Aphantasia and "The Sixth Sense"

Who sees dead people?

I was in graduate school when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999). The film’s famous line, “I see dead people,” quickly became an in-joke for history and literature PhD students trying to explain to academic outsiders what it was like to be immersed in the past. The line has resonated with my work, excavating long buried lives of enslaved African Americans, righting the historical record if not the brutal wrongs of an earlier era.

I’ve found myself returning to The Sixth Sense while reading the explosion of new research on aphantasia, the absence of visual mental imagery, and hyperphantasia, an overwhelmingly vivid mental imagination, as studies are continuing to upend assumptions about what is “normal” for human visual imagination.¹

Groundbreaking work by Adam Zeman and others suggest that approximately 0.7% of people have aphantasia, with a range of little to no ability to produce visual mental images. I suspect this percentage will grow, as people learn about visualization differences. Those of us who have it — and I have no ability to call up images at all — process information without the visualization that others take for granted. While I can recall visual details (like the design of the Chrysler building or my daughter’s face), I do not “see” these details mentally.

A larger percentage — perhaps as many as 4% — of the population has hyperphantasia, having a vivid visual imagination “as vivid as real seeing.” (Here is where I kept thinking about Cole Sear, played by young Haley Joel Osment, as having a kind of hyperphantasia, though this wasn’t the point of the film.)

Few people inside or outside of academia ask themselves how this cognitive variation plays out in everyday interactions, whether the people around you have a different inner experience of a subject you are discussing. Maybe some of my Princeton colleagues did see dead people. Nobody understood, before a decade ago, about the wide variation in internal visual processing. Many still don’t know.

The scores of emails I’ve received since writing about my own aphantasia have been about how moving and profound a newfound understanding of one’s own brain can be and how being a part of a community who also cannot “see” with their minds matters deeply. I’ve heard from a few readers with hyperphantasia who revel in their inner images but sometimes wish they could get disturbing pictures out of their heads. Research showing that those with hyperphantasia score higher on “openness” than those of us with aphantasia rings true.

In this politically fraught moment about the future of DEI — however defined — we should keep in mind the cognitive variation among people who may look alike or share a culture. It may be that some of the most blinkered ways we exclude people in American life have to do with inner differences, not outer.

It is time for our broader cultural discourse to talk about difference differently, perhaps starting with the wide variations in fear, memory, and imagination in response to disturbing images. What do we assume to be normal responses? How do people with aphantasia and hyperphantasia react differently to troubling images on social media or the news? What are the implications for politics, protest, and social response?

The Invisible Cognitive Divide

New studies have shown that for those with vivid mental imagery, even limited exposure to traumatic images can create internal representations that persist and become more elaborate over time:

One proposed function of imagery is to make thoughts more emotionally evocative through sensory simulation, which can be helpful both in planning for future events and in remembering the past, but also a hindrance when thoughts become overwhelming

A single image may generate a template that reproduces itself independently, maintaining the emotional impact of trauma even when the external stimulus disappears. A photo of a bombing victim or a dismembered fetus or a starving child maintains a persisting psychological presence for those with above normal visualization up to hyperphantasia. For those with less vivid mental imagery, disturbing images are absorbed mentally but may not generate immediate emotional urgency. Some people see dead people; others don’t.

Understanding the power of images to generate corresponding internal representations drove the shift from textual to visual propaganda in the 20th century. There is a great deal of scholarship and public writing on the work that images of atrocities do in provoking attitudes and behavior, but none of this work takes differences of visual processing into account. Michael Hameleers’s “The visual nature of information warfare” (2024) on images of Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, for example, examines how decontextualized visual images construct a “delusional rationality” to shape public opinion and legitimate violence, without consideration of the viewer’s mental processing. Lior Zylberman & Vincente Sánchez-Biosca’s “Reflections on the Significance of Images in Genocide Studies” (2018) examines the conditions of image production (perpetrator, liberator, or witness perspectives) and image circulation, but likewise doesn’t address cognitive diversity in mental imagery. These are just two examples of many.

