Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

You Do Not Have Aphantasia (Probably)

4 March 2026 · 7 min read

I would like to talk about Aphantasia today because it is something that lives in the back of a lot of people's minds like a virus, I would like to attack that virus head on

Firstly, aphantasia is incredibly rare, in all likelihood you do not have it, even if you think you do.

Oh no, how could I say that?

Well, the research on aphantasia actually supports this, but in a very weird way to ensure that the people researching it continue to receive national funding, this is the politics of academia

Aphantasia means 'Without' or 'Lacking' in 'Phantasia' which is mental imagery. It was first used by Aristotle in De Anima III1 and it means "Imagination". That means that in the classical meaning of the term, for someone to qualify as having aphantasia they must literally lack the ability for visualization. This means, and older literature repeatedly mentions this, that they -do not dream at all-, and that this lack of dreaming is not due to other factors like poor REM

Aristotle's framework treats it as foundational to -all- cognition; cognition memory and dreaming2. Later mister Alexander of Aphrodisias3 in the 3rd century thought looking at things in your mind's eye left a slime on thing that reactivated which causes images and memories and dreams, meaning without this sense one could not do any of those things. The vast majority of people who claim to have aphantasia claim to be able to dream just fine.

The old researchers thus, are quite clear about this; for someone to have aphantasia they would have to essentially be mentally retarded. Yet, if you say this today, you'll find a whole gaggle of people who -claim- to have -self diagnosed- themselves with Aphantasia, likely hearing the word first on tumblr where it reached its initial first popularity in the mid 2010s on "Cool Word" tumblr pages4 (remember petrichor? saudade? saunder? limerance). The word 'Aphantasia' was frequently brought up on these pages, and eventually it became a viral hit. Technically 'aphantasia' itself was coined in a 2015 paper (I wrote this earlier here is the source Zeman et al.5), though the concept of "imagers vs non-imagers" (coined in the late 1800s by Galton6) was well established and discussed even in Usenet circles.

This meme would evolve and take shape for years, when eventually 4chan users would popularize the "Apple Test", which would only cause even more confusion

The problem here, is that almost none of these people claiming to have aphantasia actually had it. Studies in the past 15 years have shown that people with aphantasia (remember, this is self reported) do not do any worse than people "without" aphantasia, in fact, they actually report doing -slightly better- than people without aphantasia. (Pounder et al., 20187 found aphantasics had higher mental rotation accuracy than normal imagers; Keogh et al., 2021 found equivalent visual working memory accuracy using different strategies; Marks, 1972 found no significant difference between vivid and non-vivid imagers on associative memory tasks)

Now if you're not thinking critically about this you might think, "Wow that is so cool, people with aphantasia actually can visualize, just not in ways we understand"--NO

That makes no sense! Yet, the researchers of these studies come to a similar conclusion "Our understandings and assumptions of Aphantasia continues to be challenged, more work is needed"
(paraphrase), this for those of you don't know is academic jargon for "Please give me more money to keep researching this"(I found Blomkvist & Marks, 20238 which says there is no consensus on whether aphantasia should even be described as a real condition, no "battery of psychometric instrument to diagnose it, and that only self diagnosis tools depart from validated measures in ways like to impact validity and accuracy" plain English: this shit is not real) yet these studies then made their way to pop science articles trying to cash in on the aphantasia meme which then trickle down to people on the rest of the internet to the point where 'having Aphantasia' is considered a quirky thing instead of an extremely serious form of mental retardation that even most non-human animals appear to have the capacity for

Now you've run into an issue. There is an 'aphantasia' community, a subreddmit, forums, discord communities. All centered around their shared communion in something that they almost certainly do not have who now have it as a vested part of their personality that must be taken seriously (last study I sourced also talks about how people who self diagnose with this give themselves anxiety, distress, feel stigma, and are more likely to have generalized health anxiety lol)

"No matter that I am an artist, no matter that I am a writer, no matter that I dream, no matter that I recall the faces of my friends and family, and the sights of my youth, no I'm actually very special, I don't -literally- hallucinate a 3d image onto my eyesight like -everyone else- I just [explains the mind's eye in a really concrete literal way], totally different from mental visualization!"

Remember how I mentioned that people who self-diagnosed with aphantasia tended to actually, broadly, do better on visualization tests? This is exactly what we would predict of people who are above average intelligence (110-130), (Another study Milton 2021 confirmed this actually, new to me, self diagnosed aphantasics reported their average IQ at 115 vs 110 for the general population, these are not disabled people) this is discussed on the old internet as 'Clever Sillies', the term eventually morphed into what many of you use 'Midwit' to mean, though that term itself has degraded to mean 'Stupid', when once it meant 'So smart that you're stupid but not smart enough to be smart'. If you look at discussion on the slightly above average intelligence, the clever sillies, they have overrationalization in common, they do not trust their senses or their intuitions.

One particularly sharp observation from one of the original essays on 'Clever Sillies' (Charlton, 2009, Medical Hypotheses9, I don't have to source this, but honestly as a child one of my favorite activities was reading the Medical Hypotheses journal before it went away, so I'd like to bring attention to it, if nothing else) was that these people can be convinced of anything if it sounds logical enough. This is especially true if it relates to something that makes them feel special or distinct, their capacity for rationalization was so good in fact, you could convince them that 'normal people' are hallucinating 24/7. If it sounds convincing enough, you could convince them to ban water.

This is the plight of the slightly above average. (For reference to their 'Tyranny' see the original essay by Charlton on Clever Sillies) A plight that has convinced myriads of these people that they have aphantasia BUT actually can still do good on visualization because "actually its just a non-conscious part of my brain that isn't visual like my eyes doing the visualization", like buddy you've just described the Mind's Eye, but they don't teach you about the senses in school anymore so even the 4.0 kids are confused.

