Is Your Mind’s Eye Blind? It Might Be Time for an Aphantasia Test

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In this article:

• While it’s not yet a recognized diagnosis, aphantasia is defined as a lack of visual imagination.
• Equating aphantasia with being uncreative is a misconception because people with it still have imagination. It’s just imagination without images.
• There are aphantasia tests you can take to check whether or not you have it.
• Aphantasia isn’t a recognized diagnosis yet, but several researchers have looked into the science behind this phenomenon.

We use our imagination for a ton of stuff.

Now, you’re probably thinking of imagination’s role in creative expression, but it has uses beyond that. Imagination helps us empathize with other people because it enables us to imagine ourselves in their shoes. It also lets us plan for the future by allowing us to picture hypothetical scenarios that we might want to prepare for.

Plus, many recent advancements in tech were inspired by fictional works (think Star Trek or Star Wars) that encouraged young scientists-to-be to imagine a world where sci-fi tech is real.

On a less practical note, imagination is what makes it possible for millions of Dungeons and Dragons players, myself included, to go on epic quests in worlds that don’t exist. Maybe that’s why so many D&D players are artists of some kind.

And I would have been comfortable with that assumption if not for one player who told me she can’t mentally picture what I’m describing to the adventurers.

What Is Aphantasia?

We didn’t know what aphantasia was back then, but when that D&D session ground to a halt and became a discussion about how everyone at the table imagines the setting, it became evidently clear that we were all thinking of the same thing. Everything we pictured in our heads was generally the same, based on how I described it.

Except for that one player.

Meg said, “It’s not that I can’t imagine it entirely. It’s kind of weird, like, I can’t see it like you guys do? I know there’s supposed to be a building and we’re inside it, but I can’t see the building or what’s inside it. And I can’t see you guys. I know the characters are there and where we are on the grid and what we’re doing, but I can’t see your faces or clothes.”

That was in 2017. A year later, a video by animator WowRightMeow started appearing on YouTube recommendations and made a brief appearance on Twitter’s trending list. In it, she asks viewers to imagine an apple and then rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how vivid it was in their heads.

She found that most of her colleagues in the creative industry rated theirs between 8 and 10. My little circle of artists, musicians, photographers, and writers said the same thing. Again, except for that one friend who writes fiction but can’t picture biting into an imaginary apple and tasting it.

WowRightMeow explained that if you have a hard time seeing things in your mind’s eye, you might have aphantasia.

Aphantasia is, in a nutshell, image-free imagination. Like the people I mentioned, most people with aphantasia can use their imagination, but they can’t visualize what they’re imagining or what other people ask them to imagine. Some forms of aphantasia can affect our ability to imagine with our other senses which is why some people who have it might have weaker or stronger “sensory imaginations” when it comes to taste, touch, or sound.

But what does that mean for creatives who have aphantasia? We tend to think of creatives as people who have exceptional gifts of imagination, not people who have trouble picturing apples in their heads.

That viral video helped a lot of people realize that they have aphantasia. But it also sent creatives down a pit of self-doubt.

“It can be incredibly frustrating for me to draw,” WowRightMeow said, “I have to rely solely on what I put down through sketching.”

Despite the challenges that having aphantasia presents to visual artists, it doesn’t make you uncreative. In fact, many talented artists have the condition and one of them is an Oscar award-winning artist.

Having Aphantasia Doesn’t Make You Uncreative

If you’ve seen The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast, you’ve seen the work of artist Glen Keane. Keane studied at CalArts before eventually joining Disney to work on the aforementioned films as well as Aladdin and Pocahontas.

But Keane has a secret: He can’t mentally paint with all the colors of the wind. He’s one of the 2-5% of people who have aphantasia.

Visual artist Julie Kitzes, who makes beautiful Mucha-inspired Art Nouveau illustrations of anthropomorphic animals, is also mentally blind.

So how do they make art without their mind’s eye?

According to Julia, she relies on “photobashing,” making collages of reference photos, to create a substitute for her mind’s eye. Similarly, Keane makes sketches based on memories of visual details.

