Brain Damage That Causes Aphantasia All Points to the Same Spot

Kutsche, Howard, Palacin, Drew, Michel, Cohen, Fox & Kletenik (2026). Preprint accepted in Cortex, Harvard Medical School / Brigham and Women's Hospital

This one is a bit of a detective story. Researchers found 12 documented cases where people lost their visual imagery after a brain injury, strokes mostly, and then mapped exactly where in the brain the damage was. The lesions were all over the place. Different locations, different patients. But when they looked at what all those locations had in common, every single one connected back to the same small region in the left side of the brain called the fusiform imagery node.

This is a big deal because it's causal evidence, not just correlation. These aren't people who were born without imagery and happen to show certain brain patterns. These are people who had imagery and then lost it when a specific network got disrupted.

The fusiform imagery node shows up as both sensitive, connected to 100% of aphantasia lesions, and specific, meaning it wasn't connected to 887 other brain lesion cases causing all kinds of other symptoms. It also rules out a couple of regions scientists have been arguing about, including the frontal lobes and the primary visual cortex, which turn out not to be the key players.

If you remember one thing: There is a specific spot in the left brain where the network for visual imagery lives, and we now have real causal evidence it matters. Not just brain scans of people imagining things, but cases where damage to that network actually switched imagery off.

Link to study here