Vision Without Seeing (Part II)

and, did Ronald Reagan have aphantasia?

In the ten years since Adam Zeman first formally identified and named aphantasia, the inability to call up visual images, there has been a surge of new scholarship about what happens inside our heads when we imagine. It turns out we all imagine in very different ways from one another, some of us with a vividness that exceeds “real” life and some with no visual images at all.

The more the world understands about the role of imagination in human flourishing, the more constructive future conversations can be about the differences in how our fellow human beings see and understand the world. The greatest accomplishment of Adam Zeman’s new book, The Shape of Things Unseen: a New Science of Imagination, is guiding us toward a shared understanding of the imaginative system, and a shared vocabulary for talking about variation in visual and non-visual imagination. Grappling with how these differences should be appreciated is the next step.

Part I of my review offered an overview of Zeman’s central argument that the imagination is the core operating principle of our brain. For Zeman, the brain is a “phantastic organ” that generates predictions about the world and creates models of reality. In Part II, I consider more specifically the implications of not having a visual imagination, of great interest to me (and others who have aphantasia) but only a small part of Zeman’s book. How do we create models of the world and generate predictions differently than others? What role does language play?

About 3-5% of the population are estimated to have aphantasia (I suspect it may be higher) and another 5% have hyperphantasia. There are vast variations inside our heads. I resonated with those Zeman described as experiencing an “amazing click of realization,” “the sense of revelation,” “a feeling of resolution, a puzzle finally solved.” For me, learning about aphantasia was a relief. So many things fell into place. I’d always felt a sense of difference I couldn’t quite put a finger on, about the way I struggled to follow driving directions, the way others talked about favorite places, about the way others have always said I am very “present” in a room. Zeman cites a study claiming normal people spend up to half their waking hours daydreaming or with wandering minds (10). This is not my reality.

I now understand more clearly that other people can produce and “see” vivid images in their “mind’s eye.” Other people can call up these images to remember something, to explain how to get there, to describe what things look like. They can imagine themselves somewhere else. I cannot do any of these things.¹

In return, I am hopeful that those with “normal” cognitive abilities in this regard would likewise understand better those of us with aphantasia. I don’t feel my condition as a lack. In fact, it may be that I have more brain storage capacity because I don’t have an image library, which, as a phone battery tells you, takes a lot of energy.

In making his claim for the centrality of imagination Zeman spends most of his time on people with “normal” visual imagination, describing how mind-wandering occupies nearly half of people’s waking hours. He quotes the visionary poet William Blake on the universality of visions of fancy. As a literary scholar, I considered “fancy” to be a metaphor. I dismissed Blake’s claim that “all things exist in the human imagination.” I see now that he was speaking from his own reality. But these poets were mistaken too, assuming that the ability to conjure up images in one’s mind is the default mode of human cognition.

Zeman tells the story of Natan Sharansky teaching himself to play blindfolded chess in his teens, in the 1950s. He drew on this skill and habit when thrown into a Soviet prison in 1978, spending long hours in solitary. He apparently played thousands of games by himself and “won them all.” (270). The argument seems to be that visual imaginative ability is like a muscle: people work out with it to keep it strong.

I played chess as a middle schooler and had been winning school competitions. But I hit a hard wall in high school. I tried to play games in my head, like the chess books and my older teammates recommended. I wrongly thought I was simply not smart enough, and I gave up playing, except for fun. Ideally Zeman might have given space here, not just at the end of his book, to exploring how those with aphantasia approach what he calls simply mental exercises, as my experience was quite different.

