Not everyone can picture their past. Some of us can’t relive it at all.
A space for people with aphantasia and SDAM — and for the people trying to understand them.
Choose your entry point
Newly diagnosed
You know the name for it now. What tends to come next, in roughly this order.
Think you might have it?
A short, honest self-check. Links to the validated tools. No diagnosis — no performance.
Family & partners
What this is, what it is not, and how to be useful without being strange about it.
UK clinicians & educators
A five-minute briefing: what to know, what to say, when (if ever) to worry.
Therapists & counsellors
Where standard imagery-based techniques fail aphantasic and SDAM clients, and what tends to work in their place.
From the founder — lived experience
I built this because I felt alone working out what was different about my own mind, and I didn’t want other people to. More on the about page.
Recent from the research tracker
All posts →New peer-reviewed findings, translated into plain English. Monthly.
What aphantasia does to therapy, in numbers
A 2024 mixed-methods study from a UK research group is the first to systematically document what aphantasic patients actually report about mental healthcare: imagery-shaped diagnostic criteria miss them, imagery-based therapy techniques fail them, and trauma-focused work succeeds or fails on whether the practitioner has the curiosity to adapt.
Putting a number on the silent mind
A 2024 paper in Psychological Science gives the lack of inner speech a name — anendophasia — and reports the first careful behavioural evidence that adults with low inner speech perform measurably worse on certain verbal tasks, while being indistinguishable from typical-inner-speech adults on others.
Ten years on, from the man who named it
Adam Zeman — the Exeter neurologist who put the word "aphantasia" on the map in 2015 — takes stock of a decade of research. A short, readable review from the person most responsible for the field existing at all.
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