Aphantasia: What Imageless Minds Tell Us About Consciousness

People with aphantasia can imagine an apple in an abstract sense but cannot picture it: They cannot describe its colour or shape.

Source: Tobi | Unsplash

Imagine an apple. What does it look like? What colour and shape is it?

Many people can imagine an apple but have no mental image and can not answer these questions. This phenomenon is known as aphantasia and is found in approximately 1 percent of the population (Zeman, 2024). In its most extreme form, people with aphantasia cannot generate any visual mental imagery, but interestingly, a majority still experience rich visual dreams (Whiteley, 2021).

Given the staggering complexity of the human brain (Pang, 2023a) and the many things that influence and shape us, it is not surprising to find that human minds differ greatly. Aphantasia is one of the many things that make up the myriad differences between individuals, which is what makes each human being completely unique (Cooper, 2015).

Aphantasia has some drawbacks, like being unable to remember some visual aspects of the past or reliving old memories and making it more difficult to learn certain things (Cherry, 2024). Yet based on the current evidence, it does not seem that aphantasia limits overall success in life (Monzel et al., 2022). It is considered a normal variation of human experience and not a condition that requires treatment (Cherry, 2024).

This phenomenon profoundly impacts our understanding in other areas, especially in one of the biggest mysteries in the cognitive sciences: consciousness.

Rotations in the Dark

Two Stanford researchers revolutionised psychology by publishing a short and simple paper in the prestigious journal Science in the early 1970s. Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler (1971) showed participants two three-dimensional objects and asked them to judge as fast as possible whether they represented the same or different objects.

This simple but remarkable experiment demonstrated that thought processes are not solely based on language—as was still widely believed at the time—and that visual representations play a crucial part (Nanay, 2021). Their study also found that the more the object was rotated, the longer it took participants to complete the task and come up with an answer, which suggests that this task is done by mentally picturing the object and rotating it within an internal imaginational space (Nanay, 2021; Peters & Battista, 2008; Shepard & Metzler, 1971).

Three-dimensional objects used in Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation task.

Source: Jennifer Oneske | Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

Giving this same mental rotation task to people with aphantasia produced fascinating results: Not only could they successfully perform these mental rotations, but they were more accurate, albeit slower, than other participants (Kay et al., 2024; Pounder et al., 2018; Zeman et al., 2009). Surprisingly, despite the lack of visual imagery in their imaginations, those with aphantasia also took longer to complete the task the further the object was rotated (Kay et al., 2024; Pounder et al., 2018; Zeman et al., 2009).

Research indicates that people with aphantasia used different strategies to complete this task compared to people with a more visual imagination: While others sometimes traded off accuracy for speed, none of the participants with aphantasia did this (Kay et al., 2024). Although there could be other factors involved, it is possible that this option was not available to those with aphantasia, indicating not just limited access but also limited control over this part of the mind. Zeman et al. (2010) called this a case of "blind imagination," like rotating objects in the dark.

Zombies and Illusions

What is striking about these findings is that a task that requires not just awareness but focus and conscious deliberation in some people can be done by others without any direct awareness at all. This raises the question of whether conscious awareness is necessary for other tasks that we have traditionally linked to conscious volition.

Taken to the extreme, the question becomes whether there could be humans who act and behave normally but without any awareness or consciousness at all. These are what academics call philosophical zombies (Kirk, 2023).

Although aphantasia raises many questions, the current evidence does not warrant such a radical conclusion. In fact, there may be nothing strange about this phenomenon at all: People with aphantasia still have normal vision and can employ strategies to solve the object rotation task that either makes use of the visuals in front of them, or that does not require visual imagination at all.

Computers can solve such tasks mathematically through abstract point-mapping and do not require a visual imagination. This fact could imply that there is nothing that needs explaining at all, or this view could be pushed to the extreme as well, with the suggestion that people with normal visual imagination may only be under the illusion of using their imaginary visual space while the task is completed abstractly. This view, again, goes far beyond what is warranted by current evidence and does not account for the consistent differences found between people with aphantasia and other participants in terms of speed and accuracy (Kay et al., 2024; Pounder et al., 2018; Zeman et al., 2009).

Implications for Consciousness

These opposing extremes are not directly supported by current research on aphantasia. However, they highlight the profound impact this phenomenon can have on our understanding of consciousness.

There is still a lot we do not yet understand about aphantasia, and we have even more gaps when it comes to consciousness. Aphantasia may be a quirky phenomenon with little implications for our understanding of consciousness, or it could radically alter how we view consciousness. A lot more research is needed to untangle these complexities.

Given this uncertainty, it is important not to ignore aphantasia when discussing consciousness. However, this is only one of the many missing puzzle pieces regarding our understanding of consciousness (see Pang, 2023b).

Science progresses mostly incrementally, and demanding that any theory or explanation of consciousness can account for the myriad complex phenomena on the periphery from the outset will significantly hamper this progress. As such, theories of consciousness should not be discarded simply because they cannot (yet) account for aphantasia.

Consciousness is still an enigma, but we live in an exciting time where novel research constantly solves some of the many mysteries while simultaneously adding new ones by describing previously unknown aspects. Aphantasia is one of those added mysteries that raises profound questions and highlights the many individual differences that make each mind absolutely unique.