L. Michael Hagen’s 2024 Counterpunch essay, “Some Reflections on Campus Protests,” seems to assume everyone responds to visual atrocities the same way:

The ongoing pro-Palestinian protests at American universities are more than just youthful expressions of speech freedom. Rather they exemplify the informed views of students repulsed by the genocide in Gaza, which they see every day on television and in the social media.

The assumption is: you see, you are repulsed, you act. Any other response is abnormal. Yet clearly, the effectiveness of visual imagery should depend on the viewer’s cognitive architecture. Seeing atrocities will not “naturally” generate corresponding internal imagery that persists and motivates action in the same way for all people. Not acknowledging these differences is a significant gap in the scholarship and in our cultural discourse.

Differences in mental visual processes may be at the root of so many current misunderstandings about each other.

The variation in how individuals process traumatic imagery may offer a novel lens for understanding protest participation, whether war, or climate, or abortion. While Zeman’s research indicates that approximately 3-4% of the population experiences hyperphantasia — with women potentially overrepresented in this group — little broader attention has been paid to how this trait affects responses to visual evidence of suffering and how we should appreciate this socially. For hyperphantasic individuals, disturbing images would generate internal representations with extreme vividness, potentially creating an emotional urgency that non-hyperphantasic individuals might not experience to the same degree. The documented physiological differences in emotional processing—such as heightened galvanic skin responses to frightening narratives—suggest testable hypotheses. Political activists and protesters might have higher rates of hyperphantasia than the general population. Future research could incorporate simple visual imagery assessments (like the VVIQ) into studies of protest movements, potentially showing how differences in mental imagery contribute to the mobilization process.

Understanding this cognitive dimension could bridge gaps between those who view the same imagery but reach dramatically different thresholds for action.

The Visual Standard

When some group of people are energetically taking to the streets, it’s common for those not protesting to be accused of moral indifference. Yet those of us with less vibrant or no visualization capacity do comprehend the facts about an atrocity, even if we have an attenuated visual-memory relationship to those facts.

Those with aphantasia may misinterpret the intense responses of someone with hyperphantasia as performative or disproportionate. Without a persistent internal visual component, emotional impact follows a different trajectory.

My earliest memories of the Vietnam war are sitting in the back seat the car on the way to elementary school passing convoys of young men sitting in the back of M35s, coming from the nearby base. On the car radio coming home there were reports of the day’s casualties. I recall once a teacher saying something like, “oh those poor boys going off to be killed — in my mind I see them dead already!” Her words stuck in my mind, not as an image but as words. I cannot picture the young men I saw, except that once I locked eyes with one, as our car drove past. I don’t remember anything more, except that it happened.

Even now, I am not recalling images but phenomena that exist in my auditory memory and attached to what I’ve learned since about the base, the war, the campus protests, a hundred news reports and gruesome documentaries, stories of PTSD, and the fact that the truck must have been an M35. I do not feel disabled by not being able to picture any of it. I am sure I remember the teacher’s remark because it seemed such an odd thing to say. It does not seem odd to me now. She saw dead people; I did not.

For six years, back in the 1990s, I consulted on health care policy for Planned Parenthood and sometimes daily saw protesters holding up signs with the most gruesome images of fetuses imaginable, even if I cannot visually recall them. I know I saw them; I could describe them with words. I never doubted the passion of the protesters who stood on sidewalks for days and weeks on end, even if I disagreed with them. As I have watched on the news the many images and videos of campus protests and counter-protests in the months since October 7, 2023, I have never doubted the passion that drives the actions on either side. The pictures — and I have seen them — are heart-rending.

Too few of our conversations are about the processing of visual imagery and what it means if you are one of those people who see dead people and if you see them with shocking vividness, in ways you can’t control.

Cultural and Institutional Assumptions

Now that I understand my own aphantasia, I am more attuned to how those with “working” mental imagery see it as normal, as a universal cognitive capacity that we know now is not at all universal. So many popular writers describe “seeing” terrifying scenarios unfold in their “mind’s eye,” presupposing that inner imagery is the human default.

