No. 21Lifelong learning Walking and thinking

Picture an apple

About a year ago a colleague made me aware of a word I’d never heard: aphantasia. Some people close their eyes, try to picture something, and see nothing at all. That’s me. Not a dim apple, not an outline. I know I’m thinking about an apple, and that’s all. I’d assumed that was what everyone meant by picturing something.

It turns out there’s a scale, and I’m at the bottom of it. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire has been around since 1973: sixteen things to picture, each rated from 1, no image at all, to 5, as vivid as normal vision. Totals run from 16 to 80. As far as I can tell I’d answer 1 to every question, which makes 16 out of 80. Not a low score. The lowest score there is.

It wasn’t a metaphor

The thing that opened it up for me was a piece I’d read by someone who’d realised that when a guided meditation says to imagine yourself on a beach, most people see one. They never had. That’s exactly how I do it. No colours, no detail, and not even much of a feeling. I just know I’m thinking about a beach.

I think it was Blake Ross, one of the people who made Firefox, whose 2016 essay has the beach running through it. He asked friends what happened in their minds when he told them to imagine a beach, and they described the sand and the water. He’d thought counting sheep was a metaphor, and the mind’s eye a figure of speech. The meditation version I remember may have come from somewhere else. Ross also says thinking about a beach doesn’t make him feel calm, and it doesn’t for me either. John Green had the same surprise: he’d assumed visualize meant thinking of the words, ideas and feelings attached to a thing, not actual visuals.

The Disney memory that sat alongside it is Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and was president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. A friend asked him to picture a sphere. He spent a week trying. Then he surveyed more than 500 Pixar staff and found some of the most gifted people in the building couldn’t visualise at all.

The apple test

It was my colleague who gave us the apple test. Picture an apple. What colour is it? Later I tried it on friends and family, with the follow-up, which is the real question: do you actually see it? I was quizzing people, because I don’t know what seeing it is like. I only know what an apple looks like with my eyes open.

Fig. 1 · The apple scale

Sixteen questions, each scored 1 to 5. Rate every one a 1 and you get 16, which is me. The apple chart that went round the internet in 2020 is this scale with pictures, numbered the other way round: there, 1 is the vivid apple. I’ve kept the questionnaire’s direction, so 1 is me. Nobody knows who drew the original, so this is my own.

Most people, the research says, do see something. And there’s no way for either side to check. They can’t know what nothing is like, and I can’t know what seeing it is like.

Fig. 2 · The invisible apple

The dotted apple is a drawing convention, not what I see. What I have is the idea of an apple, and what one looks like when my eyes are open.

How rare, and how real

Having no imagery at all, a 16, is rarer than people think. Studies that didn’t mention imagery when they recruited put it at about 1 in 100. The largest, a representative New Zealand survey of 32,784 people published this year, found 0.8 per cent from a single question, and an international pooled sample of 9,063 found 0.9.

Widen it to no imagery or only dim imagery, the broader definition most of the research uses, and it’s about 4 in 100, which is what a 2022 study of more than a thousand people found. Ask people to guess, as one study did, and they put it at 27 to 32 per cent.

Fig. 3 · How rare it is

About one person in a hundred sees nothing at all. People asked to guess put it at nearly a third, which says something about how little any of us know about the inside of other people's heads.

It’s measurable, too. When most people imagine something bright, their pupils narrow a little, the way they would for real light. In a 2022 experiment, the pupils of people with aphantasia didn’t move when they imagined bright or dark shapes, though they responded to real light and to effort like anyone else’s. Small samples, 18 aphantasics against 42 controls, but it’s a physical trace of an absence I’d only ever been able to describe.

Creative without pictures

You might assume that means I can’t be creative. I can draw, not badly. I make nice-looking websites. I have very good taste, and when I’m making something I have a clear idea of how I want it to look. It just isn’t a picture. I don’t think it limits my artistic ability at all.

Ask me to draw a room from memory and I can draw the whole thing: the layout, where everything sits, the details. I’m working from the geography of the room and what I remember being in it, not from a picture behind my eyes. A 2021 study found almost exactly this. 61 people with aphantasia and 52 controls studied photos of rooms and drew them from memory. The aphantasics drew fewer objects and used less colour, and were more likely to write labels on things. But they placed what they drew just as accurately, and they made far fewer memory errors: three drawings with an object that was never there, against fourteen from the controls. No picture to misremember.

