The Experience of Music in Aphantasia: Emotion, Reward, and Everyday Functions.

Sarah Hashim, Claudia Pulcini, Mats B. Küssner, and Diana Omigie. Music and Science. 2023.

The Question

Visual imagery is one of the ways music makes us feel things. If you cannot generate that imagery, does music lose some of its emotional pull? Does it change how much you enjoy it? Does it change your ability to hear emotion in it? Researchers set out to find what parts of the music experience shift when visual imagery is absent, and what stays exactly the same.

The Discovery

In the first part of the study, aphantasic listeners reported significantly less felt emotional intensity in response to film music compared to typical listeners. But they liked the music just as much. Enjoyment and emotional intensity turned out to be separate things. In the second part, researchers looked at whether aphantasia affected the ability to recognize emotions expressed by music. It did not. Aphantasic listeners were just as accurate at identifying happy, fearful, and tender music as typical listeners. The biggest differences showed up around memory. Aphantasic listeners reported fewer episodic memories triggered by music and used music less for reminiscing about the past. The ability to derive reward from music was the same across both groups.

The Insight

Aphantasia narrows some of what music can access emotionally, specifically the imagery-linked and memory-linked channels, while leaving others fully intact. The love of music, and the ability to understand what it is expressing, do not appear to require a visual imagination.

If you remember one thing

Your kid with aphantasia can love music deeply and hear exactly what it is saying. They just experience it more in the present moment than as a trigger for the past.

The Connection

The No Picture Needed paper explains that students with aphantasia often have a stronger connection to the immediate and concrete rather than the recalled and imagined. This research fits that pattern exactly. Music is not diminished for them. The reward is real. The recognition of emotion is real. What changes is the memory layer, and that is one difference worth knowing when you design activities around music or use songs to anchor learning to emotion.

You can read the full paper by clicking here.