![]() “If I asked you to imagine your favorite song, most people can hear the music in their mind, whereas I can’t do that.” Mr. His survey has revealed how aphantasia can spread beyond vision to other senses. “I’ve heard from people from Madagascar to South Korea to California.” “This really is a global human phenomenon,” Mr. So far, more than 150,000 people have taken the surveys, and over 20,000 had scores suggesting aphantasia. Visitors to the site can take an online psychological survey, read about the condition and join discussion forums on topics ranging from dreams to relationships. Zeman, Thomas Ebeyer of Kitchener, Ontario, created a website called the Aphantasia Network that has grown into a hub for people with the condition and for researchers studying them. One of the original 21 people with aphantasia who were studied by Dr. Pearson are studying an even larger swath of people who experience extremes of mental imagery. Zeman and his colleagues estimate that 2.6 percent of people have hyperphantasia and that 0.7 percent have aphantasia. Another said it was “thinking only in radio.”īased on their surveys, Dr. ![]() One described the condition as feeling the shape of an apple in the dark. Zeman and his colleagues invited their correspondents to fill out questionnaires. Zeman’s trickle of emails into a torrent. I reported on this second study for The New York Times, as did other journalists at their own publications. In a 2015 report on those findings, he and his colleagues proposed that those readers all shared the same condition, which the researchers called aphantasia. in a remarkable way: They had never had a mind’s eye to begin with. Afterward, I got emails from readers who had the same experience but who differed from M.X. I came across M.X.’s case study in 2010 and wrote a column about it for Discover magazine. could even solve problems that required mentally rotating shapes, even though he could not see them. could answer factual questions such as whether former Prime Minister Tony Blair has light-colored eyes. thought of people or objects, he did not see them. Zeman aware of aphantasia was a retired building surveyor who lost his mind’s eye after minor heart surgery. “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.” Zeman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Exeter in Britain. ![]() “This is not a disorder as far as I can see,” said Dr. Eventually, that research might even make it possible to strengthen the mind’s eye - or ear - with magnetic pulses. And they’re beginning to explore how some of that circuitry may conjure other senses, such as sound, in the mind. Zeman and his colleagues are gathering clues about how these two conditions arise through changes in the wiring of the brain that join the visual centers to other regions. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one.
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