Artists make the same point. The Extreme Imagination exhibition in Glasgow in 2019 showed work by 22 artists at the two ends of the scale. Glen Keane, who drew Ariel and the Beast for Disney, is reported to have no imagery either: he starts with a page of scribbles and takes lines away until the character appears. He draws to find the picture rather than to copy one. I recognise that. The idea comes first, and the page is where it turns into a picture.

There is a tendency in the numbers, and I’ll own it. In a survey of about 2,000 people with aphantasia, people with aphantasia were more likely to work in science, computing and maths, and less likely to work in the arts, than people at the vivid end. It was self-selected and self-reported, and plenty of people didn’t fit the pattern. I’m a developer by trade. Make of that what you will.

I only know what an apple looks like with my eyes open.

Born with it, or losing it

I believe I was born like this, and finding out came with no trauma at all. The way I think about it now is that I’m blind in the mind’s eye in the way someone can be blind from birth: you adapt, you never notice a difference, and you don’t know what you’re missing because you never had it.

Losing it is another thing entirely. Most aphantasia is lifelong, but a preliminary report on 88 cases, presented in 2021, covered people who’d had imagery and lost it, most often after a head injury, a mood disorder, a stroke or an operation. Of those who talked about their dreams, about half had lost visual dreaming too. The painter Sheri Paisley lost hers to a stroke at 29, and the New Yorker, profiling her last year, wrote that she felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. That’s someone sighted going blind, and it’s a loss.

Adam Zeman, the neurologist who gave the condition its name, did so in 2015 after 21 people wrote to him who had gone through life with little or no imagery. They described a varied but modest effect on their mood. Most had worked it out in their teens or twenties, from a conversation or something they’d read.

Even among the lifelong, the camps differ. A 2026 study asked 52 people what it was like. Most had realised comparatively late, which is my camp, and most of them had assumed, as I had, that picturing was a figure of speech. After that they split. Some shrugged: not bad or good, simply just is. Some grieved, and what they grieved was mostly faces, the spouse or the parent they couldn’t call up. And some wanted a cure. I’m in the first camp. I can’t call up a loved one’s face. My dreams are blind as well; everything in them is concepts. I don’t think I can hear a tune in my head either. In Zeman’s survey of 2,000, roughly half said every sense was like that and about two-thirds still dreamed in pictures, so I’m at the far end on every count. I have no shame in any of it. It doesn’t limit my creativity in any way.

Switching it on

The question I had next was whether it can be reversed, and the honest answer is that nothing is proven. Meditation turns up in the research only as a way people discover they have it, when the guided visualisation does nothing. The third eye, and the rituals and substances people take to open it, have no evidence behind them that I could find.

Psychedelics are the live one. There are anecdotes of imagery arriving after ayahuasca or psilocybin, and a single case report of a woman who went from a self-recalled 16 to a measured 68 nearly three years after taking psilocybin truffles. One person, with the before score remembered rather than measured. Two of the researchers behind the pupil study wrote a warning in Cortex last year: the reports are anecdotal, vivid imagery is tied up with intrusive thoughts and some mental health conditions, and nobody knows what switching it on would do to someone who has never had it. A small training study in athletes with weak imagery raised their self-reported scores; not everyone improved on the visual measures. Interesting, and not proven, is where I’d leave it.

The thing we never check

What stays with me is the bigger point. We all go round assuming everyone else’s mind works like ours, and almost nobody checks. This is a difference between people that goes to the heart of how we think, and it barely comes up in conversation, probably because for anyone who has had it all their life it makes very little difference. It matters most to the people who lost it.

At first it was on my mind every day. Now it comes up now and then in conversation. It’s also the 21st of these musings in a short run, and most of them came from walking about and coming up with ideas, which is what I call driftcasting. Not one of them needed a picture in my head.

So, the apple. Close your eyes. Where do you sit, 1 to 5, with 1 being nothing? I’d genuinely like to know, so tell me through the contact page.

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