Afantasy: the inability to visualize mental images

In 2016, a phenomenon that had gone practically unnoticed until then began to become popular. time, except for a pioneering study carried out by the celebrated Francis Galton at the turn of the century XIX. Is about the inability to visualize mental images, which has been baptized with the name "fantasy".

In this article we will describe what exactly is fantasy and what has been its historical development. To do this, we will focus on the contributions of Galton and Adam Zeman, as well as the case of Blake Ross, who contributed greatly to raising awareness about fantasy thanks to the intervention of the networks social.

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What is fantasy?

In the year 1880 Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), pioneer of the use of statistics in psychology and of eugenic ideas, published the results of a psychometric study on individual differences in the ability to generate images mental. Galton found great variability in this ability, including some cases in which he was absent.

During the 20th century, research on this phenomenon was very scarce, although there are some references under Anglo-Saxon terms that can be translated as "defective revision" or "Visual irreminiscence". Adam Zeman's team studies (2010, 2015) and individuals like Blake Ross have popularized it with the name of “fantasy”.

The limited data currently available suggest that between 2.1% and 2.7% of the general population it is incapable of generating mental images, and therefore can be considered cases of fantasy (Faw, 2009). Furthermore, it seems that the alteration could be more frequent in men (Zeman et al., 2015), although it is not yet possible to affirm this with certainty.

It is believed that the fantasy may be neurologically associated with synesthesia and congenital prosopagnosia, which consists of a marked difficulty in recognizing people by their faces. People with synesthesia obtain very high scores on visualization tests, and the opposite occurs in cases of prosopagnosia.

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Contributions from Adam Zeman's team

The term "fantasy" was coined by a team from the University of Exeter, UK, led by Adam Zeman (2010). These authors published an article on the case of MX, a man who referred a loss of ability to visualize as a result of coronary angioplasty. After this milestone, the fantasy began to become popular.

Zeman et al. Further increased awareness of fantasy with their second text about it (2015). The Exeter team relied on input through questionnaires from 21 people who had contacted with them after reading the previous article and identifying with the description of this peculiar "blindness imagination".

The study by Zeman et al. revealed that there are different degrees and forms of presentation of this phenomenon; thus, some people are unable to produce visual images voluntarily but they can experience them spontaneously, both in wakefulness and during sleep. By contrast, in other cases these capabilities are not even preserved.

The interference of fantasy in the lives of those who experience it seems generally quite limited, although a significant proportion of the participants reported autobiographical memory problems associated with this deficit, which on the other hand tended to compensate through the verbal format or what Zeman et al. called "sub-visual models."

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The Blake Ross case

In April 2016, software engineer Blake Ross, co-creator of the Mozilla Firefox web browser and former director of Facebook product, published a text on this social network in which he recounted his experiences with the fantasy. It was a New York Times article that analyzed the MX case (Zeman et al., 2010) that inspired him to share his account.

Ross claimed that he did not know he was experiencing this phenomenon until he read about its existence. Until then, he said, he believed that concepts such as counting sheep to promote sleep consolidation seemed like metaphors to him. He wasn't able to visualize the face of his deceased father from him, and he believed that no one could really generate sharp mental images.

Of course, Ross's text went viral and led many more people to the same revelation than him. Since then we have witnessed a rapid and remarkable increase in awareness of this curious imaginative deficit; in consecuense, it is to be expected that scientific knowledge will also increase in the coming years about fantasy.

Bibliographic references:

• Faw, B. (2009). Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities - evidence from mental imaging research. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16: 45-68.

• Galton, F. (1880). Statistics of mental imagery. Mind. Oxford Journals, os-V (19): 301-318.

• Zeman, A. Z. J.; Della Sala, S.; Torrens, L. TO. TO.; Gountouna, V. AND.; McGonigle, D. J. & Logie, R. H. (2010). Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: A case of ‘blind imagination’. Neuropsychologia, 48 (1): 145–155.

• Zeman, A. Z. J.; Dewar, M. & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery - Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73: 378–380