How Interoception and the Insula Shape Mental Imagery and Aphantasia

Silvanto & Nagai (2025) -- peer-reviewed paper, Brain Topography

This one takes a left turn from the usual "visual cortex" explanation of aphantasia and asks whether the real action is happening somewhere else entirely -- in the part of the brain that reads your body's internal signals. Interoception is your sense of what's going on inside you, heartbeat, breath, gut feelings, and this paper argues it plays a much bigger role in mental imagery than anyone realized.

The researchers propose that aphantasia may actually come down to how well the insula, a brain region that stitches together body signals and sensory information, is doing its job. When that process is disrupted, imagery doesn't get grounded in the self and just doesn't show up. This also helps explain why aphantasia so often shows up alongside SDAM, emotion processing differences, and other conditions and they may all share the same underlying wiring.

For educators, the takeaway is that aphantasia isn't just a vision thing. It might be a whole-brain, whole-body thing.

If you remember one thing: Aphantasia may not be about seeing, it may be about how the brain connects what you sense in the world to what you feel in your body, and that changes everything about how we understand it.

Link to study here