People With Aphantasia Cannot Count Sheep in Their Minds

Typically, when people are asked to imagine images, they could easily picture out the object. However, people with aphantasia find it more challenging than others because they live without the mind's eye.

Aphantasia is the condition wherein the person has a hard time seeing images in their brain. According to The New York Times, aphantasia was first discovered by Sir Francis Galton. Still, cognitive neurologist Dr. Adam Zeman's work in 2010 identified this lack of mind's eye.

His interest in the matter was sparked by one of his patients who underwent heart surgery and lost the ability to visualize after the procedure. He called it the patient MX, who described his dreams becoming visual and not entering the visual word when reading a novel.

Science journalist Carl Zimmer then wrote about it in Discover magazine and in The Times. After that, hundreds of people have contacted Dr. Zeman, who said they are also experiencing the same thing with patient MX, but the difference is that they have the condition for as long as they can remember.

What is Aphantasia?

Aphantasia is the liability to create images in the brain from memory, like a loved one's face or objects. Niel Kenmuir, one of the first people with aphantasia to speak up in 2015, told BBC that at a very young age, he finds it challenging to be counting sheep jumping over a fence because he can see nothing to count.

Additionally, Serena Puang, another person with aphantasia, told The New York Times that she never saw anything except for black. "I've been counting silently into the darkness for years," she said.

According to a report by ScienceAlert, counting sheep might be difficult for those experiencing aphantasia, but this does not have an apparent effect on the person's creativity or imagination. Only a few of them reported having problems with their visual memory.

Most of them typically live wholly functional and ordinary lives, and sometimes they do not know that they are different until they reach adulthood. Some can also recognize faces and places, which tells that their verbal imagination and spatial memory are still intact.

Do People With Aphantasia Can See their Dreams?

According to Dr. Zeman, despite not having the mind's eye, those who have aphantasia can see their dreams. He said that the process of wakefulness and dreaming is different.

Dreaming is a bottom-up process organized from the brainstem, whereas consciously visualizing objects or faces is a top-down process driven by the cortex, Science Focus reported.

However, there are no published studies yet on what goes on in the brains of people with lifelong aphantasia, although scientists are hoping to find some answers soon.

Since having the condition does not pose a great problem, this condition has gone nameless and unstudied for so long. The visualization strategies are not often used for memorizing since there are other ways to represent information mentally. Some use words or symbols, and others have a good mind's ear or mind's nose instead of having a mind's eye.

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