologist based at the University of Sussex. She answers these questions and more and share with us her own experiences as an aphantasiac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, and welcome to Instant Genius,

a bite-sized master class in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, Commissioner Gettter, a BBC Science Focus magazine. When you hear the word horse, Do you find it difficult to conjure up a mental image of what a horse looks like? If so, it sounds like you're an Athentasiac. Those with Afentasia have no mind's eye and are unable to form visual imagery in their heads. So how do they think?

How do they remember events? And do they even have an imagination? In this episode, we catch up with Professor Julia Simner, a neuropsychologist based at the University of Sussex. She answers these questions and more and shares with us her own experiences. as an Afentasiac. What exactly is Afentasia? Well, simply put, affintasia is a blind mind's eye. So most people on the planet have the ability to create pictures in their mind when they think about objects or events. For example, if I ask you to think about the house you currently live in,

you could imagine its front door and probably create a picture of that front door in your mind's eye, aphentasia is a significant weakness or an inability to create a picture in the mind's eye. So is it a case of either you are an Afentasic or not, or is there a spectrum? Well, interestingly, the answer to both of those is yes. So there is a spectrum because people's visual mental imagery, which is this ability to create a picture, their visual mental imagery lies on a continuum. Some people have very, very strong mental imagery and some have slightly less strong, medium mental imagery, relatively poor mental imagery, and right the way down to no mental imagery at all. So there is certainly a spectrum and it's continuous. But at the same time,

scientists have imposed a cutoff so that we can say to any given person, yes, you have affintasia or no, you don't. And that cutoff is placed to categorise people with affintasia as having either no mental imagery whatsoever or mental imagery that is vague, dim or fleeting. So how common is it? And is it something that people are born with or can it develop over time? So I can answer certainly how common it is according to the latest research, because we've recently ourselves run a study to determine prevalence, and that has shown that affintasia is approximately 3.9% prevalent. That means that almost four people out of 100 have affintasia, and that includes those who have absolutely no mental imagery and those who have it just fleetingly and dimly.

And are you born with it? There's no definitive answer to that, because there are no very early studies tracing the mental imagery of people over time from infancy to adulthood. And that would be an incredibly hard study to do. But everything that we know about the human brain suggests that probably yes, we are born with it. Although there can be exceptions. So there is one well-known case study in the science literature of a man who developed affintasia after a brain event. So four out of 100 people, that's actually quite a lot. And I venture that a lot of people haven't heard of this. So how do you identify if somebody has it? And do some people have it, but they just don't realize? Gosh, okay, so I'm going to unpack those three questions. So I'm glad

you said that you think it's common because I think it's common. So although it seems quite rare, just 3.9%, when we scale that up to the population of the planet, that's the entire population of the United States. If you imagine something impacting every single American, we would consider that to be a significant event. And so in that way, it's rare, but it's certainly not insignificant. You also ask how we can define or how we can identify someone with Afintasia. So there are a couple of ways. There is quite a commonly used questionnaire called the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire. It's quite an old questionnaire. It was first made in 1974, and then it was used quite a lot, then it kind of dropped out a bit, and it's had a bit of a resurgence because it's

quite a useful way to identify people with affintasia. So the questionnaire in its simple form is 16 statements, and you have to imagine 16 different things. So for example, you have to imagine countryside scene and what the shape of the trees look like, or you have to imagine a rising Sun. And for each object you imagine, you rate yourself, you rate your own mental imagery for how much it is like a picture. And it's on a scale from zero to five. And zero means I have no picture at all. And one means it's a picture, but it's so vague and dim, I can hardly see it. And then two, three, and then the other points on the scale are various degrees of having imagery. And people with Afintasia are those who score zero or one. So they have either no imagery.

or just an imagery that's vague and dim. There's also a very nice, current online simple test for Afintasi, which I really like. I think it was first devised by the Afentasia network, which is an online group of people with Afentasia. And it's simply a series of six photographs of the same horse. And one of them is an absolutely completely clear picture of a horse. And then another is a slightly dimmer version and a slightly dimmer version all the way down. and the last one is a black screen. And the task is simply to imagine a horse and pick the

picture that represents your imagination. And for me, I find that very easy. I can place myself exactly on that scale. And it's a very, very useful method. And I encourage anybody to Google this Afentasia horse and to try it out for themselves. So this is really interesting. For someone who doesn't have Afentasia like myself, it's quite confusing, actually. So what is going on in the mind of someone with Afantasia, when they think about something, you know, if I say horse or elephant, what's going on in their heads? Yeah, so I work on a number of different special populations who have all kinds of sensory differences, and I find that affentasia is perhaps the one that challenges people's

reality most profoundly. I've had many conversations, so I have Afentasia, and I've had many conversations with people with mental imagery, and they tend to end up in the same place, which is how on earth do you think? And I actually have a very good friend who's a professor and she has very strong mental imagery. And when she found out that I have no mental imagery, she said, Jules, it's like you're barely sentient. How are you thinking?

