Was curious if anyone's found functional treatment regiments for aphantasia. Surprised to find very little. There is some evidence that it may be psychogenic in some patients, which is promising. Quite a few reports of acquired aphantasia (after eg head injury, stroke, surgery)
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I don’t really see it as something to be treated. But since I learned about it and self-identified, I’ve idly been taking note of conditions under which I can visualize more. Relaxation by whatever means seems to do something. One time I got abstract color fields on edibles.
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Interesting. I wonder to what extent there isn't much written about treatments because that's not very salient to aphantasics!
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I mean, till that Facebook post went viral, I didn’t realize I was atypical in any way.
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That’s the strangest part. I remember hearing all of these random idioms (“mind’s eye”, “visualize success”, etc) after reading ’s post and then thinking “oh shit, people mean this literally”
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I’m still not sure I believe them. Maybe it’s some sort of delusion of seeing and we’re the ones experiencing the real thing. It’s not like they all have eidetic memory of scenes they claim to visualize so richly.
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There's new research on this front!
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Now out: One of the largest scale studies of #aphantasia (absence of visual imagery), revealing a specific deficit in object detail over spatial memory (using drawings!). With @pounderz @AlisonFEardley and @Chris_I_Baker.
Pre-proofs online at Cortex:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl
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Great ref—thanks! Lower recall rates simultaneous with lower error rates for aphantsics is v interesting. "…provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object versus spatial information."
Look forward to reading in more detail…