Imagination without Imagery: The challenge of aphantasia

A post by Georgina Brighouse

Can you imagine a bright red apple sitting on a table? Or a sunset over the ocean with orange and pink clouds?

These are examples of imagistic imagination. Visual mental imagery, in these examples, is essential to imagination.

A popular view of imagination is that mental imagery is a necessary requirement for all forms of imagination. Classical theories have often assumed that imagination depends crucially on imagery (e.g., Aristotle 1968, 428a1-2; Hume, 1739/2007), and contemporary philosophers have continued this line of thought.

Amy Kind defends an imagery-essentialist account of imagination. On her view, imagery serves as the ‘paint’ of the imagination (2001, p. 33). Just like paint captures the object of the painting, imagery captures the object of the imagining. Further, she argues that the experiential aspect of imagination – the ‘what-it’s-likeness’ – can only be explained by invoking mental imagery.

Bence Nanay also argues that, whilst imagination and imagery are distinct, the former necessarily depends on the latter (Nanay, 2023a, 2023b). Imagination is something we do, a (typically) voluntary action, whereas mental imagery can be involuntary, such as in flashbacks or earworms (Nanay, 2023a, p. 165). Nanay claims that imagery is necessarily triggered automatically during an imaginative episode.

Such accounts essentially claim that without imagery, one cannot have imagination. This view of imagination does have some intuitive appeal: many everyday cases of imagination do tend to feel similar to perceptual experiences. When one imagines a friend’s face or a scene from a novel, there seems to be something pictorial about the experience.

However, recent reports on aphantasia, a diminished or complete absence of capacity for imagery, presents a significant challenge to this view.

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Two Sources of Imaginative Pleasure

A post by Vincenzo Grasso

“Emma was not sleeping, she was pretending to be asleep; and while he dozed off next to her, she would grow more wakeful, dreaming other dreams. [...] Often, from the top of a mountain, they suddenly caught sight of splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, groves of lemon trees, and cathedrals of white marble on whose sharp steeples storks were nesting. [...] And then, one evening, they would arrive at a village of fishermen, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliff and the line of shanties. It was here that they would stay and make a life for themselves; they would live in a low house, with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, at the far end of a bay, by the edge of the sea. ”

(Flaubert 2010/1857, pp. 171-172)

Emma Bovary, in the grip of her torment, finds comfort in imagining pleasant scenes, often, as is well known, in the company of her favourite novels, or else, as in the passage quoted above, on her own. The imaginative pleasure Emma seeks is, however, to be understood as a maladaptive response, symptomatic of a profound dissatisfaction with her life. At the same time, we should not make the mistake of thinking that this pleasure is always tied to dangerous forms of escapism or wishful thinking. Taking pleasure in imagination is, after all, extremely common. On a tedious afternoon at work, we may take pleasure in imagining ourselves on a beach, lulled by the sound of the waves and the coolness of the breeze. In the absence of a loved one, we may comfort ourselves by calling up a representation of their face. Or again, after visiting the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, one might try to prolong the pleasure once felt before the sculptural beauty of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by reconstructing it in imagination.

How should we identify the source of such imaginative pleasure? One possible answer is to locate the pleasure in the content of the mental act: what is pleasurable about my imagining is a content that would itself be pleasurable to perceive. Since sensory imagination preserves, at least in part, the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience it aims to capture, it seems plausible to say that, in cases where one takes pleasure in imagining, this is because the content itself is something one would enjoy experiencing perceptually. One would no doubt take even greater pleasure in actually being on a beach, or in the company of a loved one, or before the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; but in their absence, why not settle for imagining?

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Models in Suspension: Imagination and the Structure of Scientific Understanding

A post by Ana Elisa Ulloa Labariega

Imagine a mobile—the kind that hangs above a child’s bed. Glass figures suspended at different lengths, each positioned in relation to the others. The structure is not arbitrary: it has been built to support those particular elements, with their specific weights, distances, and tensions. At the same time, the structure itself takes shape in relation to what it is meant to hold; frame and elements are not fully independent, but emerge together as a single configuration.

