Close your eyes. Picture an apple. If you are reading this sentence, you have already done something extraordinary - and something you will likely never share equally with the person sitting beside you. For some, the apple appears vivid, saturated, rotating slowly in the mind's eye as though lit from within. For others, the exercise produces nothing: no image, no colour, just blackness behind the lids, with the bare semantic knowledge that the object exists. These are not rhetorical extremes. They are poles of a measurable cognitive spectrum - one end called hyperphantasia, the other aphantasia - and the distance between them reveals something fundamental about how human beings construct reality.
The Brain That Sees Too Much
Hyperphantasia, a term only formally named in 2015, describes mental imagery so vivid it approaches the quality of perception. People with hyperphantasia do not merely "think" about a face or a landscape; they see it, with colour and spatial depth, in what researchers describe as "as vivid as real seeing." The condition affects an estimated 2–3 per cent of the population, measured through the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), a tool developed by David Marks in 1973. On the VVIQ's 80-point scale, individuals scoring 75 to 80 are classified as hyperphantasic.
The subjective experience can be startling. Mats Holm, a Norwegian hyperphantasic living in Stockholm, told The Guardian: "I can essentially zoom out and see the entire city around me, and I can fly around inside that map of it. I have a second space in my mind where I can create any location." For novelist and London-based artist Geraldine van Heemstra, "the story is like a film in my mind." When she walks through the countryside, she can recall every step, "even little things, like if I dropped something and picked it up."
William Blake, the 18th-century poet and artist, is widely thought to have experienced something close to this. Blake's biographer John Higgs documented how the artist would wait until the "spirit" appeared in his mind's eye before sketching historical or mythical figures - and would grow frustrated when his inner model changed posture unprompted. "I can't go on, it is gone! I must wait till it returns," Blake would say, according to Higgs's account. As we explored in our piece on the intersection of neuroscience and art, the line between inner vision and outer creation has never been straightforward.
The Brain That Sees Nothing
At the opposite end sits aphantasia - the marked reduction or complete absence of voluntary visual mental imagery. The condition was first described by Sir Francis Galton in 1880, though it remained largely ignored until the neurologist Adam Zeman coined the term in 2015, following a case study of a man known as "MX" who lost the ability to visualise after a cardiac procedure. Zeman subsequently received more than 17,000 emails from people who recognised the description in themselves.
About 1 per cent of the population experience extreme aphantasia, though milder forms are considerably more common. Crucially, aphantasia is not a disorder. As Zeman told Quanta Magazine in 2024: "Creating the terms turned out to be an unexpectedly good trick to attract a lot of interest." His team at the University of Exeter and Edinburgh has since produced some of the field's most significant work.
Sarah Shomstein, a perception researcher at George Washington University, discovered her own aphantasia in 2022 during a seminar, when the presenter asked the audience to imagine an apple. "I didn't actually see an apple," she recalled. "Behind my eyes, it was completely black." The revelation prompted her to study the phenomenon professionally. She still finds it remarkable that others can picture an apricot against the backdrop of the real world, eyes wide open. "Wouldn't that interfere with your everyday life?" she asked.
What the Scans Show
Neuroscience has begun to map the biological architecture beneath these extremes. Zeman's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of volunteers at rest and found that people with aphantasia showed weaker connectivity between the prefrontal cortex - the brain's higher-level control centre - and the visual cortex at the back of the skull. People with hyperphantasia showed the opposite: stronger connections between those same regions.
"My guess is that if you say 'apple' to somebody with hyperphantasia, the linguistic representation of 'apple' in the brain immediately transmits the information to the visual system," Zeman explained to The Guardian. "For someone with aphantasia, the word and concept of 'apple' operate independently of the visual system, because those connections are weaker."
A separate study by Cornelia McCormick, a memory researcher at the University of Bonn, found that aphantasics exhibited weaker autobiographical memories and reduced hippocampal activity - but, paradoxically, heightened activity in the visual cortex. McCormick speculated that this extra noise might actually inhibit the signals needed to pull a coherent mental image from the background. As Paolo Bartolomeo, a neurologist at the Paris Brain Institute, put it: aphantasics "have access to the visual information, but somehow they cannot integrate this information in a subjective experience."
These are not minor curiosities. The findings suggest that the wiring of perception and imagination differs structurally across the population, with consequences for memory, emotion regulation, and creative production.