When you search online for articles using the phrase “in my mind’s eye” what will come up are pieces about fears: picturing bodily harm, envisioning violent scenarios, seeing threats to loved ones. Brigid Delaney’s 2018 account of vividly imagining her accidental death is a perfect example:

Each time I looked down I saw my death as clearly as if it was a replay of a sporting event. High definition, the important bits in slow motion, parts of it captured overhead by a drone. There I was rolling down the escarpment, falling with the motorbike, tumbling through the sky until my broken body snagged on a tree, before falling again, then landing in a dense bit of forest.

Here’s Walter Kirn’s 2015 story of government paranoia:

Memories of the monolithic data center faded and dispersed, supplanted by visions of organ-stealing supermen that would reappear in my mind’s eye when I read, many months later, of an ambitious Italian surgeon intent on perfecting “full body” transplants involving grafting human heads onto bodies other than their own.

Here’s Tim Kreider’s 2012 piece on bicycling:

The fear gets released later on, while I’m falling asleep and near-misses replay themselves in my mind’s eye like an endless computer game fraught with constant hazards, in which I’m a disembodied Steadicam hurtling through busy city streets at the same speed something falls, pedestrians appearing out of nowhere, the broad flat fronts of busses expanding with terrifying suddenness in my peripheral vision.

Here's Katie Arnold’s 2019 story of overcoming fear:

She gave us a scenario: envision our absolute worst fear, then close our eyes and imagine it happening. I’d done this so many times already that the image came easily. Losing one of the girls—this was the absolute worst thing. As I sat there with my skis swinging above the powdery slopes, I pictured unthinkable loss. I felt it. My eyes stung, and I started to cry.

The combination of a vivid mind’s eye and a way with words is ideal for magazine writing. It would be clunky for any of these writers to stop and say, “because I have this capacity for visualization I was able to…” and continue with the description. Who wants that? The pieces are interesting, even to me, perhaps especially to me.

Yet it still bears saying that we have a blind spot in our collective understanding of how humans experience and respond to visual atrocities and threatening stimuli. In a recent New Yorker piece on AI technology, Joshua Rothman talks about the “mind’s eye” in relation to AI:

Sora performs its work not just by manipulating pixels but by conceptualizing three-dimensional scenes that unfold in time. Our own heads probably do something similar; when we picture scenes and places in our mind’s eye, we’re imagining not just how they look but what they are.

Actually, no. There’s a wide variation in our ability to do this, though another recent study suggested those of us with aphantasia may be more accurate at mental shape rotation, we just do it differently, and a little slower.

So many cultural narratives, therapeutic practices, and educational methodologies assume the universality of visual thinking. Yoga and meditation leaders ask students to “picture a peaceful scene.” Creative writing teachers advise “visualizing your character in detail.” Trauma counselling often involves “reimagining the traumatic scene with a different outcome.” These approaches reinforce the notion that visual imagination represents the default human cognitive experience.

Now that I have a fuller understanding of aphantasia and hyperphantasia, If I hear someone saying, “I can’t get the images out of their head,” I believe them. I recognize their statement as a true and literal description of their experience. I have also learned something about their cognitive processing and their differences from my own. Previously, I might have interpreted that person’s words as metaphorical, for particular emphasis. For my whole life, until a few years ago, it never occurred to me that there were people who could actually picture things, that I was in the tiny minority — a minority that seems to be growing every day.

How do we encourage people not to universalize their own visualization experience? I confess that my aphantasia has kept me at a distance when people are highly emotional about remembered images. I did not grasp how genuinely distressing persistent mental imagery can be. How do we convince those with hyperphantasia not to assume everyone else experiences overwhelming, intrusive, and persistent images? Neither group recognizes they’re experiencing fundamentally different relationships to identical information. Neither yet recognizes each other.

If there is a helpful aspect to the current attention to defining DEI it is that a fuller conversation is needed to recognize and validate more diverse forms of human diversity — including those related to cognitive and experiential differences.

Neurodiversity advocates have long waved from the sidelines asking where they best fit, under DEI or ADA? Not all neurodiversities are disabilities! Some are superpowers, though perhaps not for poor Cole Sear and his reluctant sixth sense.