For a moment, everything holds together. Each figure moves slightly, but never entirely on its own. Its motion is shaped by the others, and by the frame that sustains them all. In other words, the range of movement is delimited by the possibilities given by the whole.

But the balance is conditional.

If one figure becomes heavier, the strings must adjust. If new elements are added, the structure must redistribute tension. Changes are possible, but only up to a point. Once something shifts, it cannot simply be undone: it can only be rebalanced. At the same time there are limits to what it can sustain. At some point, the configuration no longer holds: the system strains, distorts, and eventually breaks. Pieces fall to the ground. Some may remain intact, but the mobile as it was—and the structure that held it together—cannot be recovered.

Scientific models, I want to suggest, are more like this than we usually admit.

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The Paradox of Scientific Fiction

A post by Zachary Srivastava

Over the past five to ten years, there’s been a surge of interest in the role of imagination in science, particularly since the release of The Scientific Imagination, edited by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith (2019). As research continues, we can return to traditional problems from the literature on imagination and philosophy of science to see if our cross-disciplinary excursions have revealed new paths to exploring old problems. The comparisons between fictional characters or stories and scientific models on fiction views of models has led me to think about the problem I was working on in a broader context: how do we gain real understanding from fictional models? The question strikes me as highly similar to Colin Radford’s (1975) “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” and the paradox of fiction, which asks how we can justifiably be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she isn’t real. The similarity between the two questions led me to consider how the paradox of fiction could be repurposed for the philosophy of science. I call this new version the paradox of scientific fiction. This post examines both versions of the paradox, whether they’re truly posing analogous questions, and how this could shape how we think about the relationship between artistic and scientific imagination. 

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Aphantasia and mental imagery: a call for interdisciplinary collaboration (IRCA 2026 announcement)

A post by Christian O. Scholz, Jianghao Liu, and Andrea Blomkvist

In this blog post, we will argue that aphantasia rightfully ascended from a niche curiosity to a hot topic across the cognitive sciences, that mental imagery research and aphantasia research stand to gain a lot from one another, and that the future of both should lie in interdisciplinary research and collaboration. This will then allow us to ultimately segue into shameless promotion for the upcoming interdisciplinary aphantasia conference at the University of Glasgow, IRCA 2026.

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Striving to Imagine Other Animals’ Minds

A post by Luca Marchetti

One of the best popular-science books I’ve read in recent years is Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. It’s a guided tour of how different animals perceive the world: Yong pulls you beyond the confines of human sensing and into the distinct “sensory bubbles” that different animals inhabit, shaped not just by sights and sounds, but by vibrations, pressures, smells, and even electric and magnetic fields. Along the way, he shows what dogs smell on an ordinary street, what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and how a crocodile’s scaly face can be as sensitive as fingertips – all while telling the stories of the discoveries that made these strange worlds intelligible in the first place.

I appreciated the book both for what it says and for how it says it. But I also loved it for a more idiosyncratic – and philosophical – reason: when I read it, about a year ago, I had just started thinking about the possibilities and limits of imagination in trying to understand other animals’ minds, and about the epistemic, moral, and even aesthetic value that this imaginative activity might or might not have. What I found in Yong’s book was a vocabulary – and a kind of conceptual consonance – that resonated with what I was trying to think through myself: that imagination is something we inevitably rely on in these contexts; that it is often a matter of striving to imagine; and that, despite its limits, it can still have profound value. For example, in the book’s introduction Yong writes that in understanding other animals’ minds, “our imaginations will be our greatest assets”: the “ultimate feats of understanding” always require “an informed imaginative leap”; and, even if the task is hard, “there is value and glory in the striving” (Yong 2022, 13). But what kind of imagination is this? And what kinds of value are at stake? Those philosophical questions are not answered in Yong’s book, and they are the ones I will take up – sketchily, partially, and tentatively – in this post.