The Spectrum of Imagination
A 2024 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Zeman established that aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not binary states but extremes of a continuum. Most people cluster in the middle, capable of forming mental images with varying degrees of clarity. A 2026 paper by philosopher Bence Nanay, published in Neuropsychologia, argued that the field's binary focus - "aphantasics versus the rest of us" - obscures the real significance of the spectrum: that differences in imagery vividness correlate with gradual differences in decision-making, emotion-regulation, cravings, and mental health.
"People with hyperphantasia see mental images that seem to them as real as the things they actually see," Nanay told Quanta Magazine. But those images are not hallucinations - the person knows they are not real. "There's a subset of people with extremely vivid imaginations who are known as maladaptive daydreamers," said Nadine Dijkstra, a perception researcher at University College London. "They sit down on the couch, they don't leave their house… they just imagine their whole life just the way they want it. Because for them, it feels as real as reality."
A 2022 study by Liana Palermo at Magna Graecia University in Catanzaro suggested that hyperphantasia itself may have subtypes: object hyperphantasia, involving extreme detail in imagining individual items, and spatial hyperphantasia, involving enhanced mental rotation and a heightened sense of direction. Aphantasia may be similarly heterogeneous. "Aphantasia is not a monolithic phenomenon," Nanay said.
Memory, Creativity, and Career
The practical implications are striking. Zeman's research shows that aphantasia is over-represented among people in mathematical, computational, and scientific occupations, while hyperphantasia correlates with traditionally creative careers. The novelist Mark Lawrence, the Firefox co-creator Blake Ross, and the video game designer Jonathan Blow have all disclosed that they have aphantasia. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, surveyed 540 colleagues and found that production managers tended to have stronger visualisations than the artists. Our recent profile of neurodiversity in creative industries examined how these cognitive differences shape artistic output.
This is consistent with the finding, noted in Zeman's 2024 Trends in Cognitive Sciences review, that "sensory imagery is not a prerequisite for creative imagination." Aphantasics often compensate with propositional or spatial reasoning - what one interviewee described as "I just know." They can describe objects and people from memory without any visual component.
For hyperphantasics, the relationship runs the other way. Novels become cinematic. Laura Lewis Alvarado, a union worker in London, described watching The Golden Compass as a film adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and finding it disappointing. "I already had such a clear idea of how every character looked and acted," she said. The director's choices simply could not compete with the inner cinema.
There is also evidence that vivid imagery supports autobiographical memory recall - hyperphantasics report richer descriptions and more fluency in recollecting personal events - while aphantasia may be associated with a tendency toward scientific work and, in some studies, with autism. A 2024 review by Adam Zeman noted that aphantasia "is variably associated with reduced autobiographical memory, face recognition difficulty, and autism. Visual dreaming is often preserved."
What Remains Unknown
Much of the research is still in its early stages. The VVIQ, the standard assessment tool, was developed decades before aphantasia was named and relies entirely on self-report, which some researchers consider a significant limitation. Larner, Leff, and Nachev, writing in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews in 2024, noted "the ongoing confusion of perceptual with mental images" and "the ubiquitous use of unvalidated subjective assessment instruments such as the VVIQ."
Reshanne Reeder, a lecturer at Liverpool University, has conducted in-depth interviews with hyperphantasic participants and found that about 75 per cent can project an imagined object into their real visual field - seeing an apple hovering above their outstretched palm, and even feeling its weight. This raises questions about where imagination ends and perception begins.
Zeman has suggested that alterations in connectivity between the frontoparietal and visual networks may provide the neural substrate for these extremes, but the precise mechanisms remain contested. There is no single "imagery network" in the brain; mental imagery recruits prefrontal, parietal, temporal, and visual areas simultaneously. How these regions cooperate - or fail to - determines where a person lands on the spectrum.
What is clear is that the variation is real, measurable, and consequential. "The world - as we see it, smell it, hear it, think about it - is reconstructed," Shomstein said. Even a single shared experience, a thought, a memory, or a simple image of an apple can look and feel shockingly different on the mind's stage. The two brains described in this article - one that visualises too much, the other not at all - are not anomalies. They are variations within the normal range of human cognition, and the closer we look, the more the spectrum reveals about the nature of consciousness itself.