The imaginative claims

For those who haven’t read Part I, Zeman’s description of the brain as an imaginative predictive system is central to his argument:

The brain is locked away in a dark and silent place, within our skulls. Its task is to make sense of the signals that reach it from the exterior, and to put them to use in satisfying the needs of the body that contains it. brain has some inherited expectations of what it will find in the world and the body; otherwise it has to rely on detecting repeated patterns of stimulation that mean, near the start of our lives, such things as – sunshine, Mama, hunger, milk. This process of ‘making sense’ is an active one, in keeping with its end goal of effective action. The brain is constantly guiding explorations, testing hypotheses about what lies beyond it. Over time it develops internal models of the structure and behaviour of the world, and of the body, it inhabits. These models are ‘generative’ in the sense that they generate predictions which form the basis for our experience. Every time we embark on a new adventure – from learning to crawl to writing a book – our brains bring to bear a mass of relevant expectations to form predictions about what will happen and what we should do next – with a willingness to update them if things turn out otherwise than predicted. The aim is to optimise the inner model, so that it guides us more efficiently next time – to minimise surprise (247)

Do read the whole book. Zeman argues that imagination is a learned, social, and controllable neurological tool, not just fantasy space. A working imaginative system can be precisely directed, separating the act of imagination from physical movement. For me, this analysis is particularly crucial. It confirms that my non-visual imagination was also built through social learning, a process of absorbing conceptual and linguistic models from others. More importantly, it shows that those of us with aphantasia possess the same capacity for willful imaginative control as everyone else: the command system is intact, even if the internal display screen is off. I am hoping that this is where interesting studies are now being done.

Zeman argues that chemically induced hallucinations act on the 5HT2a serotonin receptor, disrupting the brain’s normal hierarchical networks and creating a “hyperplastic state” of increased connectivity. Hofmann on LSD saw an “intense kaleidoscopic play of colors;” Huxley, on mescaline, saw shining flowers. Even with my total aphantasia, psychedelics allowed me to experience profound and world-changing visual imagery. I did not know I had aphantasia during my first experience, about which I could not stop talking for months. Now, in retrospect, it is impossible to piece apart the therapeutic effects (which were significant and lasting) of that journey from the sheer enjoyment of seeing beautiful things with my eyes closed. Again, here is a place for more research.

Aphantasia and language

Those of us with aphantasia do have an imagination, of course, but what that means needs new language and understanding. I have come to understand that I “imagine” in language. Language is how I model the world; language is my predictive system. Language was – is – how I see with my eyes closed. I study the most “predictable” poetic form, sonnets.

I wrote in Part I that I understood that making the case for imagination as a predictive organ required Zeman to tell stories of the failures of the visuo-sensory system, which then frames his discussion of healthy cognitive difference as a kind of disadvantage. The result is a book that looks at aphantasia from the outside in, from the perspective of a world that can see. Fortunately, the field is flourishing in new ways, with studies looking at aphantasia from multiple perspectives and new methodologies.

Some of the most interesting research (for me) focuses on the way humans communicate what is in their heads through language, and whether language therefore can give us a clue to the capacity for visual imagination in others, living or dead. There is early work on aphantasia and understanding poetry, for example. A 2022 study on aphantasia and poetry concludes “People who suffer from aphantasia are characterized by a high level of mental processing ability,” which I appreciated, if I don’t think of myself as “suffering” from aphantasia.²

Mélissa Fox-Muraton, who also has aphantasia, pushes back against the “lack” language, draws on Wittgenstein to wonder if the “problem” of understanding the nature of visual mental imagery is a grammatical problem, a conformity of language use, a bleeding of the concepts of “inner” and “mental,” and a certain incredulity that imaginative capacities are so variable. “A person who claims to have no mental representations, to never see anything in the mind’s eye, may very well be able to recognize his friend on the street, offer a description of him or even produce a recognizable drawing,” she argues, then concludes with Wittgenstein: “We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike” (Philosophical Investigations).³

The question of metaphor and mental imagery is an old question, as Stefana Garello notes, pondering what role mental imagery plays in understanding, whether mental imagination is even necessary for understanding metaphor, for grasping the difference between the literal and the figural. Garello calls for more research on the role of mental imagery in understanding metaphor because it “seems to be activated” in novel metaphors.⁴

Presidential rhetoric

Now to my provocative subtitle. I recently heard an anecdote about a person who asked Ronald Reagan, in the course of a procedure, while he was president, to “close your eyes and think of a pleasant scene,” to which Reagan replied, “But how can I imagine anything if I close my eyes?” I have good reason to believe this story is true.

