Raquel Krempel is a professor of philosophy at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), Brazil. She works primarily in the philosophy of cognitive science and is currently investigating individual differences in mental imagery and inner speech.
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).
Figure 1: A common graphic used to illustrate the inability to visualize in aphantasia, represented by number 5. From Wikipedia.
However, little attention has been directed at trying to better understand aphantasics’ own internal experiences. Is it really true that, when trying to imagine or remember something, aphantasics’ minds are just blank? Surely something must be going on?
A common idea is that aphantasics have some sort of abstract knowledge of the object they try to imagine. Individuals are typically classified as aphantasics on the basis of their score on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks 1973). The questionnaire instructs participants to think of various things, such as a friend or a rising sun, and then rate the visual image that comes to mind from 1 (“no image at all, you only know that you are thinking of the object”) to 5 (“perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision”). Extreme aphantasics mark option 1 on all items. We might thus be led to think that aphantasics’ inner experience consists only of a certain abstract knowledge of the object they are supposed to imagine. However, it might well be that aphantasics mark this option because it is the one that best describes their lack of visual images, and not because their experience consists in simply knowing the object.
In an attempt to better understand the experience of aphantasics, my collaborators and I (Blomkvist, Walsh, Boere and Krempel, under review) have asked aphantasics (n=62) and controls (n=59) to describe, in their own words, their experiences both when they try to imagine and when they try to remember something. Not surprisingly, we see a big difference in the use of visual images between aphantasics and controls. Most individuals who can form visual images use them in memory and in imagination. One participant, for instance, says that “I imagine in pictures and videos like it’s a movie”. Most aphantasics, on the contrary, explicitly deny the use of visual images both in imagination (“I cannot imagine in pictures at all”) and in memory (“I don’t remember in pictures”).
But although visual images are generally lacking in aphantasia, aphantasics also described their experiences in more positive terms. Unlike controls, aphantasics show a tendency to use words both in remembering and in imagining something. One participant reports that “I remember in words. I will get descriptions in varying amounts of detail of the thing or event I’m trying to remember”, another notes that “As with remembering, I imagine in spoken word. When I imagine something in everyday life, it is basically me just telling myself that I will carry out the event. I am literally just talking to myself in my mind.” This indicates that inner speech is an important element of the experiences of many aphantasics, but inner speech itself may come in different forms. While some may have the sense of hearing an inner voice, for others this auditory element may be lacking (Krempel 2025). Some aphantasics also indicated that they do not remember or imagine in words.
Some aphantasics report emotions and feelings to be an element in their experience of imagining (“I feel as though Imagination is more of a ‘feeling’, without any visuals, I still know what I’m thinking of. I will close my eyes to imagine a space, however I am not seeing anything, but feeling it.”), as well as of remembering (“I remember mainly through the thoughts and feelings I had at the time of the memory, the pictures don’t come to me and I remember partially in words but they are very vague”). Words and feelings are not mutually exclusive, though, and some participants report both as central elements in their experiences (e.g. “I remember with words and how I felt at the time of the event”).
Option 1 on the VVIQ, which emphasizes the knowledge of thinking of an object is thus insufficient to capture the experience of aphantasia. But it is not completely off the mark. Several aphantasics did report knowing what they are remembering or imagining, or having a conceptual representation of the thing, while being unable to see it. One participant notes that “If I imagine something, I know what I am imagining, I could draw what I imagine but I can’t “see” it.” Another observes that “I know the object but I don’t see the object when I close my eyes.” Often, this knowledge is related to other forms of experiences, such as words (“I have a ‘knowing’ of something. I think I’m using words in my inner monologue to describe people, places, actions”) or feelings (“I remember in feelings and facts. I’ll feel the emotion that I was experiencing in the memory and I will know the details about what was happening as facts.”).
Interestingly, some aphantasics report what we may call “inaccessible images”. Even though they claim not to see anything in their mind’s eyes, they have a sense that an image may be there. In describing their memories, one aphantasic says that “it feels like the pictures might be there but I can’t actually see them. As if another part of my brain has access to them but my consciousness does not”. In describing their imaginings, another participant says that “I feel like imagining is done in some part of my brain that I’m not privy to and the answers are then handed to the conscious part of my brain. I can’t see any images, but sometimes I sense the images are somewhere out of sight.”
These reports show that aphantasics’ minds are not just blank or empty when remembering or imagining something. Rather, they may have a variety of non-visual inner experiences, which can vary from person to person (e.g. some may have inner speech while others don’t), as well as within the same person (e.g. feelings and a more conceptual sense of knowing at one time, inner speech at another). It is frequently recognized that aphantasia is a heterogeneous condition, in that some aphantasics may lack visual imagery but have auditory imagery, while others lack all sensory imagery (something that we also saw in our study). Some may have imagery in dreams while others do not (Zeman et al. 2020, Dawes et al. 2024, Nanay 2025). But this recognition has so far focused on varieties of imagistic experiences in aphantasia, neglecting that there can be relevant differences in non-imagistic domains as well.
Aphantasics’ descriptions of their experiences deepen our understanding of the heterogeneity involved in aphantasia, providing us with helpful information for further theorizing. For example, it is often said that aphantasics use non-imagistic strategies to solve various tasks, but the precise strategies are often left unspecified. As indicated by our data, these strategies may vary from person to person, but verbal strategies may be common. Also, the view that aphantasics have unconscious imagery may well have a point, at least for some aphantasics, given the reports of inaccessible imagery (although one may question whether these images are really unconscious, given that aphantasics report their presence).
The upshot is that, in theorizing about aphantasia, we should resist two common temptations: assuming that aphantasics’ minds are empty, and assuming that aphantasics minds are all alike. Imageless experiences may be imageless in many different ways.
References
Dawes, A. J., Keogh, R., Robuck, S., & Pearson, J. (2022). Memories with a blind mind: Remembering the past and imagining the future with aphantasia. Cognition, 227, 105192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105192
Dawes, A. J., Keogh, R., Pearson, J. (2024). Multisensory subtypes of aphantasia: Mental imagery as supramodal perception in reverse. Neuroscience Research, Volume 201, Pages 50-59
Keogh, R., Wicken, M., & Pearson, J. (2021). Visual working memory in aphantasia: Retained accuracy and capacity with a different strategy. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 143, 237–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.07.012
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Nanay, B. (2021). “Mental Imagery”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/mental-imagery/>.
Nanay, B. (2021). Unconscious mental imagery. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 376: 20190689. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0689
Nanay, B. (2025). Varieties of aphantasia, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 29, Issue 11, 965 – 966.
Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., Hattersley, A., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., MacKisack, M., & Winlove, C. (2020). Phantasia-The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 130, 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.04.003
Zeman, A., Monzel, M., Pearson, J., Scholz, C. O., & Simner, J. (2025). Definition: Aphantasia. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 182, 212–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2024.07.019