By Alexander Stone
Think of a memory. A significant one. Perhaps the day you learned to ride a bicycle, the taste of gingerbread in your grandmother’s kitchen, or the face of a loved one as they delivered important news. As you recall the moment, what do you see? Most people will experience some form of mental picture, a fleeting image or a detailed scene replaying behind their eyes. This internal cinema is so fundamental to our idea of memory, thought, and imagination that we rarely question its existence.
But what if that screen was blank? What if your mind held all the information – the facts, the emotions, the sensory data – but simply refused to project an image? This is the reality for a portion of the population living with a condition known as aphantasia. It is not a disorder or a defect. It is, however, a profound variation in the human experience that challenges our most basic assumptions about how we think. At the other end of this invisible spectrum lies hyperphantasia, a state of such vivid mental imagery that the past can feel as real and immediate as the present. These two extremes reveal a hidden truth: the subjective nature of our reality is far more varied than we could ever imagine.
A World Without Pictures
Mary Wathen is a 43-year-old solicitor from Newent. By all accounts, she lives a full life, rich with experiences and relationships. Yet when she accesses her memories, she encounters a quiet void where pictures should be. She knows she baked with her mother as a child; she can recall the feeling of the flour and the warmth of the kitchen. But she cannot see it. The memory of her husband’s proposal exists as a set of facts and a profound emotional echo, not a visual snapshot. Even the birth of her children, moments of immense personal significance, are stored without a single accompanying image.
“When people say they can bring up images, to me that sounds really quite odd,” Wathen explains. “I can’t relive any experience I see. I see it only once in the moment. I’m more led by feelings and thoughts than I am by visuals.”
For decades, Wathen was unaware that her internal world was different. The discovery that others could conjure mental pictures at will was a revelation. It was a bit like discovering that everyone else possessed a sixth sense. She and her mother both share this trait, this unique form of processing where the mind’s monitor is, in a sense, permanently switched off. To be clear, all the hardware is there. The concepts, the comprehension, the memories – they are all intact. The information is processed, the emotions are felt, the knowledge is stored. But the visual display unit is inactive. It is a silent, imageless existence in a world that assumes everyone is a visual thinker.
An Internal Kaleidoscope
Contrast Mary Wathen’s experience with that of Geraldine van Heemstra. For the Dutch-born artist, the mind is a place of explosive, irrepressible imagery. She has hyperphantasia, a condition that makes her inner world a high-definition, multi-sensory cinema. Her memories are not faint echoes of the past; they are immersive experiences, recalled with such intensity that they can feel like they are happening all over again.
Her sensory experience is also intertwined in a way that most find difficult to comprehend. For van Heemstra, letters and numbers are not just symbols; they have distinct colours. People sometimes emit auras, their personalities rendered in a palette of light. This cross-wiring of the senses is a form of synesthesia, which often accompanies hyperphantasia. It turns the mundane act of thinking into an artistic event.
Recalling the birth of her daughter is not an abstract exercise. It is a full-body, full-colour immersion. “I remember a blue screen and then our daughter’s head popping up with a little sunrise over her head, probably because she was screaming her lungs out,” she says. “It’s just a very beautiful and vivid memory, with very warm colours.” Her mind doesn’t just remember; it reconstructs, it paints, it scores the moment with light and sensation. Her internal world is not a quiet database of facts but a living gallery, a constant stream of vibrant, detailed pictures.
The Spectrum of Perception
It is tempting to view these two conditions as a simple binary opposition: the blind mind’s eye versus the all-seeing one. But the reality is a spectrum. Most of us exist somewhere in the vast middle ground between Mary and Geraldine. When asked to picture an apple, some might see a vague, ghostly outline. Others might conjure a detailed, photorealistic image, complete with a dewy sheen on the red skin and a fleck of brown on the stem. Many will fall somewhere in between.
The formal study of this spectrum is relatively new. The term “aphantasia” was coined only in 2015 by a team led by Professor Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter. The research was prompted by a man who lost his ability to form mental images after a minor surgical procedure. This led to the realisation that many people are simply born this way, having gone through their entire lives assuming that phrases like “picture this” were purely metaphorical.
The neurological underpinnings of this spectrum are still being mapped, but they appear to be linked to the network of brain regions responsible for memory and sensory processing, particularly the visual cortex. In those with hyperphantasia, these regions show heightened activity and connectivity. In aphantasics, the same regions remain quiet during tasks of imagination. It is not that the brain is broken; it is simply wired to follow a different pathway. The information takes a different route, bypassing the visual projection room and heading straight to the conceptual centres.
Creativity and the Imageless Mind
The immediate assumption is that a vivid mental canvas like Geraldine van Heemstra’s must be a prerequisite for creativity, particularly in the visual arts. Her ability to see worlds inside her head seems like a natural asset for an artist. She can compose a scene, experiment with colour, and walk through an imagined landscape before ever touching a brush. Her art is a direct translation of her rich internal life.
But what of the aphantasic? How can one create without the ability to visualise? The existence of successful artists, designers, and architects with aphantasia proves that the mind’s eye is not the only source of creativity. Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, a company that has arguably created some of the most visually imaginative worlds in modern cinema, has reported having aphantasia.
This seeming paradox forces a deeper question about what creativity truly is. For an aphantasic creator, the process is not one of transcription – copying an image from the mind onto the page. It is one of construction. They might work from references, building an image piece by piece based on conceptual knowledge rather than an internal picture. They know a tree has a trunk, branches, and leaves, and they can render it based on that abstract understanding. Their creativity is more procedural, like an architect designing a building based on blueprints and physical principles rather than a pre-formed vision. In a sense, they are discovering the image at the same time as their audience.
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding. We often conflate imagination with visualisation. But imagination is a far broader concept. It is the capacity to generate ideas, to solve problems, to create something new. Visualisation is merely one tool in the toolbox, and for some of the world’s most innovative minds, it’s a tool they have learned to work without.
The Great Unseen
Perhaps the most profound implication of this spectrum of perception is what it says about the nature of human consciousness. We navigate the world cocooned in the certainty of our own subjective experience, assuming it to be a universal standard. We believe that when we talk about love, or fear, or the memory of a summer’s day, we are all accessing a similar internal landscape.
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia shatter this illusion. They demonstrate that the very texture of our internal lives can be radically different. When one person speaks of seeing their future, they may be engaging in a literal act of mental projection, playing out scenarios in a detailed internal film. For another, the same process might be a non-visual exploration of concepts, possibilities, and potential emotional outcomes. Neither is superior. They are simply different languages of thought.
This realisation is a powerful call for a new kind of empathy. It asks us to consider that when someone says “I don’t see your point,” they may mean it more literally than we think. It complicates our understanding of learning styles, trauma therapy, and even the way we describe our own inner lives. The world is not just divided by culture, language, or belief, but by the very way we process reality inside our own heads. The landscapes of our minds are un-mappable to anyone but ourselves, and the diversity within them is as vast and as beautiful as the diversity of the world outside. So, the next time you close your eyes and retreat into your own mind, spare a thought for the great unseen – the countless different ways a human brain can make sense of a life.
