Only recently has this last response acquired a name. Aphantasia designates the inability, or near-inability, to form voluntary visual mental imagery. Its opposite, hyperphantasia, names imagery so vivid it can rival perception. Together they have opened a new empirical field, prompting questions about memory, creativity, emotion, and consciousness itself.
But the deeper significance of aphantasia does not lie where it is usually sought. Its importance is not that some people lack a mental faculty others possess. Rather, it lies in what the phenomenon quietly exposes: the myth of the mind’s eye.
The mind’s eye as a theoretical artefact
The language surrounding aphantasia is strikingly uniform. We are told that some people cannot see in their minds; that they lack access to mental images; that an inner faculty is missing or impaired. Even when care is taken to avoid pathologising, the framing remains unchanged: there exists a mental image, and some minds cannot produce it.
This framing depends on a powerful but rarely questioned assumption — that imagining consists in inspecting inner representations, as though perception were simply relocated behind the eyes. The “mind’s eye” appears so intuitive that it passes unnoticed as a metaphor, becoming instead an implicit ontology.
Yet this is precisely what aphantasia destabilises. For if there truly were a universal inner screen, the absence of imagery would be unintelligible except as defect. And yet people with aphantasia reason, remember, create, and feel with no evident loss of cognitive life. What fails is not the mind, but the theory.
Imagining as construal, not inspection
From a relational perspective, there is no pre-existing inner image waiting to be accessed. There is only construed experience: first-order meaning actualised in a particular configuration of relations.
To “imagine an apple” is not to retrieve a picture stored somewhere inside the head. It is to engage in a culturally and linguistically organised activity — one that invites certain kinds of experience to be actualised. For some, this construal recruits vivid visual phenomenality. For others, it recruits spatial relations, propositional structure, linguistic description, affective tone, or motor anticipation — with little or no visual component.
Nothing is missing. The system simply actualises a different cut through its available potential.
On this view, imagery is not a faculty but a mode of construal. It is one way — among others — in which experience can take form under particular prompts. Aphantasia names not the absence of imagination, but the absence of one specific phenomenological outcome under one specific framing of a task.
Difference without deficit
This reframing dissolves much of the puzzle surrounding aphantasia’s reported correlations with memory and emotion. Autobiographical recollection, for example, often differs between those with vivid imagery and those without. But memory here is not the replay of stored content; it is the re-construal of past experience. Different construal regimes re-actualise different kinds of meaning.
What looks like diminished vividness is simply a different organisation of phenomenality. The past is present again, but not as a picture.
The same holds for creativity. If creativity is tacitly equated with imagery, then aphantasia appears paradoxical. But once imagery is understood as contingent rather than essential, the paradox disappears. Creativity does not depend on pictures in the head; it depends on the capacity to actualise new relations of meaning — something humans do in many ways.
Hyperphantasia and the temptation of privilege
The opposite pole, hyperphantasia, is often treated as evidence of “more imagination”, as though vivid imagery were a privileged access to mental reality. But from a relational standpoint, it is no more fundamental than aphantasia. It reflects a stronger coupling between certain construals and sensory-like phenomenality, not a closer approach to truth.
There is no baseline phenomenology from which others deviate. There are only different ways experience becomes what it is.
What aphantasia really shows us
Seen this way, aphantasia is not primarily a discovery about imagery. It is a discovery about the danger of universalising one’s own phenomenality and mistaking it for the structure of mind itself.
The real lesson is this:
phenomena are not given; they are actualised.And what is actualised depends on how a system is situated, prompted, and construed.
Once this is recognised, the “mind’s eye” returns to where it belongs — as a metaphor, not a mechanism. And imagination reappears, not as an inner theatre, but as a field of possible experience whose forms are far more varied than we once assumed.
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