Close your eyes and picture a beach. For most people, you can “see” it in your mind—water, sand, sunshine. For around 3 to 4% of the population, however, no image appears. The mental screen stays blank, and many of them spent years assuming everyone else was speaking metaphorically when they said, “picture this.” That condition is called aphantasia, and what’s really weird: a lot of people who have it still dream in full color.
A new study published in Scientific Reports set out to explain that contradiction and came back with something more complicated than a single answer. Researchers from the University of Queensland and the University of Bonn surveyed 205 participants, 84 of them classified as visual aphantasics, asking them to rate how vividly their waking imagination worked across six senses, then report how often those same senses appeared in their dreams. To add texture, participants also mentally revisited familiar scenarios—a dinner party, a sick day at home, a trip to the beach—and ranked which senses came through.
At the group level, the results pointed in one direction. Senses a person couldn’t summon while awake were more dulled in their dreams too, with the strongest links appearing for inner speech, hearing, and taste. Vision was the exception, which the researchers attribute to the fact that nearly everyone in the aphantasia group had little visual imagery to begin with, making it hard to measure variation. Aphantasia Probably Isn’t a Single Condition
The averages, though, are almost beside the point. The individual spread is where things get a bit wild. Some participants had virtually no waking sensory imagination and equally blank dreams. Others couldn’t picture, hear, or feel anything voluntarily while awake, yet all of it came flooding back once they fell asleep. Among the visual aphantasics in the study, 46% said they always dream in pictures. About 8% said they never do. What struck the researchers was that each person’s waking-to-dreaming relationship stayed consistent across senses—loose in one area, loose across all of them; tight in one, tight throughout. A stable personal signature, wildly different from one person to the next.
One possible explanation the researchers raise involves differences in how brain regions coordinate during sleep versus waking hours, which could account for why one person’s dreaming mind mirrors their conscious one while another’s runs completely free. Both lead authors have aphantasia themselves, which is what drew them to the question in the first place.
The study’s broader implication is that aphantasia has been treated as a single condition when the evidence suggests it’s more like a cluster of related ones. Two people can have the same diagnosis and, once the lights go out, inhabit completely different inner worlds.
I have aphantasia and I have visual dreams although details are extremely sparse and imprecise. It’s kinda like animated part of the music video for Take On Me visually, but even people are completely featureless. I can consciously visualize things in my head in a similar way with enough concentration, but it’s always a fleeting thing I can barely maintain for any amount of time.
poorly.
I have aphantasia and no inner monologue that I can “hear”, either.
My dreams are, as best as I can tell, very vivid images, though. I’ve always assumed it meant that the hardware exists in my brain and works, but the wiring isn’t connected.
You’re like one of my friends. I’m on the extreme end with absolutely no sense memory, Aphantasia, and while I do dream it’s without any imagined senses either. I do have an inner monologue but it’s silent. I realise that makes absolutely no sense written out. I think in sentences yet still silent 🤷.
your local admin has disabled your graphics card.
for what it’s worth, I have heard of people curing their aphantasia by microdosing mind altering drugs like psilocybin or LSD.
it’s a risk to take it at all, but if it’s something you desperately want to experience it might prove useful.
FYI, don’t try to DIY. find someone with experience that you 200% trust. they are, after all, going to be caring for you while you’re under the influence.
I’ve done mushrooms, LSD, and DMT with some fairly high dosages multiple times, no luck personally. It’s black void no matter what. Open eyes I get some minor hallucinations like text warping. DMT and LSD, spacial warping.
I used my share of substances when younger and nothing doing. I also don’t think it’s a thing to be “cured”. I don’t particularly want all that shit going on in my head.
I can tell you.
My dreams are like a child’s story — “and then this happened, and then that happened, and then my friend did this, but it wasn’t my friend but a coworker, and they said this…”
It’s like reading the plot synopsis of a movie as opposed to watching the real thing.
Same with memories. Or conceptualizing things. If you tell me to imagine a red ball, my mind goes “ball, red” instead of hallucinating an image of a ball.
Give me a sheet of paper and ask me to draw someone from memory, you’ll get a stick figure. Ask me to draw someone in front of me, and you’ll get something (more) realistic.
Here’s a good example from https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/news/cant-draw-mental-picture-aphantasia-causes-blind-spots-minds-eye:
A whole life without imagining things, unimaginable
Visualizing =/= imagining. People with aphantasia imagine things all the time! They might just not «see» them in the same way.
I don’t like the word “imagine” as an aphant or whatever I should call myself since it contains the word “image” but I’m not sure if “conceptualise” is quite right either :s
We can imagine things, we just can’t visualize them (or rarely we can but they are usually only the border of the object or black and white)
Nah, you’re just imagining things.
