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Many people don’t see mental images. The reason offers clues to consciousness
People with aphantasia have no mental imagery—and they’re offering brain scientists a window into consciousness
February 25, 2026
10 min read
Many people don’t see mental images. The reason offers clues to consciousness
People with aphantasia have no mental imagery—and they’re offering brain scientists a window into consciousness
By Elizabeth Quill & Nature magazine
[Conceptual illustration of a head and puzzle pieces]
Ada Zielińska
Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?
Most of us can call up such pictures in our minds. We can visualize the past and summon images of the future. But for an estimated 4% of people, this mental imagery is weak or absent. When researchers ask them to imagine something familiar, they might have a concept of what it is, and words and associations might come to mind, but they describe their mind’s eye as dark or even blank.
Systems neuroscientist Mac Shine at the University of Sydney, Australia, first realized that his mental experience differed in this way in 2013. He and his colleagues were trying to understand how certain types of hallucination come about, and were discussing the vividness of mental imagery.
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“When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.
This moment of revelation is common to many people who don’t form mental images. They report that they might never have thought about this aspect of their inner life if not for a chance conversation, a high-school psychology class or an article they stumbled across.
[Visit the story from Nature to play the quiz 'How do you imagine?']
Although scientists have known for more than a century that mental imagery varies between people, the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.
Since then, aphantasia has shot into the canon of unusual phenomena that are invaluable for studying how the mind works. Like synaesthesia (in which people’s senses are connected in exceptional ways, so they hear colours, for example) and prosopagnosia (also known as face blindness), aphantasia has opened many new research avenues.
Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life. The findings have led to a flurry of discussions about how mental imagery forms, what it is good for and what it might reveal about the puzzle of consciousness: researchers tend to define mental imagery as a conscious experience, and some are now excited to study aphantasia as a way to probe imagery’s potentially unconscious forms.
Cognitive neuroscientist Giulia Cabbai at University College London is among the researchers interested in these questions. She was shocked to learn about aphantasia in 2015. Her own intensely vivid mental imagery is at the other extreme of the distribution — she has hyperphantasia. The fact that there are people with a complete lack of mental imagery brings fresh ways to study this internal experience, she says. “How does it affect our emotion, our perception, our attention, our memory? We can understand this with aphantasia.”
Genuine variation
Neurologist Adam Zeman at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Exeter, UK, began studying aphantasia in 2003. He met a man who, after a minimally invasive heart procedure, complained that although his visual perception remained normal, his mind’s eye had vanished. Scans of his brain showed the expected activity when he looked at images of famous faces, but notable differences from control individuals when he tried to imagine the faces. After Zeman’s team published a case study in 2010, Zeman heard from more than 20 people who said that they, too, lacked mental imagery, but they had lacked it their entire lives. Zeman’s team surveyed those people, reporting the findings and introducing the term aphantasia (tacking an ‘a’ to the front of ‘phantasia’, Aristotle’s term for the mind’s eye) in 2015 in Cortex.
Zeman says that he was inundated with messages after an article about the paper appeared in The New York Times. Since that article, some 20,000 people have contacted him with their own stories of mental imagery.
“I didn’t expect it to explode quite as it has,” says Zeman. “If you are studying what you regard as a rare neuropsychological phenomenon and you get half a dozen people in touch, that’s big time.”
The 2015 paper and subsequent research has revealed how much aphantasia can vary. For instance, people with aphantasia often, but not always, lack the ability to imagine in sensory modalities besides vision — having no ‘mind’s ear,’ for example. Some people with aphantasia report dreaming in pictures, but others don’t.
Researchers have also found that aphantasia seems to have a genetic component, with the likelihood of having aphantasia increasing tenfold if you have a sibling who has a weak or absent mind’s eye. And aphantasia might be more common in people in scientific and technical professions than in people with careers in the arts.
Zeman and others say that aphantasia doesn’t seem to make much difference to behaviour, and although it might influence creativity, it by no means precludes it. Instead of calling it a disorder or condition, Zeman describes it as an “intriguing variation” — one extreme on a distribution of mental-imagery capabilities.
Getting a measure
Much of the work characterizing mental imagery relies on asking participants to describe their experience. But such methods are subjective, and they can’t separate true variations in experience from variations in how people describe or interpret that experience. So some researchers have been attempting to come up with other techniques.
Neuroscientist Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and his colleagues developed an approach that takes advantage of a perceptual phenomenon called binocular rivalry. When a different visual is presented to each eye simultaneously, for example, a pattern of green lines to the left eye and red lines to the right, a person’s perception toggles between the two instead of blending them. Nearly two decades ago, Pearson decided to see what happened if he imagined one of the visuals in his mind’s eye — in this case, only the green lines or only the red — before the test began. It turned out that whichever pattern he imagined was what he saw during the test.
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