Visualizing memories is common for many people. The smell of cinnamon and ginger may bring back memories of your childhood kitchen and eating freshly baked cookies. Also, when you hear a certain song, you may imagine dancing with someone special.
Mary Wasen has never had such an experience. When the 43-year-old lawyer from Newent, UK, recalls baking with her mother, no image comes to mind. She cannot imagine her child opening her presents, her husband’s face when he proposes to her, or even the birth of her child.
“When you say people can bring up images, it sounds really weird to me,” Wasen said. “I can’t relive any experience I’ve seen. I only see it once at the moment. I’m more influenced by emotions and thoughts than by visuals.
“For now, there are no images of the birth of our sons, but we can tell you everything about it,” she added. “I remember what it felt like and I describe the room and the birth in great detail, but I will never see it again.”
A year ago, Wasen discovered that she and her mother had a rare form of treatment called aphantasia. Their brains don’t form mental images to remember or imagine. (Fantasia is a Greek word meaning imagination.) “Until recently, I had no idea that other people were actually watching the footage. I thought everyone was just like me,” she says. said.
Experts say that, like left-handedness, aphantasia is not a disorder or disease, but merely an interesting variation in the human experience.
“I understand concepts, I understand things, I have memories, but they’re not backed up by any images,” Wasen said. “I once read that aphantasia is best described as, “He has the same computer hardware as everyone else, but his monitor isn’t turned on.” That really hit home. Masu.”
Dutch-born artist Geraldine Van Heemstra is at the other end of this unique process. She suffers from hyperphantasia, which allows her to recall her memories as vividly as if she remembered them at the moment.
For Van Heemstra, letters and numbers have colors, and people often have a colorful aura surrounding their bodies. Therefore, remembering the birth of a daughter is an experience filled with warm colors and bright lights.
“I remember seeing a blue screen and a little sunrise over my daughter’s head, probably because she was screaming for breath,” Van Heemstra recalled with a smile. “It’s such a beautiful, vivid memory, with such warm colors.”
Although such explicit images can be a boon for artists, there are also significant downsides. “Having an overactive imagination can sometimes be a problem, because you overthink things and get very anxious,” said Van Heemstra, who splits his time between London and Edinburgh, Scotland.
For example, if she’s nervous about going somewhere, she might overthink it and experience deja vu. “I think it’s happening because I imagined it so vividly,” she said.
Sometimes Van Heemstra can’t shut off her brain. “Last night, my girlfriend’s son convinced me to watch a horrifying TV series about a woman who smuggled cocaine into Miami and shot her child in the head,” she said. “Then throughout the night, every time she tried to sleep, it was like a camera in her head was seeing all these very colorful and frightening images.”
Aphantasia is not a medical condition or disorder
Adam Zeman, a neurologist and professor of cognitive behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter in the UK and honorary research fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said that around 4 per cent of the world’s population may experience aphantasia. He said there is.
Zeman coined the term in 2015 after meeting a man who once had a vivid memory but lost it after heart surgery.
“We performed brain imaging tests and found that when he sees things, his brain responds normally, but when he tries to imagine it, the visual areas of his brain don’t activate,” Zeman said.
Since then, research has exploded, Zeman said. science review Aphantasia published Wednesday in Cognitive Science Trends. One advance is how to objectively measure visualization deficits.
“When you visualize looking into the sun, your pupils actually constrict a little bit,” Zeman says. “Just imagining looking into a dark room causes the pupils to dilate a little. However, people with aphantasia do not experience this effect.
Van Heemstra created a tool that moved with the wind, allowing him to capture images created by the movement of air. (Geraldine Van Heemstra/CNN)
“When you have images and read really scary stories, you sweat. But people with aphantasia don’t do that,” he continued. “But when you show them scary pictures, they sweat. So the interpretation is that images are needed to create some sort of visceral response to an emotional story.”
Researchers now recognize that aphantasia may be associated with memory loss, autism, or facial blindness, which prevents people from recognizing most faces, even those of loved ones. People with aphantasia are also more likely to work in science, mathematics or information technology fields, Zeman said. Aphantasia can be caused by brain damage, but some people, like Wasen and her mother, are born with the condition.
“We now know that aphantasia runs in families, so if you have aphantasia, first degree relative They are about 10 times more likely to be affected as well,” Zeman said.
Another finding is that many people with aphantasia dream visually. How could that be? Zeman said this is because the process of generating images while awake is completely different from the process of generating imaginations while dreaming.
