(Nature) – Although scientists have known for more than a century that mental imagery varies between people, the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.

Since then, aphantasia has shot into the canon of unusual phenomena that are invaluable for studying how the mind works. Like synaesthesia (in which people’s senses are connected in exceptional ways, so they hear colours, for example) and prosopagnosia (also known as face blindness), aphantasia has opened many new research avenues.

Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life (Read More)