The simple answer to your question is when you say horse or elephant, I know exactly what a horse or elephant looks like. I know every single feature of it. I know its color, its shape. I know everything about it. I simply do not have that knowledge in a picket form. So when did you first realize you had affintasia? Oh, what a good question. I think I was first surprised when I did the maths and realized how many people on the planet had affentasia. That was

quite nice and empowering. I was hugely surprised when I found out that other people had mental imagery. I think that has to be the bottom line. So I was having a conversation at least, I want to say, 15 years ago at University of Edinburgh with a professor at the university. I had just been studying a group of people with synesthesia. So synesthesia is another completely separate, a special population, unrelated to affintasia in many ways. And the people I had just spoken to with synesthesia had told me that when I say the word dog, they picture a dog. Or they might picture the word DOG, for example. And I was so surprised. surprised about this feature of synesthesia. I told my colleague and I said, wow, Bob, you're not

going to believe this, but people with synesthesia can see pictures in their mind's eye. And he looked at me and just said, everybody can do that, Jules. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. They can see a picture in their mind's eye. He said, yes, everybody can do that. And that really was the beginning of a readjustment in my own mind about my capabilities and my reality and then something very surprising hit me a year or two later. I remember that when I was a child, I had had one visual image when I was a child and I realized that that's what it was. To me, it had been a very bizarre event of my childhood that made no sense and now I realized that it was a single visual image as a child when I was about six or seven. I'd been in the garden

picking peas with my mother and I went to sleep that night and I closed my eyes and I saw the peas behind my eyelids. And it was so bizarre. I just kept opening and closing my eyes and looking at the peas. And then I eventually fell asleep and then I woke up the next day and it was gone. Gone forever. Never, never came back. So I think it's useful as well because I can definitively say I do not have mental imagery because I did one time have a mental image. So this comes down to a sort of classic visual versus verbal thinking argument. So what's the difference there? And yeah, How does that apply to Afentasics? You're absolutely right that the very first thought of both psychologists would be,

is this visual verbal thinking? And so we investigated this empirically in a series of studies. The question we were asking was simply, are people with Afentasia who are not visual thinkers? Are they simply verbal thinkers? And the answer, surprisingly, is no. So we gave a whole battery of tests on verbal thinking. and we've found that people with Afantasia are not only not visual thinkers, they are also not

verbal thinkers. So these tests would be things like, how well can you imagine a sound in your mind's ear, if I say a dog barking, can you hear it or is it totally silent? How much do you have internal dialogue? How much do you even speak out loud to yourself? Like where have I put my keys? and many other tests of verbal thinking, and we found that people with affintasia were also poor verbal thinkers. Now, you might think this means that people with affintasia are hugely impaired, but they're not. So I'm doing okay. I'm a university professor.

I'm fine. I used to score really highly in creativity tasks at school. So there's some other unexpected mode of thinking, which is driving affontasia. So what do we know about that then, this mode of thinking? Well, this is where it does get quite hard to explain, because I am about to tell you that the mode of thinking of people with affintasia is a little bit picture-like.

We use the word iconic. So iconic means does it look like stuff in the real world? And we know that the answer to that is yes, it does in a way. However, it's still not a picture. So first of all, really simply, we know from colleagues studies that people with affintasia are very, very strong on spatial thinking. So when I think about my mother's face, I absolutely know where her eyes, her nose and her mouth are. We actually, by we, I mean people with affintasia perform very well in spatial thinking tests.

So there's no problem there in spatial layout, and that's one thing that we know. Another way that we know people with Afintasia have an iconic way of thinking, so a way of thinking that seems like real life, is in a recent study I ran with a group of students here at University of Sussex. So to understand the study, you first need to know that people with Afentasia, who have poor visual imagery also tend to have poor auditory imagery. That means they not only struggle to form a picture, they also struggle to sort of hear things in their mind's ear. And we can consider poor visual and poor auditory imagery as being like different sides of a coin.

They're related to each other. So when we studied people with affontasia, we actually studied the hearing element of affintasia, so the lack of hearing imagery. And here's what we did. We investigated the mind's ear of people with and without. mental imagery. We had them read a passage in their head and that passage was all about a Guinness World Record holder. Half of the people were told that the passage was about the fastest speaker on the planet and the rest of the participants were told that this person was the slowest speaker

on the passage. Now the passage was identical. It was all about how to control your speech and how to be dedicated to a task and so on. But the two groups of participants didn't know what each other had been told. They just knew that they were either reading about a fast speaker or a slow speaker. Now, we know that when people are reading, they can hear an internal voice sometimes of the character. And so we were not surprised to see that people with imagery read the passage faster if they thought that the speaker was a fast speaker. So what did we find in this? the people with Afantasia? Exactly the same.

