While completing the Masters of Psychology at Université Grenobles Alpes my research focussed on mental imagery. The understanding that our inner worlds are almost as individuals as a finger print expanded my world and shaped my clinical understanding. I’m not going to cover 5 years of research, but here are the essentials (from my perspective).

Originally the term aphantasia was specific to visual voluntary imagery. That is, what we see in our mind’s eye when we try to imagine a visual prompt. This can be considered on a continuum, from ‘I know I’m thinking about it but there is no visual image’ to ‘a visual image as vivid as real life’. As well, some people can (intentionally or not) project their imagery into the environment, while for others the experience is within the inner ‘mental space’.

The term has grown to cover other forms of imagery (other senses). At the Aphantasia Alps Research Group (AARG) our focus has broadened and includes sound and voice; multilingual learning; spatial; and emotional imagery.

That imagery can also be spontaneous (unintentionally come to mind), can vary in vividness and may not always be present.

This understanding has impacted the way I speak to clients about their inner experience. For example, waking from a nightmare does the sensory experience follow you in to wakefulness? During a flashback how true to life is the emotional or visual experience? When thinking about critical conversations, do you hear your voice? Do you hear someone else’s voice? Is that in your mind or outside of you?

I think it is important to know the baseline for each modality. For a person with aphantasia to suddenly experience spontaneous grief related imagery can be terrifying and they may doubt their own mental health. For a person that has emotional hyperphantasia the standard (& effective) process of exposure therapy may be genuinely more extreme and may require different approaches. For a person with extremely vivid voice imagery that is projected into the environment they may have to reality check more frequently.

There is no diagnostic test, because aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not mental disorders. They are extremes of a continuum, a cognitive trait. But It is interesting to think about our imagery and those we are closest to. That tendency to assume our own inner process is true for all needs to be challenged. We can all benefit from learning about others. We are currently developing a new measure of mental imagery (slowly moving through the validation stages), but for the moment the original study is still online. You won’t get a lovely graph or numbers at the end, but you will learn about your own imagery through the questions.

Here is the link to the UGA aphantasia on line study