People Who Can't Picture Anything Are Rewriting the Science of Imagination
I'm aphantasic, so I read People Who Can't Picture Anything Are Rewriting the Science of Imagination with more than usual interest. It reports a review in Consciousness and Cognition by Derek Arnold and colleagues, two of them aphantasic, arguing that imagination is not seeing run backwards: people whose primary visual cortex has been destroyed can still imagine, so a mental image looks like teamwork between brain regions, and aphantasia like a breakdown in it. The two describe their own inner life as "an awareness of a set of spatial facts". I have shared links on this before: item 24 of my (Almost) 52 Things I Learned in 2025 was about SDAM, a related condition, and the show notes of our What Next? episode with Les Cochrane link a primer on it. If you lead people, the useful claim is the bigger one: inner lives differ, so "just picture it" will not work for every mind on your team.
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