Millions of people have 'mind blindness' and don't realise it
Picture something in your head now. Anything.
It could be your dog, your car, maybe even England winning the World Cup. You can see it now, can't you? Harry Kane lifting the golden trophy high above his head as wild celebrations erupt all around you.
Only, some people, millions, in fact, maybe even some reading this, can't picture any images in their minds at all, like, anything.
Those people have the cognitive difference Aphantasia, a term coined by neurologist Adam Zemen in 2015 for people who find it impossible to imagine a thought in their head, be it a place, a person, a taste or smell.
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Sassy Smith, an Aphant who also can't picture sounds or tastes in her 'silent mind', told LADbible: "It's the inability to create mental imagery on demand and the on-demand bit that is absolutely 100 percent key.
"Because people with Aphantasia can dream. We can hallucinate, we can go into a sort of almost sleep state where we have that ability to see mental imagery then.
"But if you ask us to create an image under demand, we can't do it."
Even imagining what not seeing an image in your head is challenging for the majority of the population, as it goes completely against our lifetime experiences - though it is possible to develop Aphantasia after suffering an injury, as Zemen discovered when he first learned about it.
Thankfully, Smith, author of Unseen Minds: A Therapist's Guide to Multisensory Aphantasia and Invisible Cognitive Differences, has also explained how Aphants' thought processes work.
"If you ask me to visualise an apple, I would come at that from a place of knowing," she said.
"So I know what an Apple is. I've eaten an apple. I can describe apples, I can do it in words, I just can't create an image to go with it.
"That is it in its simplest term. We know what it is. We just can't see an image of it in our mind. And so a lot of it's conceptualised, a lot of it comes from a place of knowing what something is.
"You know what an apple is, but you know it also comes with an image. A picture of it. It's the same as you, I just don't have a picture that goes with it.
"So if you think of it like a computer, like your laptop right now, if your screen goes dead, all the information in your laptop is still in your laptop. It's just you can't see the image that goes with it. It's a bit, I mean, that's a very simple way of putting it, but it is it's kind of it's all in my brain."
How many people have Aphantasia?
Aphantasia can often blow people's minds when they learn about it, with the concept of non-visual thinking such an alien one to so many people.
Yet, it's estimated that far more people are Aphants than you would likely expect, especially as many people can go through their entire lives without realising they are one.
Sassy - who now runs the Aphantasia Academy to teach therapists how to help people with Aphantasia - didn't learn she had it until she was 47 and she says up to 10% of the world's population are on the 'Aphantasia Scale.'
"f you're talking about Global Aphantasia, so that's no sense. You're looking at, I think it was 0.89 percent or roughly 1 percent.
"Just the imagery is 3.9 to 5 percent. Adam Zemen, in his 10-year review, said that with the expanded definition, it could go to 10 percent of the global population. So that's, in the UK, if we look at 5 percent, that's what put around about 4 million people."
Do you think you may have Aphantasia? Why not take a visual imagery questionnaire to find out?
Topics: Health, Science, Mental Health
Daniel Murphy