TOKYO - A cognitive trait known as aphantasia, in which people are unable to voluntarily form images in their minds despite knowing what objects look like, may affect about 4% of people, highlighting significant differences in how individuals experience memory, imagination and everyday tasks.
For most people, being asked to imagine a red apple may bring an image of its shape and appearance to mind. People with aphantasia, however, may see nothing at all mentally, even though they still remember factual information such as the apple being red, round and sweet.
Yuko Setoguchi, a homemaker in Osaka Prefecture, has aphantasia and creates detailed paintings of birds, including vividly colored kingfishers. Because she cannot mentally picture what she has seen, she works by repeatedly looking back and forth between photographs stored on her smartphone and the picture she is drawing.
"I can observe something and draw it fairly well, but because I have aphantasia, drawing something without looking at it is extremely difficult," Setoguchi said.
As a child, Setoguchi struggled with drawing and crafts. Assignments such as drawing her mother's face from memory for Mother's Day or depicting a memorable scene from a school sports day left her unable to understand how her classmates could produce pictures without a reference.
"I couldn't picture anything, so I couldn't understand how everyone else was able to draw," she said.
Setoguchi learned the reason only about two years ago, when she came across information about aphantasia online and discovered for the first time that many people actually see mental images.
"I thought everyone was the same as me," she said. "When I learned that what I experienced was actually quite rare, I was unbelievably surprised. It felt as though my whole world had been turned upside down."
Aphantasia is a relatively new concept, having been proposed in 2015. Its underlying mechanism has yet to be fully explained and there are no clearly established diagnostic criteria, but questionnaire-based research suggests that roughly 4% of people may have the characteristic.
It is often present from birth, and the inability to imagine sensations is not necessarily limited to vision. Some people cannot internally recreate visual images, sounds, tastes, touch or other sensory experiences, while others have difficulty only with visual imagery. The degree also differs substantially among individuals.
Setoguchi recalled experiencing difficulties 18 years ago when she helped a senior colleague produce a cookbook. She struggled to imagine how completed dishes should look in photographs, including what plates they should be served on or what tablecloth would make the food appear most attractive.
Her former colleague, however, remembered other strengths. Setoguchi carefully checked written material and, whenever a recipe failed to reproduce the intended result, closely examined why it had gone wrong.
The colleague said Setoguchi may have believed she was not particularly useful during photography, but showed a strong ability to analyze problems and work out the causes of failures.
Setoguchi has since developed ways of working that suit her own cognitive style. While preparing for an exhibition of her bird paintings, she paid particular attention to the written descriptions accompanying each work, hoping the explanations would give visitors clues for viewing the pictures.
When the exhibition opened at 10 a.m., Setoguchi was especially interested in hearing how visitors mentally expanded on what they saw in her paintings.
Some described imagining the surrounding scenery, such as trees around a bird or the path it might take as it flew toward the water. Setoguchi said she had no such surrounding image in her own mind.
The experience reinforced for her how differently people perceive the world.
"I felt a mixture of envy and happiness," she said. "Hearing people's impressions is very stimulating for me, so I really enjoyed it."
She said she hopes awareness of aphantasia will spread in a positive way rather than being treated as something inherently serious or negative.
"I hope people can enjoy these differences," Setoguchi said.
People with aphantasia may also notice the characteristic when reading fiction. Someone who does not create visual images while reading a novel may feel little discrepancy when the work is later adapted into a television drama or anime, because they had not previously imagined what the characters should look or sound like.
Experiences with dreams also vary. Some people with aphantasia report seeing visual dreams, while others do not, reflecting the wide range of experiences associated with the trait.
Aphantasia can nevertheless create difficulties at school or work when communication assumes that everyone can visualize something mentally.
One person interviewed for the report had worked in a department store and found it difficult to participate actively in meetings when colleagues discussed plans based on an imagined picture of how a sales floor would look. Such difficulties can lead people to believe they are simply poor at certain tasks, even though they may perform strongly after moving into work better suited to their cognitive characteristics.
Because aphantasia remains a relatively new field of study, researchers are still examining differences in its severity and how it affects visual imagery as well as imagined sounds, smells and other senses.
Greater recognition of the trait may help people understand why they experience memory and imagination differently from others, while allowing schools and workplaces to account for cognitive differences that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Source: TBS
