Whenever people read a certain scene in a book, most of them picture the scene in their heads. Some people can imagine things more vividly than others, like examining the freckles on someone’s face or patterns on a butterfly. However, around 4% of the population see something very different: nothing. This is known as aphantasia, the inability to envision things within your head.
Origins
Aphantasia was first discovered by a psychologist around the 19th century, or around the year 1800 to 1900. He took a sample of people and told each of them to try to envision their breakfast meal in their heads. Some people said that they could see it clearly with many details, known as hyperphantasia, while other people said that they couldn’t see anything at all. Most people’s level of envisioning landed between these two places. Through this, the psychologist determined that seeing things in your mind exists on a spectrum.
Does Aphantasia affect Dreams?
To understand whether this genetic inability affects dreaming, we need to understand how visualization works. When you imagine something, different parts of your brain activate. The top parts try to envision an object, and sends messages to the bottom parts to process and memorize what you see in your head. However, dreaming works in a different way. When you dream, the bottom parts of your brain take memories and send them to the top parts of your brain to envision them as dreams. These two processes are known as the Top Down Process and the Bottom Up Process, which are both uniquely different. So no, people who cannot visualize things are not unable to dream.
Aphantasia Today and How It Works
While the trait of aphantasia is quite strange, it isn’t considered a mental disorder, but rather a different way people experience their lives. For example, people with hyperphantasia are more likely to experience the emotional outcome of a book rather than people with aphantasia, mostly due to their ability to envision the book’s events. Scientists have also found that aphantasia could also affect career choices. A survey of more than 2000 people discovered that people with little to no mental imagery usually decide to work on math and science related jobs, while people with vivid mental imagery lean towards arts and English related jobs. While we may never be able to understand this fascinating concept of not being able to envision things, we must understand that the way we see the world might be different from another.