Christian O. Scholz currently works as a PhD candidate at the Philosophy Institute II of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he investigates the phenomenon of aphantasia, focusing on the relationship between cognitive strategies and representational formats. In an attempt to further the exchange between theoretical and empirical researchers he recently co-founded, together with Jianghao Liu, the Interdisciplinary Reading Club on Aphantasia (IRCA).
A post by Christian O. Scholz
Aphantasia is a recently coined cognitive norm variant characterized by a severe deficiency or complete absence of voluntary mental imagery, most commonly the inability to visualize (Zeman et al., 2024). While aphantasia can be acquired, for example as the result of brain damage or a mental disorder (Keogh et al., 2021), most cases discussed in the contemporary literature focus on congenital (i.e., lifelong) aphantasia, meaning on people that have had deficient or absent imagery abilities from birth onwards or, at the very least, for as long as they can remember. For reasons that will become apparent shortly, I will focus only on congenital cases involving the complete inability to form visual mental imagery for the remainder of this post.
While investigations into aphantasia predominantly focus on its underlying neurological profile or the cognitive abilities of aphantasics (for a review, see Zeman, 2024), a thus far underexplored aspect is the finding that the majority of aphantasics report having been unaware of their inability to visualize for decades of their lives, a phenomenon which I will henceforth refer to as aphantasia nescience (i.e., the lack of knowledge about one’s own aphantasia). In a recent study (Zeman et al., 2020), for example, two-thirds of the participating aphantasics report having learned about their inability after the age of 20, and roughly one fifth reported having learned about their inability via social or news media coverage.[i] Importantly, this lack of knowledge cannot be explained by a mere disinterest or indifference on the part of the affected, because learning about their inability often causes intense emotional feelings, including personal distress and feelings of inferiority (Monzel et al, 2023).
In what follows, I will outline an answer to the question of how aphantasics can remain in a state of ignorance (or, in my own terminology, nescience) about their aphantasia.
Puzzle of aphantasia nescience (PAN): How is it possible that aphantasics remain unaware of their inability to visualize (i.e., remain in a state of aphantasia nescience)?
The argument that I will outline is that it is the aphantasics’ ability to express a certain type of behavior, instead of any failed introspection, that explains the phenomenon of aphantasia nescience. Furthermore, I will argue that the solution to the PAN lies in the early developmental stages, especially the stage where the aphantasic child learns to use and respond to certain terms such as ‘visualize’ or ‘imagine’.
None of us exist in a social vacuum. Thus, the PAN does not merely refer to the aphantasics’ evaluation of their private experience but, at least indirectly, also to the perception of their abilities by their visualizing peers. For one way in which aphantasics could likely learn about their imagery inability would be by people who do possess said ability (i.e., typical visualizers) pointing out the deficit to them, e.g., by critiquing the aphantasic’s response to a visualization exercise. However, the fact that such critiques apparently do not regularly occur does, conversely, motivate the suggestion that the visualizing peers, at least on the basis of their observation of the aphantasics’ behavior, also often remain unaware of the aphantasics’ inability. This suggestion is further strengthened by the fact that many visualizers are outright incredulous of the inability when aphantasics who are aware share their experience (see e.g., Faw, 2009, p. 2).
I have proposed elsewhere (Scholz, 2024b) that the aforementioned disbelief of (some) visualizers about aphantasia, a phenomenon that might be referred to as aphantasia skepticism, can be explained by a false belief that I coined the visualizer’s fallacy. Simply put, the visualizer’s fallacy posits that because a visualizer experiences mental imagery during the performance of a task X, they might falsely assume that mental imagery is necessary to perform X. Examples of tasks to which the visualizer’s fallacy commonly applies include mental rotation tasks (Shepard & Metzler, 1971) and questions about the relative length of animal tails (Behrmann et al., 1994), which were widely considered to test for mental imagery, until recent findings (e.g., Pounder et al., 2022; Liu & Bartolomeo, 2023) showed that they can also be solved by aphantasics, presumably via the use of alternative strategies (Scholz, 2024b).
Visualizer’s Fallacy: The false belief, caused by the visualizer’s own experience, that mental imagery is necessary to perform supposed ‘mental imagery’ tasks.
A corollary of the visualizer’s fallacy is the (false) conclusion that the successful performance of task X by another agent implies their ability to use mental imagery. For example, if a visualizer holds the (implicit) belief that mental imagery is necessary to perform a mental rotation task, or to answer questions about the visual details of objects (e.g., animal tails), then they will falsely attribute the ability to use mental imagery to an aphantasic who successfully performs any of these tasks.[ii]
So, an important part of the solution to the PAN lies in the observation that because visualizers commonly assume certain tasks to rely on mental imagery, they fail to detect the inability to visualize in their aphantasic peers. But to explain aphantasia nescience it is not enough merely to show that aphantasics do not receive negative feedback from visualizers. Instead, we must show that the visualizers actively give aphantasics the impression that they can visualize. Furthermore, this positive feedback must already occur at a young age, so that it can fundamentally frame the aphantasic child’s understanding of terms and phrases related to visualization.