Cognitive Architectures: More Than Visual Processing

Recognizing visualization diversity should matter for so many creative fields. Writers, artists, musicians, and other creators likely have vast differences in their internal representational processes, yet discussions usually default to visualization-centered language. “I saw it in my mind before creating it” is normalized as the standard creative process.

I think about so many times in a creative writing or critical thinking classroom I brought up terrible scenarios, like a trolley problem, without it ever occurring to me that describing a group of people tied to the tracks about to be run over might be visualized by students. The research suggests that the human ability to visualize mentally allows us to think through scenarios in our mind is likely an adaptive trait. Is it better for percentage of the population not to have the ability to visualize, so they can weigh costs and benefits of an action without emotional distress? More research is needed.

Meanwhile we should recognize that visual thinking strategies dominate too many pedagogical approaches, from the use of visualization in mathematics to imagery-based memory techniques. The recognition of aphantasia, hyperphantasia, and other variations in mental imagery offers a real opportunity to reconsider how we understand the human experience more broadly. The differences in how we process visual information internally shape every aspect of our lives, from how we experience emotions and memories to how we approach problem-solving and creativity.

While we have developed frameworks (such as DEI) for certain differences, visualization differences go unacknowledged because they can’t be observed. What would happen if we took this moment to expand our concept of diversity to include less visible cognitive architectures? Doing so might help in recognizing that apparent moral or political differences may reflect different cognitive processes rather than different values.

Most importantly, acknowledging the profound diversity in how humans construct their inner experience of reality might foster greater mutual understanding. When we recognize that our own cognitive architecture is just one possibility among many, rather than the default human experience, we open ourselves to better appreciating human consciousness in all its varied forms.

Further reading

Milton, F., Fulford, J., Dance, C., Gaddum, J., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., Knight, K. F., MacKisack, M., Winlove, C., & Zeman, A. (2021). “Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes: Aphantasia versus Hyperphantasia.” Cerebral Cortex Communications, 2(2), 1-15. doi: 10.1093/texcom/tgab035

Fleckenstein, K. S., Gage, S., & Bridgman, K. (2017). “A Pedagogy of Rhetorical Looking: Atrocity Images at the Intersection of Vision and Violence.” College English, 80(1), 11-34.

Hameleers, M. (2024). “The visual nature of information warfare: the construction of partisan claims on truth and evidence in the context of wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.” Journal of Communication, 00, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae045

Kay, Lachlan, Rebecca Keogh, and Joel Pearson. “Slower but more accurate mental rotation performance in aphantasia linked to differences in cognitive strategies.” Consciousness and Cognition 121 (2024): 103694. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2024.103694

Lennon, Preston. “Aphantasia and Conscious Thought.” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, vol. 3, edited by Uriah Kriegel, 1-27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Lawrence, Mark. “I Have No Mind's Eye: What Is It Like Being an Author with Aphantasia?” The Guardian, April 1, 2020. \

Wicken, M., Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. “The Critical Role of Mental Imagery in Human Emotion: Insights from Fear-Based Imagery and Aphantasia.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 288, no. 1947 (2021): 20210267. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267

Zeman, A. (2024). “Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(5), 467-480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.02.007

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. “Lives Without Imagery – Congenital Aphantasia.” Cortex 73 (2015): 378-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019

Zylberman, L., & Sánchez-Biosca, V. “Reflections on the Significance of Images in Genocide Studies: Some Methodological Considerations.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 12, no. 2 (2018): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.12.2.1620

1. In Wicken, Keogh, and Pearson's 2021 study on aphantasia and emotional responses, the researchers discovered that “aphantasic individuals’ lack of a physiological response when imaging scenarios is likely to be driven by their inability to visualize and is not due to a general emotional or physiological dampening.” The authors proposed that “imagery is to make thoughts more emotionally evocative through sensory simulation,” serving as an “emotional amplifier of thought” — a function with both benefits and drawbacks. Their evidence suggests that “in the absence of imagery, the impact of emotive language is reduced because imagery typically mediates between verbal description and emotional response.” This finding has significant implications for mental health, as the researchers speculate that "muted emotionality...might engender resilience to the range of conditions known to involve imagery, including depression, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, PTSD, addiction, schizophrenia and even the hallucinatory symptoms of Parkinson's disease.”