Aphantasia doesn’t take away the ability to remember what things look like so creatives with aphantasia use their memories of real-life things to “construct” a mental concept of what purely fantastical things would look like.

At the risk of being ironic, imagine a blank piece of A4 paper. Now think of magazines. Instead of creating an image of a man walking on a beach from scratch, you cut out a photo of sand and then a photo of a lake. You put them together side by side and slap a photo of a man you cut out from a fashion magazine on top.

That’s what artists with aphantasia do on a cognitive level to simulate the ability to create mental images.

So while aphantasia makes it harder to imagine things, there are workarounds that allow artists to make creative works. Having aphantasia just means having a different way of experiencing art and, ultimately, being a person.

Aphantasia Tests That Can Help You Figure Out Whether You Have It

At this point, a few of you reading this might be having the sinking realization that you have aphantasia. Before you jump to conclusions, here are a few aphantasia tests that you can take to assess your ability to picture things.

The most popular aphantasia test is the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire which is a 5-point scale that asks you to rate how vividly you imagine things on a scale of 1 to 5, kind of like the apple test mentioned earlier.

The test takes you through five different pages containing one big scenario that the test asks you to imagine bit by bit until the entire image is clear (or not) in your head.

If you don’t have the patience to sit through that many questions, you can try this simple aphantasia test:

Stop here. Close your eyes and imagine a red star.

When you open your eyes, find the number of the image that looks most like what you imagined earlier.

What the Science Says About Aphantasia

No matter what results you get, though, remember that aphantasia isn’t a recognized diagnosis yet. That said, research has shown that aphantasia is real because people who have it show neurological and cognitive differences from people who don’t.

Studies show that people with aphantasia may struggle with visual imagery, but a number of them can vividly imagine using their other senses. It’s kind of like how people who are blind are more attuned to their sense of touch, smell, and hearing.

Aphantasia has also been found to be tied to how easy or hard it is to stimulate the visual cortex and prefrontal cortex. Researchers discovered that increasing or decreasing the excitability of these parts of the brain had a direct impact on the strength of visual imagery that participants experienced.

One study further suggests that people with aphantasia may also have prosopagnosia, a condition that’s commonly known as “face blindness.” As you can guess, this makes it hard for a person to recognize faces. Prosopagnosia is linked to autism.

Similarly, children with ADHD and children with autism have both been found to spend less time looking at people’s eyes than typically developing children, which may make it difficult to encode and remember faces.

Interestingly, Julie Kitzes mentions having ADHD in her blog. Of course, none of this is meant to imply that one causes the other, just that it’s interesting to see how non-neurotypical brains are similar to each other.

But what if the tests told you you don’t have aphantasia while saying that you’re also not “normal”?

Your Results Say You Have Hyperphantasia — What Does It Mean?

If your VVIQ results looked like the one above, you’re not exactly “normal” either.

Hyperphantasia is the opposite of aphantasia. Consider them two opposing extremes on a spectrum where most people fall somewhere in the middle. On one side, you have people who can’t mentally picture anything and on the other, you have people who can easily live in their own heads.

Just to be clear: Hyperphantasia isn’t a recognized diagnosis either, and internet tests like these should always be taken with a Himalayan salt lamp.

However, findings on the neurological roots of hyperphantasia mirror those for aphantasia.

Hyperphantastics have stronger connections between their prefrontal cortex and visual network compared to people with aphantasia. People with hyperphantasia tend to have synesthesia, a condition that merges the experience of sensory information (i.e. – tasting color and hearing shapes), at higher rates than most people as well.

Hyperphantasia also correlates with the Big Five Trait of Openness, which I also incidentally tend to score on the upper end of. If you take the Big Five Personality Test at Open Psychometrics, you might find that the same is true for you.

Our mental quirks shape the way we experience ourselves, the world around us, and each other. Dare I say it makes us a little bit human? If you’re interested in taking more tests and seeing how your scores overlap with each other, you can check out these free psychological tests from Open Psychometrics.