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Some people cannot see pictures in their mind's eye. Asked to imagine an apple, they know what it looks like but no image appears. This is called aphantasia; a 2022 study found that almost 1 in 100 people have no mental imagery at all, and about 4 in 100 have none or only a faint one.

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The British scientist Francis Galton first described the difference in 1880, after asking people to picture their breakfast table that morning: some saw it vividly, while others, to his surprise, said they saw nothing. The subject was then largely ignored until 2015, when the neurologist Adam Zeman and his team at the University of Exeter studied people who could not visualise and named the condition aphantasia, from Greek words meaning ‘without an image’. Many people only discover it as adults, when they realise that others mean ‘picture it’ literally. People with aphantasia can still remember, plan and create; Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar, has said he has it. Many of them still dream in images. The opposite, unusually vivid imagery, is called hyperphantasia.

Türkçe oku
Bazı insanlar zihinlerinde görüntü canlandıramaz: Bir elmayı düşünmeleri istendiğinde elmanın neye benzediğini bilirler, ama gözlerinin önüne hiçbir şey gelmez. Buna afantazi denir. 2022'deki bir araştırmaya göre insanların yüzde 1'e yakınında zihinsel imge hiç yok, yüzde 4 kadarında ise ya hiç yok ya da çok silik.

İngiliz bilim insanı Francis Galton bu farkı ilk kez 1880'de tanımladı. İnsanlardan o sabahki kahvaltı sofralarını gözlerinin önüne getirmelerini istemişti: Bazıları sofrayı canlı biçimde görüyor, bazıları ise Galton'ı şaşırtarak hiçbir şey görmediğini söylüyordu. Konu sonra uzun süre pek ilgi görmedi. 2015'te Exeter Üniversitesi'nden nörolog Adam Zeman ve ekibi, zihninde görüntü canlandıramayan kişileri inceledi ve bu duruma Yunanca “imgesiz” anlamına gelen afantazi adını verdi. Birçok kişi bunu ancak yetişkinlikte, başkalarının “gözünün önüne getir” derken bunu gerçekten kastettiklerini anlayınca fark ediyor. Afantazisi olanlar da hatırlayabilir, plan yapabilir, yaratıcı işler üretebilir; Pixar'ın kurucularından Ed Catmull da afantazisi olduğunu söylemiştir. Birçoğu rüyalarında yine de görüntü görür. Bunun tersine, alışılmadık derecede canlı imgelemeye hiperfantazi denir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Aphantasia
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