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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Thinking about neuroscience these days, it feels to me that one very strong message emanating from the field is that human brains accomplish the goals of human life in wildly different ways.
Though all living humans are very similar genetically — and our brains, were you to look at them in jars, would look quite similar — the connections between our billions of neurons are wired up in so many different ways. And this spectrum of variation between people includes even capacities that most people take entirely for granted, like the ability to visualize things in your mind.
New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar explores the range of visualization in humans in a big new feature in the magazine, and she joins us this morning. Welcome, Larissa.
Larissa MacFarquhar: Thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re also joined this morning by Tom Ebeyer, who’s founder of the Aphantasia Network. Welcome, Tom.
Tom Ebeyer: Thanks so much for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: So, Larissa, let’s talk about this condition, aphantasia — the subject of this big New Yorker feature. Just tell us what it is.
Larissa MacFarquhar: Essentially, whereas the vast majority of people can, as you said, see pictures in their minds and use those pictures to remember things they’ve seen or done in the past, some people can’t. They don’t see those pictures.
They know many of the same things that the rest of us do — if you ask them, “Does a squirrel have a short or long tail?” they know the answer — but they just can’t see the squirrel.
Alexis Madrigal: Right. Like when we say, “Hey, picture this in your mind’s eye,” that’s the thing — there’s not a picture there.
Larissa MacFarquhar: That’s right.
Alexis Madrigal: Tom, you’re the founder of this network and identify as aphantasic — and you’ve been a subject of study and all these things. Like, if she says, “Does the squirrel have a long or short tail,” how would you get to that answer?
Tom Ebeyer: It’s mostly through semantic knowledge. So I can answer many of these questions — like “the squirrel has a long tail” — just because I know this information. I don’t need to see the image to answer. That’s because the knowledge isn’t necessarily stored in image format. It’s just there, and many aphantasics will answer these questions by saying, “I just know.”
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. It’s like we know six times six is thirty-six — it’s just a piece of information.
Tom Ebeyer: Yeah, exactly. The image representation isn’t actually the source of the knowledge — it’s just a representation of that underlying knowledge. And this applies to knowledge about squirrels and knowledge about your own life — things you’ve done in the past, ideas about the future.
Alexis Madrigal: Do you see words in your head?
Tom Ebeyer: No, I don’t. If the question is ever “Do you see?” the answer is always going to be no. I know — there’s no internal representation that’s not present to the senses.
Alexis Madrigal: That’s so interesting. Larissa, we also know, like many things, there’s a distribution here — a spectrum. Does that mean there are people on the extreme end who can visualize very, very well?
Larissa MacFarquhar: Yes. The same British neurologist, Adam Zeman, who coined the term aphantasia to denote people like Tom who don’t see pictures in their mind, also coined a second term because he found people writing to him saying, “I’m the opposite — I see pictures all the time.” Some said they sometimes couldn’t get rid of them, that it was a plague to have so many images zipping around their minds at all times. He decided that needed a name too — and he called it hyperphantasia.
Alexis Madrigal: I mean, Larissa, you must have thought about where you are on the spectrum.
Larissa MacFarquhar: Of course. I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s a little frustrating because if you’re at one end or the other, it’s pretty clear once you know there’s a spectrum. For people in the middle like myself, it’s harder to say because the tests — there are tests online you can take — are all very subjective. Like, “Is your image of an apple clear or not?”
If the scale is one to a hundred, I feel like maybe I’m around thirty or forty, but it’s so hard to tell.
Alexis Madrigal: Tom, in your experience, as people come to the network or community — for how many people is it super clear, and how many people are more like me and Larissa, where I’d agree I’m on the lower end of this visualization spectrum? There are images, but they’re faint. How would you sort people that way?
Tom Ebeyer: Yeah, it seems like on the most extreme end — where there’s no image — that’s about half a percent of people. The rest looks like a standard distribution, with another pocket at the high end as well.
