Il perfume of a freshly baked cake. The vision of old furniture at grandmother's house. There feeling of the spring breeze of a morning by the sea. Our mind is capable of taking us far even when we stand still in the same place. How many times do we happen to get lost in our thoughts and memories of the past? When it happens we cut ourselves off from the reality that surrounds us, we forget everything that is in front of our eyes and we are catapulted into moments already lived or in an ideal future that we like to dream.
However, not everyone has this capacity for imagination and it is not simply pragmatism or lack of creativity. It's a real one psychic condition, called "patterned".
What is meant by "aphantasia"
In the XNUMXth century BC, Aristotle defined the "fantasy" as the power of imagination. Being imaginative means to be able to imagine before your eyes situations, people and things that in reality, they are based only in our mind. At the same time, thanks to the imagination, not only visual images can be recalled to mind, but also smells, tastes, sounds and the different perceptions related to tatto.
The opposite of this mental capacity, however, takes a very specific name, that of patterned. This term indicates that neurological condition for which an individual cannot visualize any mental images, as if the mind's eye were blind. Scientists have noticed how this ailment affects 3% of the population, manifesting itself mainly as inability to retain visual images in memory and for this reason it is also called "psychic blindness".
Discovering this condition
Although cases of aphantasia are not very rare, for many years this brain disorder remained in oblivion. In fact, the first one who tried to bring it to everyone's attention was Francis Galton with a studio in which they merged empiricism and serendipity. The Victorian-era intellectual opened a poll asking several English noblemen to imagine your own breakfast and to describe to the best of their abilities the scene that presented itself in their minds. Among numerous refractory and several acquiescent, Galton noted that some of his acquaintances had provided a faded and poorly detailed imagedespite the effort to recall their habitual early morning meal.
Unfortunately, Galton's study was forgotten for many years, including its conclusions, which they already indicated how the visual imagination was not unique, but that it presented a much wider range and vast, yet to be explored. His article has only recently returned to the light and attention of the scientific community. In particular, in 2016, Dr. Adam Zeman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Exeter, definitively coined the term "patterned". Since then they have started steadily multiple searches on causes of this condition and on effects that presents in the daily life of those affected.
What are the causes of aphantasia
Studies from the University of Exeter and Adam Zeman have focused heavily on the causes that lead to this lack of imagination. It was found that some people suffer from aphantasia for congenital reasons, others because of a previous illness or conditions and still others developed it after surgeries. There seem to be gods links to other neurological conditions, such as synesthesia, or the confusion of the sensory perception of stimuli, and the prosopagnosia, a deficit of the nervous system that makes it difficult to recognize the general features of people's faces.
So, precisely because it is not possible to trace a single cause that could explain this disorder, the researchers investigated what happens in the brains of those with aphantasia. It seems that this psychic blindness should be linked to the inability of the brain system to build associative models linked to what is seen. Generally, every visual stimulus, but also every stimulus derived from the other four senses of perception, has an impact on the brain and leave on it "an imprint". When we want to remember something, we go to rediscover that mark left in our mind and bring it back to light. In the brains of people with aphantasia all this does not happen and, therefore, not only the capacity of the imagination is compromised, but also creativity, memory or the act of dreaming.
Living with this psychic blindness
Before the rediscovery of Galton's psychology study and the new research carried out by Adam Zeman, aphantasia, in addition to not having even a real name, was not taken into consideration by experts. All this makes it clear how people who suffer from it can lead an almost normal life except in those moments when they are asked to use very specific mental faculties linked, in fact, to imagination, creativity and fantasy. They usually experiment a situation of malaise when asked to remembering faces of individuals they know but that are not present next to them or on similar occasions.
Furthermore, a repercussion of aphantasia is seen on the retention ability to dream. While a person with imagination can escape from the reality that surrounds him by simply taking refuge in his own mind and experiences that fascinating phenomenon that are dreams at night, the aphantasius fail and they cannot build that mental experience.
Are there any remedies for aphantasia?
At the moment the research is still in fieri e there is no treatment for aphantasia. The testimonies of those who suffer from it show how this deficit does not seriously or seriously compromise the life of those who suffer from it, but, in any case, these people feel that something is missing. We hope that science and psychology can make progress in this direction.
Source article: Alfeminile
