People with aphantasia may struggle with recall and envisioning what’s to come.
Are you the kind of person who can see strands of hair fluttering in the wind when you read the scene described?
Or does your mind’s eye get “the script but not the movie”?
For people with the condition known as aphantasia, mental visual imagery is heavily reduced or even absent altogether.
Researchers wanted to see what effect this idiosyncrasy had on memory and how people envision the future. Especially considering how important visual imagery is thought to be in our ability to create rich mental representation of memories and simulations of the future.
“Both are everyday cognitive processes involving the reconstructive simulation of events and scenes, typically accompanied by anecdotally vivid online sensory replay (or ‘preplay’) in the form of visual imagery,” author Dr Alexei Dawes, cognitive neuroscientist at RIKEN Centre for Brain Science in Japan, wrote on Twitter about the team’s study.
Dr Dawes and colleagues wanted some hard evidence on whether rich mental imagery serves any real benefit in recalling memories or imagining future scenarios.
So they tested around 30 people with what is sometimes called “mind blindness” for their ability to recall details of events that happened in their lives, and compared their performance to another 30 people without the condition.
As you might have guessed, people with mind blindness remembered significantly fewer details about past events compared to their peers. The effects were even more pronounced for imagined future scenarios.
“This demonstrates greatly diminished richness and specificity of episodic simulation capacity in aphantasia,” Dr Dawes wrote.
One driver of this was that the control group were able to recall more visual details compared to their mind blind peers, “suggesting an increased dependency on visual imagery by future prospection relative to episodic memory,” he continued.
While people with this condition may be able to remember fewer fine details of events, don’t expect them to forget how to ride a bike any time soon. That type of memory seems to be just fine, as is their general ability to remember things.
“Individuals with aphantasia are clearly still able to recall the past and describe the future,” said Dr Dawes. “However, our collective data shows that visual imagery is an important pre-cursor to the capacity to internally reconstruct, represent and re-live episodic events in sensory detail.”
If a mote troubles your mind’s eye, let penny@medicalrepublic.com.au know.
