It’s upsetting to realize at 32 that the way you’ve always experienced the world isn’t entirely “normal.” That there is something you missed without knowing it. In all these years, the concept of mental imagery never really made sense to me. When people said things like, “I can still see it clearly,” I thought they were being dramatic. I didn’t think people could actually imagine images floating around in their heads somewhere. I was convinced that “counting sheep” was just a metaphor. And when my soccer coach told me to visualize myself scoring a goal, I just thought about concept to score a goal. All I had was words and descriptions and details echoing in my skull.

But my therapist recently asked me to close my eyes, imagine myself in a safe place, and wait for parts of myself to emerge. As usual, I didn’t really “see” anything. I just responded with something I thought sounded right: I saw myself perched on a rock in my favorite spot along the Eno River as my childhood self walked up to me today in overalls and a green turtleneck, and a “dark” version » of myself representing my depression was hiding. on the other side of the river. When I relayed these images to him, I felt like I was pretending. As our sessions progressed, I tried with all my might to enter an altered state where I could “see” these numbers; Sometimes, after intense concentration, I would experience something akin to blurry dream images, but that’s all. After coming out of it, I wanted to talk about these versions of myself, to process what they meant, to come back to them. But most of the time, I didn’t see anything.

As I have now learned, there is a name for the mental blindness I suffered from: aphantasia. People with aphantasia cannot form mental images, or what little they see is faint and vague. It is estimated that between 1 and 4 in 100 people have aphantasia, and those who do sometimes refer to themselves as aphantasics, aphants, or aphantasiacs. We usually self-identify because there is no way to confirm whether someone has it or not. Even for people who participate in studies, the ideal way to “diagnose” aphantasia is to answer a questionnaire about the vividness of visual imagery.

Aphantasia was described for the first time in 1880 by the British psychologist Sir Francis Galton. After asking participants to recall the lighting, definition and colors of their breakfast table as they sat down to eat that morning, he found that, for some, “the power of the visualization was rubbish.” More than a century later, in 2010, Adam Zeman, MDneurologist at the University of Exeter who studies visual imagery, published the case study of a 65-year-old man who suddenly developed aphantasia after a cardiac procedure. In other cases, he noted, people had lost mental imagery as a result of head injuries. Thanks to the media coverage around their work, Dr. Zeman and his team received a flood of stories from others who had similar experiences.