Although they have no mind's ear, they do not hear people speaking in their head when they read, they still acted as if they could hear a mental voice. So their knowledge about sound somehow represents the real world, even though it's not like a sound playing in their head, and even though their imagery is not like a picture, they have no imagery. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good piece.

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And again, this is a no-brainer for people with Afentasia, because imagination and imagery are entirely separate things for them. People without mental imagery like me can imagine anything you like. I can imagine an orangutan wearing a bowler hat and diving flippers. It's quite easy for me to imagine anything at all. I just don't have it as a picture. So there are very many people with Afentasia in the public domain who are highly creative. For example, the ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull has Afentasia. There are famous artists and writers who have Afentasia,

and in many ways it's completely unrelated to imagination, but there is an exception to that. So in a study that I conducted with my colleague Carla Dance, we gave a questionnaire that in theory can tap into how imaginative people are. And in that imagination questionnaire, the people with Afentasia did in fact score slightly lower. So this is a bit of a confusion for me because on the one hand, hand, we don't see very many deficits in people with Afentasia, but on the other hand, in this direct test, there seem to be a very small penalty. And I think it comes down to tiny details. So there's a nice body of literature now. There's a nice body of evidence showing that people with Afentasia can remember things, but they tend to miss out tiny details. And I think in order to be

hugely imaginative, you're probably also very good at details in that sense. So you mentioned there some artists without Fantasia. So visual artists, I find that really interesting. I assumed that if you had Afentasia, you wouldn't be able to draw a picture from memory. Is that just completely incorrect? It's a really good question. And nicely, there's a study that addresses this exactly. So people with Afentasia can draw things from memory because, of course, don't forget, we know what things look like. At the same time, there is a nice study by Bainbridge and her colleagues, that show that when people with Afentasia draw things from memory, they tend to miss out tiny details.

So in their study, they were shown a picture of a kitchen or they were shown a picture of a lounge, and then the picture was taken away, and they were asked to draw it from memory. People with Afentasia seemed to have no trouble doing this, but when the pictures were analysed in detail, tiny details were missing for the people with Afentasia. So, for example, maybe a cushion was missing,

or maybe there was a lamp missing in the corner. So on the whole, pretty okay, but definitely struggling with tiny details. How about things like recognising faces? Is there a difference there? I'm so glad you're asking all these questions because we've been running the science to ask these same questions ourselves. So people with Afentasia were originally reporting having poor facial recognition. We can still recognise faces, but perhaps in self-report,

not as good as other people, not as well as other people. But the early studies were confusing because when people with Afintasia were given direct tests of face recognition, they did just fine. There was no deficit. So we were confronted with this problem. Again, my colleague Carla Dance and I were confronted with this problem. And we realized that the early tests of face recognition were faces that had a lot of clues. They were faces with the hair visible. They were faces with the collar of the clothing visible, perhaps with jewelry visible. And we realized that this might be a crutch for people with Afentasia. So we ran the study again with a different kind of face recognition task. And in this face recognition task, you just see bare faces. And in fact, people with

Afentasia did not do so well in this task. They did show slight base deficits. We then also wondered, well, does that mean that they would be quite bad witnesses? in a court case, what would happen? So we ran another study to see how people with Afintasia do when they're given eFIT tasks, identity fit tasks. So we showed them a face, and then we gave them the professional EFIT software to see how well they could recall the face

and rebuild the face. And here we found no difference. We're wondering whether when you're constructing a face, really what you have to remember are details, and so people with Afentasia should be a little bit poorer, but actually those details are quite predictable because most people have two eyes and nose and a mouth, and so you're not going to be forgetting a nose

or you're not going to be forgetting a mouth, and we think that could be a crutch in reconstructing the face. So the short answer is people with Afentasia are poor at recognising faces, but when they have to reconstruct them using forensic techniques, they seem to do okay. Personally speaking, I'm a very visually led person, and I think part of that is that I have very vivid dreams. So do people with Afantasia have dreams?