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Imagination on the Cusp of Impossibility

A post by Zach Kohler

There is something strange about the experience of theatrical magic. Anyone who has watched a good magic trick knows the feeling—it presents itself without fanfare, yet leaves us with the troubled sense that something about the world we take for granted has briefly been unsettled. This post asks what kind of imaginative engagement makes such an experience possible. Against accounts that assimilate magic either to fictional make-believe or to the presentation of known impossibilities, I contend that theatrical magic ought to operate on what I call the cusp of impossibility: a liminal modal space in which events are experienced as radically implausible without being decisively foreclosed as impossible. My claim is that while magic may, and often does, present itself as outright impossible, its most compelling and aesthetically successful instances do not. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe, Jason Leddington’s alief-based account of illusion, and Richard Moran’s distinction between hypothetical and dramatic imagination, I argue that imagination plays an essential role in magic—not by transporting spectators into a fictional world, but by enabling a resisted, emotionally charged way of relating to our own.

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Imagination in Learning and Creativity

A post by Kerry Clark

Introduction

Imagination is used in many ways—whether in daydreaming, anticipating future outcomes, or engaging in creative works. I take imagination to be (roughly) the mental faculty that allows individuals to form images, ideas, and sensations without direct input from the senses. This mental faculty supports important human activities, whether it be for practical purposes like imagining how to organize furniture, daydreaming for entertainment purposes, or imagining to better understand the world around us. This post explores imagination within two distinct but related processes: learning and creativity.

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The Discovery of Imagination

A post by Avshalom Schwartz 

The safest general characterization of the history of imagination is that it begins with Plato. Indeed, this is a rare point of agreement between scholars—from intellectual historians to analytical philosophers—about what is otherwise a contested and heavily debated concept. According to this standard account, Plato was the first to offer a philosophical investigation of imagination. This position was taken, for example, by Murray Wright Bundy in what is, to this day, the most comprehensive study of imagination in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bundy’s claim that “the history of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ as terms of reflective thought begins with Plato” is echoed in countless other historical and philosophical treatments of this concept (Bundy 1927, 11; cf. Kearney 1988, 87; Jørgensen 2017; Watson 1988, 1; Clifford and Buxton 2023, 4). Aristotle, as this common story goes, was the first to treat this concept systematically—“the first to give a careful delineation of the power of imagination as part of a complex theory of human and animal psychology,” as one commentator has put it (Sepper 2013; See also Schweitzer 1925, 77)—with others going as far as attributing to him the “discovery” of imagination (Castoriadis 1997).

Very few studies of the imagination have examined the pre-Platonic imagination or evaluated the background of his treatment of imagination and the resources on which he drew in developing his philosophical account of this mental faculty. Some have searched among Plato’s philosophical predecessors, focusing on pre-Socratic thinkers such as Thales, the Atomists, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (Ambrosi 1898, 5–9; Bundy 1927, 11–18; Sepper 2013, 107–14). Others took more mythical or aesthetic routes, treating the story of Prometheus and early practice of poetry—including ideas about inspiration and creativity—as pre-theoretical reflections on the human imaginative power (Kearney 1988, 79–80; Jørgensen 2017, 21; Sheppard 2015). But what about the more straightforward, linguistic origins of imagination?

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Why do we rewatch fictions—but not sports?

A post by Neil Van Leeuwen

In the background as I write this blog, the Superbowl is on. The Seahawks currently lead 6-0 in the second quarter, which makes me vaguely happy, since I dislike the Patriots (sorry, not sorry). But I’m not Seahawks fan, so my investment in the game is minimal enough that I can write.

Things are different, of course, for New England and Seattle fans. For them, this game will appear as one of the most riveting things they’ve seen in years. And all told, about 100 million people in the United States, along with about 25 million more around the world, are watching this game.