My mom has aphantasia we believe is caused by years of undetected epilepsy and multiple TBIs.
She and I think completely opposite. She has a strict internal monologue with zero pics while I can only think in pictures/scenes and concepts.
Playing DND together is really interesting because we have to get as many visual examples as possible for stuff that’s happening for her to look at. She’s the only one in our group with aphantasia, so we all get pumped to find art to use for the sessions.
I struggle to calculate how personal interviews alone can capture reliably said subject. Were there studies to tell if it’s 0-1 tumbler or rather a 0-…-1 spectrum, maybe with more dimensions? Do we see differences in brain activity on scans? Is there some map or math we can use there?
From what I’ve read before, this sphere is rather unexplored and more of a starting thesis that would be studied some time in the future that we reflect on after reading on the web.
I fucking hate these articles and the damage they do to people’s perception of aphantasia.
It is absolutely a spectrum. People who don’t visualize an apple like it’s a picture on an iPhone can still visualize an apple. They know it’s red, the size of a fist, round/tooth shaped, etc.
So when we dream, our brain interprets our thoughts into visual hallucinations just like everyone else. If someone’s ability to visualize an apple is a black and white amorphous blob, their brain will still make them think they saw an apple.
People who don’t visualize an apple like it’s a picture on an iPhone can still visualize an apple. They know it’s red, the size of a fist, round/tooth shaped, etc.
could you imagine a crystal apple, with little black stars inside that are spinning clockwise?
or how about an apple that has a worm chewing through it with a face?
what does the face look like? is it human?
if you can’t even imagine a face, what part of the spectrum are you on?
People who don’t visualize an apple like it’s a picture on an iPhone can still visualize an apple. They know it’s red, the size of a fist, round/tooth shaped, etc.
So they don’t visualize it, then. Imagine, recall characteristics, yes, but without a visual it’s not visualizing.
Yeah i can describe an apple to you but I sure can’t see it.
But i also have trouble describing people too.
I can tell you my wife is shorter then me and has mid to long hair of a dark colour but no idea about much else unless I see her.
When we watch movies if two characters who look similar appear she has to tell me who was who cause I can’t keep track of them.
I had that problem with The Departed. Great movie, but why did they have to make Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters look so similar?
I had aphantasia as well. I also have the issue with identifying people or describing people. Until now I thought those were two separate issues.
Thank you for your post, it has really helped me.
They very well might be, I’m no doctor haha but I’ve always put it to being the same problem because i can’t draw either but i can look at something and draw it.
I hated art in school until we started drawing vases and plants etc from the room
I struggle to understand how you could exist this way. Like how would you remember where you put things if you can’t see it in your memory?
It continues to boggles my mind how so many people are walking around with a narrator and movies playing in their head, and how I went through decades of life before I realized that was a thing
How do I know where my keys are? I just remember the location of my keys…I don’t see them, I remember their location. It’s one of a million little quantifications of the environment my brain does for me automatically all the time. In fact, I generally notice and remember where all the keys I see are, because I think of keys as an important object to keep track of
I won’t remember what they look like, except as a very general impression. I’ll probably remember if they’re big or small bunches of keys, or if they’re on a lanyard, but I probably won’t remember if a keychain is red or green. I’ll remember it’s on a side table near the door, or on this side of the room.
But I’ll remember qualia of the keys. I’ll remember if I see an individual put them down somewhere, and if there’s something interesting about the keys I’ll probably remember that, but generally? I probably won’t remember much except the general location
At the end of the day, I remember what I notice, which is generally what matters to me subjectively. My mind stores everything as impressions
Why would I need to somehow ‘see’ where I put something? It’s data. My database doesn’t store pictures of things, it stores the information about the things. I put the keys on the counter by the door as I do 95% of the time I enter the house. I don’t need some picture for that.
seems a lot harder to index a contextual bit on an optical database.
I remember everything through visual indexing. think of it like taking snapshots of my instruction set based on what I’m looking at.
decades ago I worked in a factory that had robotics involved. I got laid off. two years later they called me in to see if I wanted my old job. I came back and got back to work like I left for the weekend. leadership was dumbfounded. they never saw anything like it and asked me how I did it.
I explained it to them but they didn’t really believe me when I told them I have a mnemonic memory that works off visual indexes. if they had changed the UI for the robots, I would have needed to be trained all over again. since they didn’t, all my training had been triggered by the visual format of the interface.
thing is, I can trigger this directly as well. If I Imagine the UI I still remember the different functions and input commands to move those big fanucs, even 20ish years later.
my point is, for someone like me it’s difficult to imagine how efficient it would be to remember contextual information in basically text format.
not knocking it, it’s just…different.
