To Be Blind in One’s Mental Eye
The ability to picture things in our mind seems so natural, and yet certain people, as researchers have discovered, are unable to. Referred to as “aphantasia,” the condition describes an inability to form mental images. What is currently known about the condition comes mostly from the work of neurologist Adam Zeman.
In 2005, Dr. Zeman at the University of Exeter Medical School performed a minor surgical procedure on a patient referred to as “MX” who thereafter lost his ability to create mental images. Dr. Zeman failed to find any description of such condition in medical literature, so he gave MX a series of examinations. In addition to performing well in problem solving and semantic memory tests, MX could look at faces of famous people and name them; however, if only given their names, he could not be asked to picture their faces. Brain scans revealed that face-recognition regions that would active in normal brains in such a test were not active in MX’s brain.
Dr. Zeman and his colleagues more recently performed another study on several people believed to have the same condition. Their results found similar symptoms between each subject in that they could all perform general knowledge tasks like counting the windows in their house, but could not be asked to picture things like a sunrise. However, in their report, the scientists noted that many of the subjects did not become afflicted with aphantasia from an injury, but had it since birth. As a matter of fact, the condition is believed to affect as much as 2% of the population, but as of now, Dr. Zeman hopes to find more people with it in order to perform a bigger scanning study by comparing their brains with people who can form mental images and find out how common the condition really is.
Firefox co-creator Blake Ross described how it feels to have aphantasia since birth and his surprise at his discovery that other people can visualize things. “I can’t ‘see’ my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago,” he wrote on Facebook. “I thought ‘counting sheep’ was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.”
Writer: Nathaniel Meshberg
Editor: Kawtar Bennani
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If you can’t imagine things, how can you learn?
