Living Without a Mind's Eye and the Ability to Visualize

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you ask someone with aphantasia to visualize an apple, a tree, or the house they grew up in, their mind draws a blank. Literally. The inability to conjure up mental images was discovered in the 1880s but only recently has been given a name and become the subject of more serious study. Aphantasia is found in approximately one percent of the population and can also affect the ability to recall sounds, touch and the sensation of movement. Some aphantasics experience their condition as a loss, while others say the freedom from being bound by visual memory allows them to live fully in the present. We talk about aphantasia and what it tells us about how our brains perceive and remember. Guests: Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer for The New Yorker, her most recent article is titled "Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound" Tom Ebeyer, founder, Aphantasia Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:35.3	From KQED.
0:38.3	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Thinking about neuroscience these days feels to me that one very strong message emanating from the field is that human brains accomplish the goals of human life in wildly different ways.
0:52.3	Though all living humans are very similar genetically,
0:55.0	and our brains, where you look at them
0:57.0	in jars would look quite similar,
0:59.0	the connections between our billions of neurons
1:02.0	are wired up in so many different ways.
1:05.0	And this spectrum of variation between people
1:08.0	includes even capacities that most people take entirely for granted, like
1:12.9	the ability to visualize things in your mind.
1:16.4	New Yorker's staff writer Larissa McFarcker explores the range of visualization and humans
1:21.8	in a big new feature in the magazine, and she joins us this morning. Welcome, Larissa.
1:25.7	Thanks for having me. We're also joined this morning by Tom E. Bayer, who's founder of the A Fantasia Network.
1:33.8	Welcome, Tom. Thanks so much for having me.
1:36.7	So Larissa, let's talk about this condition, A Fantasia, the subject of this big New Yorker
	...

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