“People with aphantasia know what an image is; they can’t summon it during the day,” he said. “A lack of imagery usually affects all the senses, not just the mind’s eye.”
That certainly applies to Wasen, whose images, sounds, smells, textures and tastes cannot be recreated. But Wasen said she is often “driven by emotion and feels things very intensely” and can describe smells, tastes and sounds by how they make her feel.
Wasen has had a successful career as a lawyer and considers himself adept at conveying complex information. “I don’t really rely on images in any way, shape, or form, and I don’t think anyone else does.”
But she doesn’t like fantasy novels. “It’s just words on a page. I don’t travel or visit places that are in my head” – this interferes with her ability to role-play with her children. She often sees her husband, who turns out to be a hyperfantasist, do so with ease.
“When I see them riding tractors, racing cars, and playing pretend, I’m a little jealous,” she says. “They’re much better at helping with homework and actually playing games.”
But for Wasen, the most upsetting aspect of aphantasia is “the fact that you can’t see your kids unless you’re with them.” I can’t picture them. I can tell you every detail of what they look like, their mannerisms, even what they were wearing this morning, but I don’t have an image of them.
“When I lose someone I love, like my mother, I worry that I won’t be able to close my eyes and visualize a picture of her.”
looks too clear
Zeman estimates that up to 10 percent of the world’s population suffers from hyperphantasia, which is at the opposite end of the brain’s processing spectrum from aphantasia. People who experience very vivid images are often involved in the arts and may experience heightened emotions, Zeman said.
Since childhood, Mary Wasen has not been able to see images in her head. (Mary Wasen/CNN)
“Images are said to amplify emotions, so I think it’s fair to say that people with hyperphantasia tend to have more volatile emotional responses than people with aphantasia, but that’s still not enough. “It hasn’t been studied much,” he says.
Brain scans have shown that people with vivid images have “very strong connections between the front of the brain and the sensory centers in the back of the brain,” Zeman said. “On the other hand, if you have aphantasia, the connection is much weaker. So the difference between the two may be in brain connectivity.”
There are distinct advantages and disadvantages to being at both ends of the sensory spectrum, Zeeman said.
One of the benefits of aphantasia, he said, is that it can make it easier to live in the moment because you don’t have repetitive visual distractions.
“We are concerned that hyperphantasia may make people more susceptible to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder),” he says. “People sometimes confuse what they imagined with what actually happened, or they constantly imagine terrible outcomes that never actually happened.”
For example, a mother whose children got out of the car moments before it collided with another car was haunted by graphic footage of what would have happened if her children had still been in the car, Zeman said.
People with visually sensitive brains often have symptoms such as: synesthesiaZeman said the brain experiences multiple sensations simultaneously, including: Taste the color, Feel the sounds and assign specific colors to numbers and letters.
grow up with a different brain
Although many people with hyperphantasia are satisfied with their abilities, the condition can lead to ostracism. Mr. Van Heemstra learned to hide his sensory abilities from childhood in response to cruel teasing from his siblings and schoolmates.
“When I was young, I was very quiet about how my mind worked,” she said. “You could play without having anything. Literally with a few sticks you could build a huge town with rivers and bridges and plant trees, but my younger brother He couldn’t imagine that, so he said, “I don’t see anything, you idiot,” and jumped at it.
“Even at school, it was very difficult for me to do things like math, where the numbers were displayed in colors,” Van Heemstra said. “Even though I knew how to calculate and the correct answer, I would change the numbers because the colors didn’t match and I didn’t like the results.”
Van Heemstra and Wasen had never met or spoken to each other, but both women told CNN they wanted to help others, especially young children who feel left out at school. They said they were talking about their unique brains, hoping to become
“It was very frustrating because at school I would explain things and people would laugh at me,” Van Heemstra said. “I felt very anxious. I think so many kids can suffer from it, whether it’s aphantasia or hyperphantasia, because they’re made to believe they’re so different. is.”
Many elementary school teachers focus on boosting children’s creativity, but they are unaware of the differences in how the brain processes sensory information, saying, “That’s not actually the child’s brain’s job.” However, their seeming indifference can easily leave students behind. It allows them to do that,” Wasen said.
“It’s so important that children feel inspired and engaged at school,” she says. “The more we are aware of these things, the more we can understand and empathize with them. They are part of our effort to live in harmony.”
