The Paper That Named It

Lives Without Imagery: Congenital Aphantasia

Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar, and Sergio Della Sala. Cortex. 2015.

So after Zeman published that first paper in 2010 something unexpected happened. Over 2,500 people reached out to his team to say they had never been able to picture things in their mind and not because of a surgery or an injury but just because they had always been that way. They had spent their whole lives assuming they were bad at visualization or not trying hard enough and then they read about Zeman's patient and recognized themselves completely. Zeman realized this was something much bigger than one unusual case and wrote this follow-up paper which is the one that gave the condition its name.

The Question

Were all these people describing the same thing? And if so was it a distinct and real phenomenon that deserved its own name and its own place in the scientific conversation?

The Discovery

Zeman and his colleagues studied 21 of the people who had contacted them and confirmed that what they were describing was consistent, real, and lifelong. None of them had experienced it as a loss because they had never had visual imagery to lose in the first place. Most had no idea their inner experience was different from anyone else's until they read about Zeman's 2010 patient and something clicked. The team named the condition aphantasia pulling from the Greek word phantasia meaning imagination and published their findings. The paper was three pages long and it changed everything.

The Insight

Millions of people had been living with something they had no word for. One paper gave them a name for it and a name gave them a way to finally explain themselves to the world.

The One Thing to Remember

Aphantasia was not invented in 2015. It was named in 2015. The people who have it had always been this way and most of them had spent decades not knowing that their experience was any different from everyone else's.

The Connection

The No Picture Needed paper opens by noting that most of the people it describes have never had a word for their experience. This 2015 paper is the reason that is starting to change. The whole field opened up from there.

You can read the full paper by clicking here.