I have this condition and when I’m trying to remember where I put something, I try to bring up the memory of when I was setting it down. I may not visually see what it looked like, but I can still recall the state of mind I was in, where I was, what I was thinking at the time. Even if I don’t see what I was seeing, I remember being there and seeing what I saw. It’s just more akin to a text adventure.
Not sure how universal this is, but when I close my eyes while falling asleep. I frequently notice a sort of glowing blue light that radiates outward from the center of my vision. It’s like a pulsing ring of blue that expands outward from the center.
During this time, I can experience a very mild capability to visualize things. Like if I try really hard, I can invent cartoon characters and visualize them as I’m falling asleep.
Then, when I’m actually asleep, I have vivid full color dreams with enough detail to believe it’s real basically all of the time.
I have Aphantasia, and it has a lot less impact than you might think. Just like you I’m able to retrace steps in my mind, or to imagine objects, or recall visual facts from memory (E.g., tell you the colour of someone’s hat, or the shape, etc), or to solve a maze in my head before drawing it on paper, etc, etc.
Pretty much the only thing I cannot do that people with Phantasia can is picture images in my head. E.g., I cannot picture a cow and then rotate it in my mind. I can imagine the concept of a rotating cow, but there’s no head picture that goes along with it. Other than that, I cannot think of any real task that is in any way more difficult (or even really different) from people with Phantasia.
You just remember where you put the thing, the concept of where it is still remains even if you can’t visualise it. Similarly I can still remember routes and recognise people even though I can’t really visualise either.
Not being able to visualise images has no bearing on whether you can conceptualise surrounding space (positions, distances) or you wouldn’t be able to function at all. While aphantasia is not a medically recognised condition and therefore not exactly well studied there’s a lot to suggest it partially overlaps with autism. This in turn would explain tendency for bottom-up thinking - your brain has to systemise everything to understand it. At least that’s my intuition as someone with both.
i mean you can just remember the words “keys are on the kitchen table”, it’s not exactly rocket science.
But personally i have a sort of pseudo-visualization, best comparison i’ve come up with is like a computer without a monitor: the information is there but it’s just not properly presented visually. It also kinda uses the sense of knowing where your limbs are (proprioception), so i sorta “feel” things in my mental projection and just know what colours and stuff they should have.
A wireframe view like this should very very broadly get the idea across, i don’t literally see this but it’s closer than regular visualization:
That’s interesting. I think sometimes I can visualise something quite well, but most of the time it feels more like what you’re describing.
you’d remember the fact of where you put things, or if something’s lost, you’d go around to the places where logically you were likely to last have them.
TIL that some people remember where stuff is by picturing their location mentally, that’s cool!
There are definitely degrees to aphantasia. Rather than complete inability to visualize in the mind, I’d hazard a guess that most (myself included) can visualize to a minor degree in bursts. That might not make a lot of sense describing it to someone who doesn’t experience things that way, but if I focus, I can have a brief moment of imagining the visual features of something or someone but it fades quickly.
But as others have said here, there are far more ways than purely visual that such memories are stored and recalled. Spatial memory is comparatively strong for me as one example, such that if I close my eyes and focus on it, I can make myself “feel” like I’m in another room I’m familiar with entirely. Anyone who has ever wandered around their room in complete darkness or with their eyes closed probably knows what this feels like.
As it relates to this article, I’ve always heard that those with aphantasia can still have visual dreams since the two experiences rely predominantly on different parts of the brain. At least in my case I’d claim aphantasia but also no issues with experiencing dream visuals.
Sorry to yap so much, but I find it so extremely interesting that people can have such wildly different experiences within the mind like this, such that someone can sound totally bonkers to someone else if they don’t share the same experience. Inner monologues are another related phenomena where it’s fun to watch people try to explain what it’s like to each other.
My mom gained aphantasia from (we believe) years of undetected epilepsy and TBIs. She loses her things constantly. I have no idea if the two are related in her case. She also has really bad ADHD and the part of her brain that turns what she wants to say into actual sounds is fucked up so she stutters and forgets words and just replaces things with “Thingy”
It’s fascinating to be honest. The stutter and word forgetting thing started after a horse riding accident. It’s okay, though, because she proved she can be a rodeo champ. She stayed on for over 8 seconds. (My mom always mentions the rodeo champ part to lighten the story a bit)
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I have this, and sometimes I occasionally visual dreams, but it’s usually strong emotions, conversations, or music
If you can visualize when asleep but not when awake, how do you know you visualized when asleep?
Good question! When I wake up I can remember some pictures, but as the day goes on I can’t remember it. Like it fades away
