Can’t count sheep? You could have aphantasia 
 
 If counting sheep is an abstract concept, or you are unable to visualise the faces of loved ones, you could have aphantasia – a newly defined condition to describe people who are born without a “mind’s eye”. 
 
 Some people report a significant impact on their lives from being unable to visualise memories of their partners, or departed relatives. Others say that descriptive writing is meaningless to them, and careers such as architecture or design are closed to them, as they would not be able to visualise an end product. 
 
 Cognitive neurologist Professor Adam Zeman, at the University of Exeter Medical School, has revisited the concept of people who cannot visualise, which was first identified by Sir Francis Galton in 1880 A 20th century survey suggested that this may be true of 2.5% of the population – yet until now, this phenomenon has remained largely unexplored. 
 
 Visualisation is the result of activity in a network of regions widely distributed across the brain, working together to enable us to generate images on the basis of our memory of how things look. These regions include areas in the frontal and parietal lobes, which ‘organise’ the process of visualisation, together with areas in the temporal and occipital lobes, which represent the items we wish to call to the mind’s eye, and give visualisation its ‘visual’ feel. An inability to visualise could result from an alteration of function at several points in this network. This problem has been described previously following major brain damage and in the context of mood disorder. Now, Professor Zeman and his team are conducting further studies to find out more about why some people are born with poor or diminished visual imagery ability. 
 
 The recent research came about by serendipity. The American science journalist, Carl Zimmer, wrote an article in Discover magazine about a previous paper by Professor Zeman reporting a man who lost his mind’s eye in his sixties following a cardiac procedure. Professor Zeman was then contacted by 21 individuals who recognised their own experience in the Discover article, but had never been able to imagine. Professor Zeman and colleagues describe these patients’ experience in a paper just published in the journal Cortex. 
 
 Dame Gill Morgan, from Devon in South West England, made contact with Professor Zeman as a result of this coverage. The Chair of NHS Providers first realised that her ability to conjure a mental picture differed from her peers during management training in her 20s. She said: “We were told to ‘visualise a sunrise’, and I thought ‘what on Earth does that look like’ – I couldn’t picture it at all. I could describe it – I could tell you that the sun comes up over the horizon and the sky changes colour as it gets lighter, but I can’t actually see that image in my mind.” 
 
 Dame Gill has a successful career and does not feel hindered by her lack of a “mind’s eye”. But she said: “I became more aware of it when my mum died, as I can’t remember her face. I now realise that others can conjure up a picture of someone they love, and that did make me feel sad, although of course I remember her in other ways. I can describe the way she stood on the stairs for a photo for example, I just can’t see it.” 
 
 Dame Gill believes her excellent memory may have developed in part to compensate for her lack of visual imagination. “If I have to recount something that’s absent, I have to reconstruct it from the facts I know about it, rather than view it in my mind.” 
 
 Niel Kenmuir, 39, from Lancaster in the UK, first realised he could not visualise images at primary school. “I can remember not understanding what 'counting sheep' entailed when I couldn't sleep. I assumed they meant it in a figurative sense. When I tried it myself, I found myself turning my head to watch invisible sheep fly by. I’ve spent years looking online for information about my condition, and finding nothing. I’m very happy that it is now being researched and defined.” 
 
 Niel works in a bookshop and is an avid reader, but avoids books with vivid landscape descriptions as they bring nothing to mind for him. “I just find myself going through the motion of reading the words without any image coming to mind,” he said. “I usually have to go back and read a passage about a visual description several times – it’s almost meaningless.” 
 
 Niel studied philosophy, which is rich in visual imagery, but this aspect was lost on him. The way he explains it, though, he does understand the mechanics behind it. He said: “The mind’s eye is a canvas, and the neurones work together to project onto it. The neurones are all working fine, but I don’t have the canvas”. 
 
 Asked if it had impacted on his life, he said: “I have never been ambitious, and wondered if an inability to 'imagine myself in a place ten years from now' as a concrete image has affected this. I also find it difficult to jump from abstract thought to concrete examples, although I think a positive consequence is that I am perhaps better at thinking abstractly than many other people.” 
 
 Professor Zeman said: “This intriguing variation in human experience has received little attention. Our participants mostly have some first-hand knowledge of imagery through their dreams: our study revealed an interesting dissociation between voluntary imagery, which is absent or much reduced in these individuals, and involuntary imagery, for example in dreams, which is usually preserved.” 
 