People can also have combinations of these abilities. Someone might not be able to visualize images but can imagine sounds or smells quite clearly. It really is a wide distribution. And Larissa’s point is really good — it’s quite subjective in the center. How do I know that my dim image is the same as your dim image? It’s an internal, subjective experience.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the condition aphantasia — the inability to visualize in your mind’s eye. We’re joined by Tom Ebeyer, founder of the Aphantasia Network, and Larissa MacFarquhar, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. Her most recent article inspired this show. It’s called “Some People Can’t See Mental Images — the Consequences Are Profound.”
Of course, we want to invite you into this conversation — we’re just talking about what’s in our minds. Do you or someone you know have aphantasia? Maybe you’re on the other end and have hyperphantasia. Give us a call: 866-733-6786.
Maybe you’re hearing about this for the first time and trying to see that apple and you’re not sure — we’ll take that call too. 866-733-6786 or forum@kqed.org. And, of course, on all the social media things, we’re there as well.
Tom, how did you discover that you had aphantasia?
Tom Ebeyer: I was about twenty, in college at the time. I’d come home from a party with a girlfriend, and afterward she said, “Oh, Joanne was wearing the same thing she wore last year.”
I was confounded — “How do you remember what she was wearing last year?” And she said words I’ll never forget: “I just see the picture in my mind.”
From that moment, I was obsessed. I thought, “What do you mean you see an image in your mind?” It was a totally foreign concept to me. I always took these kinds of ideas metaphorically. I never let the idea go. That was around 2010. Aphantasia was given a name in 2015. So at the time, there wasn’t really anything describing the condition. A couple years later, it finally got a name — and this community formed.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, Larissa, you know that some scientists — in fact, one quite notorious scientist — were thinking about this concept and probing through introspection, wondering whether this ability could exist or not exist in the mind.
Larissa MacFarquhar: That’s right. There was some sporadic work on it in the late nineteenth century. Gustav Fechner, a German psychologist in 1860, published a paper analyzing his own mental imagery. He noticed he could have an image but couldn’t keep it in his mind — he had to sort of “re-up” it.
He also found, surprisingly, that he could see images more clearly with his eyes open than closed. But then he dropped the subject and pursued other things. It seems to have gone quiet until 1880, when a British scientist — a very notorious one, later known as the father of eugenics — became interested in mental imagery.
He started interviewing scientists he knew, and later some children at a local school. To his amazement, he found many of the scientists did not have imagery — and thought he must be making it up. They were so used to their own minds working their way, they thought he was, to use his term, “romancing” — making up some fanciful idea that people could see pictures in their minds.
But then, weirdly, the interest faded. Some of that was due to behaviorism — the psychological theory dominant in America for much of the 20th century.
Alexis Madrigal: Stimulus–response — focus on what you can observe.
Larissa MacFarquhar: Exactly. They felt it was unscientific to plumb the subjective interior of the mind. You should look at external things. So it was kind of dropped until much later. Even when scientists became interested in mental imagery again, they focused on typical imagers. As Tom said, it wasn’t until Adam Zeman encountered a patient in the early 2000s that the topic was revived as a serious area of study — which I find amazing.
Alexis Madrigal: It’s partially too, right, that our concept of consciousness and neural networks fits this topic so well.
Larissa MacFarquhar: Yeah. You’re reminding me of a conversation I had with a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, Rishan Reeder, who studies hyperphantasics more than aphantasics. She — and other scientists who share this theory — believes the main factor that affects imagery is neural pruning in early childhood.
Now, this happens to everyone — it’s not a bad thing. Neural pruning — the withering away of some neural networks as you develop — tends to affect those less often used. Her theory is that most small children are hyperphantasic, but many lose that ability to experience vivid images because they don’t use it. They don’t daydream as much, or maybe they’re scolded for daydreaming.
Their brains adjust to focus on the here and now, and that ability fades away.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.
Larissa MacFarquhar: And that ability kind of goes away.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking with Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer for The New Yorker. Her most recent article is “Some People Can’t See Mental Images — the Consequences Are Profound.” We also have Tom Ebeyer, founder of the Aphantasia Network. We’ll be back with more right after the break.