Well, this one does. I do. Yes, the answer is mostly they do have dreams. My dreams can be particularly vivid. So I have had a, and very full of the senses. So I've had a dream about a man with very blue eyes. I remember once dreaming something that smelled really bad, and it smelled bad in my dreams.

so I have all of the senses in operation in my dreams. I tend to start seeing things when I fall asleep. We call that a hypnagogic state. So in a hypnagogic state, I can sometimes encourage mental imagery. And because I'm a scientist, I'm very observant of my own hypnagogic state. But there are studies to show that although people with Afentasia can dream and do see things and do have sensory details, maybe just a bit less than other people. We've talked a lot about different characteristics.

of people with Afentasia. But do they share any sort of common personality traits? It's a good question. Personality has been examined by a scientist studying Afentasia. So to understand their results, you have to understand that personality can be broken down into different facets. And one simple way of breaking down personalities is to use the big five model. And so this breaks personality down into five key traits. And actually, they spell the word ocean, which helps you remember them. So there's openness to new experiences, which is kind of interest and intellect. There's conscientiousness and there is extroversion or introversion. There is agreeableness, how polite you are to people and how much you trust people.

And the last one is neuroticism. And that is a lot to do with how much you worry. And the one trait that seems to be different in people with Afintasia is the introversion, extroversion. So people with Afentasia were scoring high on introversion, slightly more introverted than the average person. Who knows why? So how about other impacts on life? Do people with Athentasia tend to gravitate towards certain professions, for example? Yes, I think so. My colleague, Adam Zeman, and his group recently published data from a really large survey where they just ask questions of very, very many people with Afentasia. And the people with Afentasia, and the people with Afentasia, were gravitating towards the sciences and maths.

Now, this might be because it may be because we have independently found that people with affintasia are slightly higher on autistic traits. It doesn't mean that people with affintasia have autism. You can have autism without affintasia. You can have affentasia without autism. But people with affentasia just shifted very slightly up the autistic scale in some ways, but not in others. and we also know that part of the autistic spectrum is to be very strong in systemising.

And systemising is the ability to see patterns in things and to group together like objects. And those kinds of things tend to make someone a good scientist. So it may be that the affrontasics gravitating towards the sciences may be this fantastic trait of systemizing. So are there any links with any other sort of overarching brain? conditions? Well, we have looked at autism. And so in the way that I just explained, there are links between Afentasia and autistic traits. And again, just to be clear, you can have autism without Afentasia. You can have Afentasia without autism. But surprisingly, in a very positive way, we have also found that affintasia can be protective against certain conditions. It can protect you.

So two conditions in particular, we looked, first of all, at sensory hypersensitivity. So people who are sensory sensitive in the way that we looked at it would find bright lights too bright, would find noises too loud, smells too strong and so on. And that is a trait called sensory sensitivity. And we found that people with Afentasia were protected against it. They had much lower rates of sensory sensitivity than chance would predict. The other condition that we think Afentasia protects against is anxiety and worry. And this is a fantastic new study by my colleague Carla Dance and in our lab here at Sussex.

She looked at the worry traits of people with affintasia and found that there was a lot lower, there was a lower level of worrying in people with affentasia, potentially because they can't inspect pictures of events that would be worrisome. that when they think of worrying events, they have a more abstract way of thinking about those events, and somehow that lowers their level of anxiety and worry. By way of closing, then, what are the next steps for research in this topic? You know, what would we like to discover? Okay, well, I can tell you what I'm interested in at the moment,

although I'm sure there are many avenues for future research, which are going to be fascinating. So over the last 15 years since I discovered I have no imagery, I've obviously tried many times. And given my interest and the longevity of that, I would say that if anyone were going to develop imagery, I would have done so by now. However, I had an experience just in the last month, which has slightly opened my eyes

to the possibility of developing mental imagery. It's a completely different question, whether that's a good idea or not, and in many ways it may not be a good idea, but I was able to come up with a paradigm where I could develop mental imagery, what happened was I was falling asleep, I was entering hypnagogic state, which is that state between waking and sleeping. And in that state, I tend to have imagery. However, I tend to be so much down the line of sleeping that I can't do

much about it. But in this instance, I happen to be developing an image in hypnagogic state and sentient enough to still be partly awake. And so what I did was, was I used that moment. I grasped that moment, and I practiced my image over and over again. I made sure to myself I was awake. I was sentient. I was awake.

And I was playing with the image. And that's the first time in 50-odd years that I've, well, no, it's the second time in 50 years that I've had what could be considered a waking image, once when I was six and once a month ago in hypnagogic state. So I wondered if that might be a way to train mental imagery, really, to induce it in a group of people. and I think we will do exactly that.

We may try exactly that. But before we do that, we're going to consider the ethical implications of this. Because at the moment, I'm very beautifully protected from anxiety, sensory sensitivities, over worrying, PTSD. I'm nicely protected from all of these things. And so it's an important ethical question to think about whether or not it would be a good idea to train mental imagery or not. But at least now I have one method of doing it.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor of Neuropsychology, Julia Simna. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of the best of the best of the video. music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have

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