How Vivid Is Your Mind’s Eye?

Hold on — your mind’s eye isn’t just a metaphor? Turns out I have aphantasia.

If I ask you to imagine a tree. Do you see a tree in your mind’s eye? How high is the fidelity? It is like looking at a real tree, a photo, a rough drawing, a vague blob? Or like me — do you see nothing?

I have aphantasia. Aphantasia is where you don’t form visual images in you mind, essentially having a “blind mind’s eye”. Even though I can’t “see” something when I try to imagine it, I still process information, understand concepts, know who people are and their features. How? I do not know.

Even more mysteriously — I have vivid visual dreams. How do I know? Because I they feel real like life. But then when I wake I can’t see them, but I know I saw them! And can recall the details of what happened. Again, how? I do not know!

There is so much diversity when it comes to how each of us imagine, learn, process and recall visual information. If you’re curious on where you sit on the minds eye visualisation spectrum, there’s a fun test you can do:

https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/

Here is a comic I made about finding out I had aphantasia — a common story. We go about our lives assuming that other people visualise or don’t the same way as us, and it’s only when we talk about it and compare and contrast that you realise how diverse our brains actually are!