Of course, the Superbowl and sports in general aren’t the only long viewing people do. Estimates suggest that that average person watches about a movie a week, and then TV shows are in addition to that. Most movies and TV shows are fictional dramas, and plays and musicals fall in that category as well. So the amount of fictional drama that people watch is impressive as well.

Given all that, if you were to ask, “What do people like watching more, sports or fictional drama?” I would have a genuinely hard time answering. We could come at the question from multiple different angles, some of which might put sports on top and others of which might put fictional drama on top.

But there is a related question, concerning which I think the answer is abundantly clear: What do people like rewatching more, sports or fictions?

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Grieving Imagined Futures

A post by Hannah Fasnacht

«Wie geht’s?» fragte die Trauer die Hoffnung.

«Ich bin etwas traurig», sagte die Hoffnung.

«Hoffentlich», sagte die Trauer.

—Franz Hohler

“How are you?” Sadness asked Hope.

“I’m a little sad”, Hope said.

“I would hope so”, said Sadness.

[my translation]

Grief is typically directed at or caused by an actual loss: the death of a person, the end of a relationship, the removal of a certain form of security, for example due to a war, the deprivation of abilities and things once possessed. One could call this kind of grief “past-oriented” and “directed at actual objects”. Mostly, grief is understood as a reaction to a loss – paradigmatically, the loss of someone close to us (Cholbi 2021; Ratcliffe 2020).

Grief seems to be a complex thing. It is not just sadness; rather, it is arguably a process with different emotions which can co-exist, contradict each other, shift into one another, have “stages” (Kübler-Ross 1969) or come in waves.

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Can We Imagine New Emotions?

A post by Irene Lonigro

According to a venerable philosophical tradition, imagination builds upon experiences we have already had (Nagel, 1974; Paul, 2014). I cannot imagine what it feels like to taste a new kind of fruit like a durian until I have that very experience first-hand. We may call this limitation to our imagination the experiential constraint. Tasting a durian for the first time is therefore an ‘epistemically transformative’ experience that was previously inaccessible to us (Paul, 2014: 26).  

More recently, some scholars have questioned the experiential constraint. Following Amy Kind, there is no in principle difficulty in imagining new experiences. We can indeed access new experiences in imagination through ‘imaginative scaffolding’, the process of adding, subtracting and modifying our previous experiences to obtain novel re-combinations in imagination (2020: 137). We can perhaps imagine a new sensory experience like eating a durian by scaffolding out from experiences we have already had.

Now, try to imagine a new example: what it feels like to experience the joy of motherhood if you have never been a mother or to experience nostalgia for the first time. These examples present us with new experiences, this time of an emotional nature. Can we access these experiences via imagination? More generally, can we apply imaginative scaffolding to emotions as well? In this post, I explore whether and how the case of emotions presents a different kind of challenge for imagination compared to other experiences.   

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The world of image

A post by Reza Hadisi

In one of his commentaries, al‑Shahrazūrī (d. ca. 1288) cites and elaborates on an enigmatic passage from Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of the Ishrāqī philosophical movement:

“If you hear of the discussion of the ancients that there is a magnitudinous world in existence, which is not the sensory world nor the intelligible; its cities are countless without end; among them are Jābalqā and Jābarsā… Believe in it!” (trans. Lit 2017)

The passage is cryptic, but for Suhrawardī it is not poetic flourish. He is referring to the notion of the ‘world of image’ [ʿālam al‑mithāl] and its “cities,” which he identifies as a distinct set of mind-independent objects (alongside sensible objects, Platonic forms, and souls). These, for him, are the proper objects of imagination.

Now, not many of us believe in the existence of Jābalqā and Jābarsā, or any other “cities of the world of image.” At best, we might be persuaded by the idea of imaginative construction: that episodes of imagining can generate quasi mental objects, and that these objects can be shared if the “construction script” is sharable. But Suhrawardī and his Ishrāqī commentators mean something far stronger. They do not think we construct these objects. They think we can discover them.