Let us consider a concrete example, in the form of a just-so story intended to pump the desired intuition. How could an aphantasic child, let us call her Anna, learn the use of the term ‘visualize’ while missing out on the seemingly crucial detail that it involves a (quasi-)sensory experience? Here is my suggestion. Imagine Anna is in kindergarten and observes the kindergarten teacher tell another child, Victor (a typically visualizing child), to visualize an apple. Anna observes that Victor, after a few seconds, replies: “My apple is half green and half red." Arguably, Anna learns at this point that the game of visualizing X, say an apple, is played by providing a description of an X that is currently not directly perceived. Now, imagine that the kindergarten teacher gives Anna the same task. Since she has previous experiences with apples and, crucially, since her access to the relevant visual information does not have to come in the form of a visually experienced representation (see e.g., Liu & Bartolomeo, 2023), Anna will have no problem providing a suitable description. Notice that her description of the imaginary apple might even be judged by the kindergarten teacher as more creative than that of her visualizing peer Victor. And if, instead, her description is judged too ‘boring’ or uncreative, the teacher might encourage her to be more imaginative, and, if necessary, explain to her what this means (e.g., that she should pick a color that apples usually do not have, or endow her apple with magical abilities, etc.). However, none of this teaches Anna anything about an accompanying experience commonly associated, by typical visualizers, with the exercise; it merely teaches her how to act. Yet, importantly, if her actions suffice to satisfy the teacher, he will give her the feedback that she did well, which will give Anna the impression that she, in fact, knows how to visualize.
So, what does ‘visualize X’ mean to Anna? It means ‘acting (i.e., behaving) as if you were seeing X’ or ‘providing a (non)verbal description of the visual details of an X that is not there’.[iii] However, importantly, mastery of this interpretation of ‘visualize X’ turns out to suffice for the production of behavior that is, from the outside perspective (e.g., the kindergarten teacher), virtually indistinguishable from that of a typical visualizer (here, Victor) engaged in the same task.
Where does this leave us with respect to the PAN? If my story is correct, it indicates that one possible explanation for the finding that aphantasics often remain unaware of their inability is that they learn, early on, to mimic the beahvior of visualizers, by means of recruiting alternative representational vehicles to provide (non)verbal descriptions that meet the respective expectations of their visualizing peers. Specifically, their successful production of the desired behavior leads their surroundings to give the aphantasics the positive feedback that they can visualize. This belief, in both the aphantasic and the visualizer, is further strengthened by the aphantasics’ successful performance of other tasks, e.g., mental rotation tasks, that do not explicitly include the command to ‘visualize’ but are, as the visualizer’s fallacy and aphantasia skepticism show, nonetheless closely tied to the concept.
In conclusion, aphantasia nescience may not be the result of a faulty introspective process of aphantasics, but may instead be attributable to the aphantasics’ learning, in early developmental phases, of the appropriate behavioral patterns associated with visualization in typical visualizers.
Notes
[i] Unfortunately, ‘before 20’, ‘after 20’ and ‘unsure’ were the only three options to choose from in the study, leading to an extremely coarse-grained representation. However, personal accounts of aphantasics, as collected e.g. in an exploratory qualitative questionnaire (Scholz, 2024a Supplementary Material) indicate that at least some aphantasics discover their condition as late as their 40s, 50s, or 60s.
[ii] The breadth of tasks to which some visualizers may commit the visualizer’s fallacy becomes even more clear when we consider the long history of positions, both in philosophy of psychology, taking mental imagery to be centrally important, if not even necessary, for cognition in general (for a review, see MacKisack et al., 2016), arguably starting with Aristotle’s proclamation, in De Anima III, that the soul never thinks without an image.
[iii] An example of a nonverbal description of the visual details of an X that is not there is the drawing of X (e.g., if, instead of giving the verbal description of the apple, Victor would have drawn it, “even if only in the air with his finger” [Wittgenstein, 2009, §18]).
References
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Scholz, C. O. (2024a) Imaginability as Representability: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Aphantasia. Master of Logic Series. https://philarchive.org/archive/SCHIAR-11.
Scholz, C. O. (2024b). The Visualizer's Fallacy: Why Aphantasia Skepticism Underestimates the Dynamics of Cognition. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0k4282bn
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