Skip to main content

← Research tracker

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.

Published
Source paper
Zeman, A. (2025). A decade of aphantasia research – and still going!. Neuropsychologia. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109278

Every field needs a tenth-anniversary paper, written by somebody old enough in it to have watched the thing grow and careful enough to say honestly which bits are solid. For aphantasia, that paper is Adam Zeman’s 2025 decade review in Neuropsychologia. Zeman is the Exeter neurologist who, with Michaela Dewar and Sergio Della Sala, coined the word aphantasia in 2015 after a patient — now widely known as “MX” — described losing his ability to visualise after a minor heart procedure. The word landed, the public response was unlike anything the group had prepared for, and a decade later the field is recognisable as a field.

The story so far

The 2015 paper was short, case-focused, and cautious. It proposed aphantasia as a working label for a lifelong (or in MX’s case, acquired) inability to form voluntary mental imagery. What happened next was not expected: tens of thousands of people wrote in to say they recognised themselves in the description. A decade on, the review takes stock of what that surge of interest — and the research that followed it — has produced.

The short version: aphantasia is real, it is more common than initially suspected, prevalence estimates cluster between roughly 1% and 5% of the population depending on where the cut-off is drawn on the VVIQ, and it sits at one end of a spectrum with hyperphantasia (unusually vivid imagery) at the other. It is not a disorder. It does not need a treatment. It is a labelled variation in how human minds work, and giving it a label has mattered to the people who live with it.

What the decade has made solid

  • The phenomenon is not just self-report. Pupillary light responses to imagined bright scenes are weaker in aphantasics than in typical imagers (Kay et al., 2022). Skin-conductance responses to imagined frightening scenarios are also weaker (Wicken et al., 2021). When the imagination is tested at the level of the autonomic nervous system, the difference shows.
  • Spatial cognition is usually intact. This was suggested by mental-rotation work and confirmed by the Bainbridge 2021 drawing study. People with aphantasia navigate cities, reason about layouts, and pass spatial-memory tasks at typical-imager rates. The visual-detail layer is thinner; the spatial layer is not.
  • The visual cortex is structurally normal. The difference is not in the presence of imagery hardware but in the way that hardware is recruited — the finding that prompted the functional-disconnection framework Liu and Bartolomeo proposed in the same year as this review.
  • Autobiographical memory is often, but not always, affected. The overlap with SDAM is real but partial. Many aphantasics remember their own lives vividly in non-visual ways; many people with SDAM are typical visual imagers. The two conditions cluster together in the data without collapsing into one.

What the decade has not settled

  • Cause. Developmental, genetic, environmental contributions are all plausible and all under-evidenced. The honest answer is still “we do not know why”.
  • Subtypes. Aphantasia is heterogeneous — some people report no visual imagery but vivid dreams, some have partial or fleeting imagery, some are aphantasic in the visual modality but not in hearing or smell. Whether these are distinct conditions or points on one landscape is unresolved.
  • Mechanism at the circuit level. The disconnection framework is the best current hypothesis but it is a framework, not a mechanism. The specific patterns of connectivity, their developmental origin, and whether they can be modulated are all open.
  • Intervention. No training has been shown to reliably produce imagery in people who lack it. The commercial programmes that claim otherwise are not supported by evidence. The decade has, if anything, made that conclusion firmer.

The review is also, practically, the paper to hand to a curious GP. It is short, non-technical for a medical reader, and written by the person who coined the term. The clinician briefing on this site points at the same paper for the same reason: if a clinician wants one entry point into ten years of aphantasia literature, this is it.