In a recent paper (Hadisi, forthcoming), I try to make sense of this medieval conception of imagination. Some of the reconstruction there is tied to Suhrawardī’s broader metaphysics. Here, I focus on just one basic idea concerning the constitutive norm of imagination.

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Imagination, Autonomy, and Really Big Numbers

A post by Ansley Avis

“It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10?”

-Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development

Imagine an elephant.

Got it? Perfect. How many toenails does it have?

Your elephant probably didn’t give you an answer. That’s okay, it would still be unfair to say that you failed to imagine an elephant. While their toenails are unique, they aren’t necessary to capture what makes an elephant an elephant. You could have thought about a long trunk, big ears and rough, grey skin, a trumpeting noise, or some other combination of features and gotten the gist of it. Even if you have aphantasia, you were presumably able to tell that you were thinking about an elephant, not something else.

Now imagine a trillion dollars. This is how much money Tesla shareholders recently voted to allocate to Elon Musk over the next ten years.

How did you do it? Could you be sure that you were imagining a trillion in a way that would meaningfully set it apart from a billion, or two trillion? If you switch from imagining 1 to 2 trillion, do the changes you make track the actual trillion dollar difference between these numbers?

We can’t imagine a trillion in the same straightforward way that we can an elephant. Our minds just don’t have the resolution necessary to do so. This holds even for legendary thinkers – 400 years ago, René Descartes wrote on the impossibility of imagining a chiliagon, a 1,000 sided polygon. Descartes noted he could at least conceive of a chiliagon; even if he couldn’t accurately picture it, with a little effort he could still understand it intellectually by drawing on his mathematical knowledge. But when we read a story like the one above, how do we intellectually grasp $1,000,000,000,000? This isn’t a shape with clearly defined parameters – it’s untold power. Our failure here is both imaginative and conceptual. If we want to understand the implications of numbers we encounter every day, we have to get creative.

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Delirium, the imagination and altered states

A post by Dorothy Wade

In my work as an intensive care psychologist, I frequently hear from patients about the vivid and frightening experiences they undergo. Bombarded by hallucinations and delusions, their visions and thoughts are inescapably real to them. Often involving bizarre elements such as aliens, medieval monks or cannibals, the episodes could be mistaken for scenes of a horror movie (Wade et al 2014).

Marilyn believed there was a baby factory in the hospital basement. She told me the nurses were manufacturing ‘Frankenstein babies’ with disabilities, as a scam to claim welfare benefits.  She had seen it for herself, and urged me to go and check the basement. Irene saw puffins jumping on the bed next to hers, shooting blood at her from plastic rifles and laughing day and night. She was scared, but didn’t tell staff or family about the gun-toting birds in case they thought she had lost her mind.

Like thousands of seriously ill people in hospital every day, Marilyn and Irene were suffering from an altered state of consciousness known as delirium. In the aftermath they were terrified, both from the experience, and the belief that they were going mad. Delirium is like imagination on steroids (often literally). There seems to be no limit to the ideas, emotions and extraordinary tales the mind can generate in this state. Delirium in ICU results from brain changes caused by illness, medications (sedatives, opioids or steroids) and a disorientating environment. Although usually temporary, the syndrome may leave people with significant cognitive problems and psychological scars.

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Episodic Construction: Compositional or Associative?

A post by Joshua Myers and Johannes Mahr.

Imagination and episodic memory are intimately linked. Imagination draws on previous experience—when picturing yourself on a beach in Portugal sipping mango juice, you will draw on memories of other beaches you’ve visited and other mango juices you’ve had. Conversely, memory involves imaginatively filling in missing detail—when you remember your last trip to the beach you will likely draw on elements from other beach trips to populate the scene.