 Professor Zeman is pursuing the study of aphantasia through an interdisciplinary project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The Eye’s Mind - a study of the neural basis of visual imagination and its role in culture. The AHRC project involves, among others, the artist Susan Aldworth, art historian John Onians and philosopher, Fiona Macpherson. 
 
 
 
 Read Professor Zeman's post on aphantasia on The Exeter Blog. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "When I think about my fiancee, there's no image" Niel Kenmuir on living with aphantasia 
 
 Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind? 
 
 Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye. 
 
 But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images. 
 
 Niel Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has always had a blind mind's eye. 
 
 He knew he was different even in childhood. "My stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep, and he explained what he meant, I tried to do it and I couldn't," he says. 
 
 "I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences, there was nothing to count." 
 
 Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at school. 
 
 As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memory are "terrible", but he is very good at remembering facts. 
 
 And, like others with aphantasia, he struggles to recognise faces. 
 
 Yet he does not see aphantasia as a disability, but simply a different way of experiencing life. 
 
 Take the aphantasia test 
 
 It is impossible to see what someone else is picturing inside their head. 
 
 Psychologists use the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, which asks you to rate different mental images, to test the strength of the mind's eye. 
 
 The University of Exeter has developed an abridged version that lets you see how your mind compares. 
 
 You must have JavaScript enabled for this quiz to show! 
 
 Mind's eye blind 
 
 Ironically, Niel now works in a bookshop, although he largely sticks to the non-fiction aisles. 
 
 His condition begs the question what is going on inside his picture-less mind. I asked him what happens when he tries to picture his fiancee. 
 
 "This is the hardest thing to describe, what happens in my head when I think about things," he says. 
 
 "When I think about my fiancee there is no image, but I am definitely thinking about her, I know today she has her hair up at the back, she's brunette. 
 
 "But I'm not describing an image I am looking at, I'm remembering features about her, that's the strangest thing and maybe that is a source of some regret." 
 
 The response from his mates is a very sympathetic: "You're weird." 
 
 But while Niel is very relaxed about his inability to picture things, it is a cause of distress for others. 
 
 One person who took part in a study into aphantasia said he had started to feel "isolated" and "alone" after discovering that other people could see images in their heads. 
 
 Being unable to reminisce about his mother years after her death led to him being "extremely distraught". 
 
 The super-visualiser 
 
 At the other end of the spectrum is children's book illustrator, Lauren Beard, whose work on the Fairytale Hairdresser series will be familiar to many six-year-olds. 
 
 Her career relies on the vivid images that leap into her mind's eye when she reads text from her author. 
 
 When I met her in her box-room studio in Manchester, she was working on a dramatic scene in the next book. 
 
 The text describes a baby perilously climbing onto a chandelier. 
 
 "Straightaway I can visualise this grand glass chandelier in some sort of French kind of ballroom, and the little baby just swinging off it and really heavy thick curtains," she says. 
 
 "I think I have a strong imagination, so I can create the world and then keep adding to it so it gets sort of bigger and bigger in my mind and the characters too they sort of evolve. 
 
 "I couldn't really imagine what it's like to not imagine, I think it must be a bit of a shame really." 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption How good is your visual imagination? 
 
 Not many people have mental imagery as vibrant as Lauren or as blank as Niel. They are the two extremes of visualisation. 
 
 Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. 
 
 His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the journal Cortex. 
 
 Prof Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that they find hard to convey to others." 
 
 How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. 
 
 But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury. 
 
 He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people. 
 
 But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to time, it's a variability of human experience." 
 
 If you think you have aphantasia or hyperphantasia and would like to be involved in Prof Zeman's research he is happy to be contacted at a.zeman@exeter.ac.uk ||||| One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind. 
 
 The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read. 
 
 Then these images all vanished. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a “reverberation” in his head and a tingling in his left arm. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness. 
 
 Worried, MX paid a visit to Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England. Zeman was so intrigued by the case that he teamed up with Sergio Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh who specializes in how the brain handles visual information. Neither Zeman nor Della Sala could offer MX a cure for his condition, unfortunately, but they recognized a rare chance to study how the mind’s eye works. Della Sala proposed running a series of exams. MX gave his consent. 
 
