More than three million French people suffer from a disability which has only been studied for around ten years and about which we communicate little.
In 1880, Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and father of eugenics, put his finger on a neurobiological problem which, 135 years later, still fascinates researchers. The scientist had noticed that certain people possessed an intriguing peculiarity, which prevented them from putting images on the objects they were thinking about. As reported by Le Monde, Galton had demonstrated through tests that some people had difficulty visualizing abstract concepts and could not demonstrate visual imagination. For example, imagining a breakfast with its different elements, their sizes, their colors, their textures, without having them in front of their eyes, was impossible for them.
What Galton then called the absence of “mental imagery” became in 2015 “aphantasia”. A little-known cognitive disorder which nevertheless affects nearly 160 million people worldwide and more than 3 million French people! It is not a painful illness, but a particularity which prevents at least 5% of the world’s population from visualizing a mental image. Or, more simply, to imagine a known object as if we saw it.
The origin of this disorder is unknown. This could be the consequence of brain trauma or a congenital peculiarity. Aphantasia does not affect all people in the same way, some can partially see an image, while for others it is complete darkness. But overall, scientists have shown that people with aphantasia are slower than average to process visual information.
Several testimonies from people with aphantasia reveal that this cognitive particularity can extend to the other senses, such as Matthieu Munoz, co-founder of “Aphantasia Club”. The young man’s brain is incapable of rediscovering the images, but also the sounds and smells of an event, so much so that after a few months, the memory disappears completely and irreversibly.
There is no treatment and you can live very well with this disorder. However, there is a risk for the child to be handicapped by learning difficulties, due to the specificities of the school system. In schools, the methods are generally based on memorization and visualization. As with dyslexia, support is possible and aphantasia is not synonymous with failure. However, and as Charlotte Langlais, author of the book “Aphantasia Club: research on the spectrum of mental imagery”, herself suffering from aphantasia, explains, certain professions seem excluded, in particular all those where the visual aspect and conceptual is very important, like for example architect or painter.
The author discovered very late that she had aphantasia, like many others, with diagnoses often being made late. We generally detect the problem ourselves, but there is still the VVIQ test (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire), which is currently a reference and is available online. Concretely, if when you imagine an apple you can see it as if it were before your eyes, see the color and for some even the texture of the skin, you are not one of the 3 million French people concerned.
