Driving a car is not an option for Jake S., a musician and artist in Hamilton, Ontario. When he first tried to get behind the wheel years ago, his mind would flicker between the road ahead and the stream of images and scenes that play through his mind. “It was very scary,” he tells SELF, and it put him off driving for good. Part of Jake’s constant distraction can be attributed to his ADHD, which he was diagnosed with and medicated for a few years ago. But that hasn’t lessened the constant imagery that flashes through his mind. “It’s like I’m constantly on my phone in my head,” he says.
Jake has hyperphantasia, which causes him to experience extremely vivid mental imagery. It’s the opposite extreme of aphantasia, the phenomenon of completely lacking mental imagery. According to research, about 3% of the population experience hyperphantasia, and they often say that seeing in their mind’s eye is just as vivid as real life sight. For Jake, hyperphantasia means that every thought he has usually triggers some kind of visual—“my mind is mostly thinking in video,” he says.
Hyperphantasia and aphantasia are not disorders, says Adam Zeman, MD, an honorary professor or neurology at the University of Exeter, honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and the researcher who coined the two terms. “They’re variations in human experience and in human psychological ability,” he tells SELF, “and there are pros and cons at each end of the spectrum.”
What is living with hyperphantasia like?
Research on hyperphantasia and its impacts is still in its infancy, so we’re only just starting to document the ways differences in mental imagery really affect people, says Reshanne Reeder, PhD, a lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Liverpool who studies differences in perception. But there are all sorts of possible implications—people with hyperphantasia might enjoy daydreaming more than others, for example, but also be more prone to maladaptive daydreaming (or spending so much time daydreaming and lingering on their mental imagery that they begin to neglect other parts of their lives), she says.
Despite the emphasis on mental imagery and vision, it seems like aphantasia and hyperphantasia also correspond to other senses as well. Jake says that when he imagines eating an apple, he imagines the mouthfeel, the taste, and the feeling of juice running down his throat, as if he’s experiencing it in real life. “This is very common,” Dr. Reeder tells SELF—if you have hyperphantasia for vision and images, that likely applies to other senses as well.
In her research, Dr. Reeder has spoken to many people with hyperphantasia who have told her how they use their abilities in their day-to-day lives. “One person with hyperphantasia once said that when he took a human anatomy course in college it was a breeze, because he could see the names of all the ligaments and things in the body right in front of him,” Dr. Reeder says. But that’s not to say that people with hyperphantasia have a better memory than others. The effect mental imagery has on memory “is much less than you might predict,” says Dr. Zeman. People with hyperphantasia, or aphantasia, have on average the same memory abilities as anyone else—but those with the former seem to be slightly better at remembering visual information, as well as first-person memories of their own lives.
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