A popular way to explain the intimate relationship between memory and imagination has been to say that they both rely on a process of episodic construction that (re)combines elements of previous experiences (Addis 2020, Schacter & Addis 2007, Hassabis & Maguire 2007). But it is much less common to cash out the notion of episodic construction or (re)combination in any detail. According to what principles does this process unfold?

We propose that episodic construction should be thought of as a compositional process. More specifically, we defend Episodic Compositionality: the view that episodic construction generates complex episodic representations by combining basic representational elements according to syntactic rules. 

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A Unique Epistemic Value for Imagination?

A post by Eric Peterson

In a recent post on this wonderful blog, Nick Wiltsher discusses three interrelated claims of which he is increasingly sympathetic towards.  These are:

(1) Imagination has no distinctive epistemic ends.

(2) The epistemic ends that can be pursued using imagination are better achieved by other means.

(3) There is, all the same, value in using imagination to pursue (some) epistemic ends.

As he states, claim (3) only matters if (1) and (2) stand up, and he provides some hunches that can be the beginnings of arguments for each standing up.  In this post, I want to explore whether a particular kind of knowledge might put pressure on (1) and (2).

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What is it like to have aphantasia?

A post by Raquel Krempel

Imagine an apple. Nothing happened? You probably have aphantasia.

This is a common way of introducing and thinking about aphantasia. On the web, images such as Figure 1 (below) often serve to illustrate aphantasics’ inability to visualize, represented by the depiction numbered 5.

Aphantasia is characterized as the absence or near absence of mental imagery, most typically visual, but, in many cases, all forms of sensory imagery can be affected (Zeman et al. 2025, Dawes et al. 2024). Global aphantasics report a lack of imagery in all senses, in that not only can they not “see” an apple in their mind’s eye, they also can’t “taste” it, “smell” it, and so on. Various forms of involuntary imagery are also commonly affected in aphantasia, such as imagery formed while reading (Krempel and Monzel 2024). We thus tend to think of aphantasia as a blank mind, often characterizing it in purely negative terms.

Most of the growing body of research on aphantasia concerns the assessment of aphantasics’ performance on behavioral tests, many of them related to episodic and working memory (cf. Monzel et al. 2024, Dawes et al. 2022, Keogh et al. 2021). This interest in the possible impact of aphantasia on memory is not surprising. Given the common belief that imagery plays a crucial role in memory (Nanay 2021a), aphantasia provides a great place to assess this view. The data so far indicate that aphantasia impacts the number of details recalled from a particular past event, but, perhaps surprisingly, aphantasics tend to do well on working memory tasks. A current open question is how aphantasics do that, some suggestions being that they use non-imagistic strategies and that they use unconscious imagery (Zeman 2025, Nanay 2021b).

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The Text-Conditioned Image

A post by Julia Minarik

And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life – or while the machine is recording – will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience…Then life will be a repository for death. 

– Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel.

Do machine-made images have less content than images created by human hands? I think they do, at least insofar as these machines are imaginatively impoverished: they have access only to words and images, far less sensory and emotional modalities than we do. Contemporary image generators – Midjourney, DALL-E and their kin – produce images via generative diffusion conditioned on text or images. To grasp what this limitation means for the content of their art, we must first understand how art arises from and leads the human imagination.

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Are we aware of neural activity in imagination? The attention model of conscious imagery and aphantasia

A post by Jianghao Liu

Please imagine a red Gala apple. Is it darker or lighter than a cherry? Most of us can easily conjure a mental image, a perceptual-like experience that feels almost as if we were seeing it. For centuries, mental imagery has long been considered a core component of consciousness in both philosophy of mind and neuroscience (Nanay, 2023). Yet, emerging evidence from individuals of aphantasia, who report no voluntary imagery (Zeman, 2024), raises a striking question: can there be unconscious mental imagery (Nanay, 2021; Michel et al., 2024)? In this post, I present the attention model (Liu, 2025) of the neural basis of conscious imagery and aphantasia, thereby aiming to bridge empirical neuroscience and philosophical accounts of imagination and awareness.

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