 Scientists have long speculated that the act of seeing things in our mind’s eye employs some of the same brain circuits that we use when seeing with our physical eyes. A number of brain scan studies have supported this view. When you look at a person up close, for example, a particular network of brain regions becomes active, including areas that process raw signals from your eyes as well as more sophisticated regions that recognize individual faces. When you close your eyes and conjure up a face, the parts of the brain that receive signals from the eyes are dormant, but the regions that recognize the features defining an individual again light up. 
 
 MX gave Della Sala and Zeman the chance to test two ideas about the role of the mind’s eye in our inner life. Some scientists have argued that the mind’s eye is constantly at work whenever we look at our internal simulations of the world. Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard psychologist, goes so far as to argue that we rely on the mind’s eye to make decisions about what we should do in the future. When we start driving home from a friend’s house, for example, we envision the different routes we can take in order to decide on the best way to go. 
 
 Kosslyn has his critics, though. Zenon Pylyshyn, a cognitive scientist at Rutgers University, doesn’t think mental images are essential to figuring such things out. We all have the experience of picturing things in our heads, of course. If someone asks you how many paws are on a cat, you may see the image of a cat in your mind and count the paws. But the experience of using your mind’s eye doesn’t fully explain the mental processing that goes on beneath the surface. There may be other, more essential computations that lead you to your conclusion. 
 
 To test these competing interpretations, Della Sala and Zeman put MX through a battery of tests. First they wanted to find out whether the problem with his mind’s eye was just one part of a greater disorder. They tested his other faculties, such as his ability to make decisions and form memories. To see just how unusual MX was, the scientists decided to assemble a group of control subjects who were similar to him except for his complaint, so they recruited 10 male architects around the age of 60. 
 
 The tests revealed that MX was, for the most part, pretty much like the other men. He had a high IQ and a reliable memory. He did an excellent job at playing a card-swapping game in which the rules could change unexpectedly. His vision was normal, and he could easily put names to the faces of famous people shown to him. In other words, the vision-processing networks in his brain and his memory systems were in good working order. 
 
 When the scientists tested the mind’s eye of MX, though, the difference was stark. The researchers gave all their subjects a standardized test called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. They asked each participant to picture things like a landscape and a friend. Then the scientists had each man rate the image that came to mind. If it was as vivid as normal vision, he was asked to score it a 5. If there was no mental image at all—if the subject knew only that he was thinking of an object—he was to give it a score of 1. Most of the men scored high on the test. MX scored as low as possible, racking up a bunch of 1s. 
 
 Della Sala and Zeman scanned MX’s brain to see if they could find the source of this deficit. They first showed him a series of faces. MX’s brain responded in much the same way as the architects’ brains did, activating a network of regions that process vision and recognize individuals. Then the scientists showed their test subjects a series of names of famous people. As they read each name, the men were asked to picture that person. In the brains of the control group, the mind’s-eye regions became active, much as before. But in MX’s brain, those regions remained quiet. Even though the individual regions of his brain were working normally, some of the connections seemed to be down. ||||| The Eye's Mind - a study of the neural basis of visual imagination and its role in culture’ is a year-long research project begun in January 2015, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. A conference exploring the project's findings will be held on 21-22 May 2016. More information.
– When science journalist Carl Zimmer wrote a 2010 article in Discover magazine about English neurologist Adam Zeman's case study of a man who couldn't visualize people or things, the professor was approached by 21 people who saw themselves in the article and wanted to learn more. Now Zeman and colleagues at the University of Exeter Medical School are reporting in the journal Cortex that the condition could affect as many as 2.5% of the population. They're calling it "aphantasia," though Zeman insists in an interview with the BBC that it is not a disorder but rather a "variability of human experience" where most of us "spend our lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye, which we inspect from time to time." Says one man of his childhood insomnia: "I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences, there was nothing to count." Others with the condition can't visualize the faces of their friends and family. The newly described condition is something that affects some people from birth, which is different from the experience first described by Zeman in Discover about a patient who lost the ability to visualize after a heart procedure. In patients with congenital aphantasia, Zeman says that a network of regions distributed throughout the brain but implicated in visualization may function differently, not from a traumatic event but from birth. Similarly, people can be born with hyperaphantasia, or the ability to visualize in acute detail. To better understand the neurological underpinnings of this range of visual experiences, Zeman is working on a year-long project—The Eye’s Mind—that involves artist Susan Aldworth, art historian John Onians, and philosopher Fiona Macpherson. (Speaking of visualization, see why Roseanne Barr is going blind.)