Lennon's forthcoming work on aphantasia and conscious thought makes a philosophical argument that aphantasia “provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint” on conscious thought, the view that conscious thoughts must be reducible to sensory experience. Through examining the literature on aphantasia, Lennon concludes that “aphantasic subjects sometimes have thoughts without a sensory reduction base, and yet their thoughts are phenomenally conscious,” which “supports anti-reductionism” in theories of consciousness. Interestingly, Lennon proposes that the longstanding philosophical disagreement about cognitive phenomenology might have a surprising explanation: “opponents of cognitive phenomenology have particularly vivid and ubiquitous sensory phenomenology,” while “proponents of cognitive phenomenology tend to think in imagery less than their opponents,” making the non-sensory aspects of thought more salient to them.

Zeman’s 2024 review of imagery vividness extremes notes that “around 1% and 3% of the population experience extreme aphantasia and hyperphantasia, respectively,” with aphantasia often running “in families” and affecting “imagery across several sense modalities.” Gender differences appear in these conditions, as “women may be more prone to hyperphantasia.” Zeman also highlights a connection between hyperphantasia and synaesthesia, noting that “questionnaire data suggest an increased rate of synaesthesia among people with hyperphantasia.” Despite these profound differences in subjective experience, Zeman concludes that "the effects on everyday functioning are subtle," and importantly, “lack of imagery does not imply lack of imagination” — as evidenced by “creative achievements among people with aphantasia.”

Dawes and colleagues’ 2020 cognitive profile of aphantasia reveals that aphantasic individuals “report comparatively reduced imagery, on average, in all other sensory modalities” beyond just visual imagery, though only “26.22% of aphantasic participants reported a complete lack of multi-sensory imagery altogether.” Their work also demonstrated that aphantasics report “less vivid and phenomenologically rich autobiographical memories and imagined future scenarios, suggesting a constructive role for visual imagery in representing episodic events.” Regarding trauma response, while the researchers “did not directly support the hypothesis that visual imagery absence might protect aphantasic individuals from trauma symptomology,” they did observe that aphantasics "reported fewer recurrent and involuntary memory intrusions” and “lower engagement in avoidance behaviours.” Perhaps most striking was their finding that cognitive differences in aphantasia extended to involuntary imagery processes, with aphantasics reporting “significantly less frequent and less vivid instances of spontaneous imagery such as night dreams,” suggesting that “any cognitive function involving a sensory visual component is likely to be reduced in aphantasic individuals.”

Fulford et al explore the relationship between imagery vividness extremes and emotional processing, with visual imagery exerting “a potent influence on emotions” across various cognitive functions including autobiographical recall and future thinking. Studies comparing individuals with aphantasia (extremely low imagery vividness) and hyperphantasia (extremely high imagery vividness) reveal distinct patterns in emotional processing and personality traits. People with aphantasia demonstrate “a reduced galvanic skin response to visually evocative narratives with a strong emotional impact,” score “significantly lower” on extraversion measures, and show elevated levels of autistic spectrum traits and introversion. In contrast, those with hyperphantasia score significantly higher on “Openness to Experience,” a trait reflecting “an openness to new experiences, broad interests, and an active imagination, and a likelihood of experiencing both positive and negative emotions more keenly than most people,” which researchers note is “an intuitively plausible personality correlate for high levels of imagery vividness.” The research finds these differences extend to autobiographical memory, with aphantasia being “associated with relatively impoverished autobiographical memory” while hyperphantasia is “associated with enriched autobiographical memory.” Though specific mechanisms require further exploration—as researchers acknowledge that “imagery extremes are likely to have affective associations” and represent “a fruitful area for further research”—the findings already suggest vast differences in how individuals at opposite ends of the imagery vividness spectrum process and respond to emotional stimuli.