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Research tracker

New findings, in plain English.

One post roughly every month. Every entry translates a piece of peer-reviewed research into something a non-specialist can read in five minutes, with the original paper cited and linked.

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  1. 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.

    Source: Zeman, A. (2025), A decade of aphantasia research – and still going!, Neuropsychologia.

  2. Aphantasia as a functional disconnection

    A 2025 review proposes the most coherent theory yet of what is happening in an aphantasic brain: the imagery machinery is physically intact, but the parts of the brain that would normally call on it are failing to do so.

    Source: Liu, J. & Bartolomeo, P. (2025), Aphantasia as a functional disconnection, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

  3. How SDAM got its name

    Before 2015 there was no term for the experience of remembering your life as a set of facts you cannot step back into. Palombo and colleagues at the Rotman in Toronto described three adults who had always lived this way, showed the pattern was real and measurable, and gave it a name — Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory.

    Source: Palombo, D. J., Alain, C., Söderlund, H., Khuu, W. & Levine, B. (2015), Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) in healthy adults: A new mnemonic syndrome, Neuropsychologia.

  4. What aphantasic drawings tell us about the mind

    When asked to draw a scene from memory, people with aphantasia keep the rooms, the doorways, and the rough geometry — but drop most of the surface detail. A 2021 study showed this, and in doing so showed that aphantasia is not a memory deficit at all.

    Source: Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A. F. & Baker, C. I. (2021), Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory, Cortex.