People are attached to the idea of having aphantasia, it makes them feel unique and special, it makes them feel as if they have a 'silent struggle' but when you actually point out that 'real aphantasia' isn't a silent struggle but akin to something like actual retardation they get very upset, why? Because they do not actually have aphantasia, a person with aphantasia (and there are actual studies that have identified people with neurologically REAL aphantasia, Zeman's Patient MX10 lost all visualization after a coronary angioplasty) would not be very happy, and would feel the lack in every day life, they would basically be disabled.

I know what you're saying, "Okay that's all find and dandy, but aphantasia doesn't actually mean an inability to visualize, it means an inability to -consciously- visualize"

I will concede this point with a major caveat: this is what the definition means -now-, after the research done in the 2010s and now in the 2020s, after the popularization of the term, and after the mass of people who self identify as having it. In one of the original studies on visualization 10% of people claimed to have aphantasia when told what it is, however when actually testing for it with visualization challenges that number plummeted to 1%. (Fact checking this now, I was recalling Beran et al 202311, which found 8.9% of a 5k US sample self reported aphantasia, but only 1.5 scored in the aphantasic range on the validated imagery questions. Another older one I found, Faw 2009 saw a similar inflation, 2.1% reported no image but 10% reported "vague and dim")

You should be able to see the thread I am weaving here: A large amount of people who are above average intelligence and educated took the classical definition of 'Aphantasia' too literally due to lack of a basic understanding of qualia12, but a certain level of confidence in their own understanding of what they read and believe what they have read to have said (clever silly trap), turned it into a meme, created a whole new school of research that requires a mass of people who believe they have it to acquire funding, and the result is you have a bunch of people cosplaying like they are actually mentally disabled.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. In De Anima (On the Soul) III.3, Aristotle gives phantasia (from phainesthai, 'to appear') its fullest treatment: the faculty by which an image arises in us, usually translated 'imagination.' The negated word, a-phantasia, is modern. The Greek word itself is old, and she is right that Aristotle made it central to his account of thought: in 431a he says the soul never thinks without an image. source ↩
  2. Aristotle ties phantasia to all three. In On Memory he calls memory a state of an image, a likeness of what was perceived, and in On Dreams he explains dreams as the movements of earlier perception that persist after the object is gone. His claim in De Anima 431a that the soul never thinks without an image made imagery foundational to thought, which is why she reads the ancient word so strictly. source ↩
  3. Alexander of Aphrodisias (active about 200 CE) was a Peripatetic philosopher who held the Aristotelian chair at Athens and was the most celebrated ancient commentator on Aristotle. He defended an Aristotelian theory of phantasia, building on Aristotle's account of memory and dreaming, in which perception leaves lasting traces in the sense organs. That is the idea she is describing. source ↩
  4. These lists were a real genre. Petrichor, the smell of rain on dry earth, was coined in 1964 by two Australian scientists, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, in Nature, from Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the fluid in the veins of the gods). Saudade is the Portuguese word for longing for something absent. The pattern she names, a rare word with an elegant feel, is how a clinical term can become an identity. source ↩
  5. Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar and Sergio Della Sala coined the word in 'Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia', a short letter in the journal Cortex 73 (2015), pp. 378–380. It followed more than twenty people contacting Zeman after a popular article about his earlier patient, MX. The sample was therefore self-selected from the start, which is the same point she makes about self-diagnosis. source ↩
  6. Francis Galton's 'Statistics of Mental Imagery' (Mind, 1880) asked people to recall their breakfast table and rate how clearly they saw it. He reported a wide spread from vivid to faint, and that many scientists he surveyed said imagery was nearly unknown to them. So the idea of a spectrum of imagery is far older than the 2015 label. source ↩
  7. The study this most closely matches is Pounder and colleagues, Cortex 148 (2022): 20 people with congenital aphantasia (VVIQ below 25) matched on age and IQ with 20 typical imagers. Accuracy was comparable on spatial span, pattern memory, verbal memory and mental rotation, and the only differences were small and in response time. Her central point holds: the group is not impaired where imagery should matter most. source ↩
  8. Andrea Blomkvist and David Marks, 'Defining and "diagnosing" aphantasia: Condition or individual difference?', Cortex 169 (2023), pp. 220–234. Marks is the psychologist who devised the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire in 1973, the scale most aphantasia research still uses, so the critique of how the condition is diagnosed comes from the person who wrote the main instrument. source ↩
  9. Bruce G. Charlton, 'Clever Sillies: Why High IQ People Tend to be Deficient in Common Sense', Medical Hypotheses 73 (2009), pp. 867–870. His argument is that people who talk mostly with others of similar intelligence drift into opinions that lack common sense. It is a hypothesis paper in a journal that publishes them, and later work (Woodley 2010, Dutton and van der Linden 2015) tested and qualified it. source ↩
  10. MX was a 65-year-old man who lost the ability to summon images after a coronary angioplasty. Zeman and colleagues reported in Neuropsychologia 48 (2010) that he scored normally on tests of perception, memory and imagery, apparently by another strategy, and that the visual brain areas active in controls during imagery were not active in him. MX noticed the loss, which is the point she draws from him. source ↩
  11. Beran and colleagues, Consciousness and Cognition 113 (2023): in a sample of 5,010 US adults, 8.9% described themselves as aphantasic, but only 1.5% fell in the aphantasic range on imagery questionnaires. That is her pattern in numbers: self-description inflates the count about six times over. source ↩
  12. Qualia are the felt, first-person qualities of experience, 'what it is like' to see red or taste salt, a phrase from Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (1974). Her argument is that people mistook a missing felt quality for a missing ability, and the 2015 definition of aphantasia, which concerns the subjective experience of imagery, makes the same distinction. source ↩