Would it matter? Only if the work of communicating vision depended on inner vision. Did “the great communicator” have a working “mind’s eye”?

Searching “mind’s eye” or “I picture” on the Ronald Reagan presidential library website yields only one line, “In our mind’s eye, we see young Americans,” from a short speech (undoubtedly written by someone else) at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on November 11, 1988, toward the end of Reagan’s term.

Searching “mind’s eye” on the American Presidency Project website offers a fascinating glimpse of how other presidents have used the term. You see Woodrow Wilson’s “I have in my mind’s eye a future…” Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “I see in my mind’s eye the same road” and other examples. Richard Nixon used it: “I was trying in my mind’s eye to think of that evening.” Searching phrases such as “I picture in my mind” offers other glimpses. The only time Reagan seems to have used the term is reading a letter by a mother about her son. Searching the term “visualize” offers a more robust list of presidential remarks. FDR’s and Bill Clinton’s stand out as most evocative. Reagan’s are rhetorical and, like this one, joking: “When I talk about reforming the tax shelter—or system, I should say, I can visualize a beautiful swan. All the special interests see is an ugly duckling” [Laughter]. Nobody is supposed to actually “see” a swan.

In general, Reagan’s most memorable quotes are a matter of wordplay, not phrases that evoke visual images, even the “shining city on a hill” phrase, which of course was not Reagan’s, though he added the “shining.”

In reading through presidential speeches, what struck me most was the way that so many draw on the same contrastive construction I recently critiqued AI for: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem” (Reagan Inaugural Address, 1981). “It’s not x, but y!”

All of this brings me back to Zeman, his use of poetry to build his case, and the fundamental question of metaphor. If, as some researchers suggest, novel metaphors work by activating mental imagery, how do those with aphantasia make or process powerful, world-changing rhetoric? Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt’s line in his March 4, 1933 inaugural address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Roosevelt does not ask us to picture a menacing entity. Its power is in the conceptual maneuver (known as polyptoton) that reframes an abstract emotion by turning it back on itself.

For a mind that models the world through language, “seeing” happens in the elegant architecture of a sentence. John F. Kennedy’s famous antimetabole, in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” One notes, too, how the logical purity of this line makes it feel almost AI-written today, as if generated by a system that excels at manipulating linguistic patterns.

Zeman’s “phantastic organ” is a brain that models reality, one that struggles to ground words in the world of experience. My own work on AI writing has shown me what happens when that connection is severed, leaving a system that only predicts the next word, a fluent manipulator of signifiers with no access to the signified. And this leads me back to my initial question about Ronald Reagan, whose most powerful lines so often relied on the perfectly balanced, non-visual wordplay we now recognize as the hallmark of an LLM. What, then, are we to make of political visions of America sold to us, by Reagan and others, using the very rhetorical patterns that, when we encounter them today, make us feel as if nothing is there?

1. Recently I failed my university’s wellness test by answering that I have zero cups of vegetables per day. I eat plenty of vegetables but I don’t usually put them in a cup. To imagine putting carrots in a cup to measure them requires a certain cognitive ability. The question was testing that ability, not how many carrots I eat.

2. Alba, Alysa Shereen, Shella Mae Villate, and Leonardo O. Munalim. “Mental Imagery in Reflection Papers on Poetry Manifested by Students with Aphantasia: Lens of Bloom’s Taxonomy.”

3. Fox-Muraton, Mélissa. “Aphantasia and the Language of Imagination: A Wittgensteinian Exploration.” Analiza i Egzystencja: czasopismo filozoficzne 55 (2021): 5-24.

4. Garello, Stefana. “Metaphor and Mental Imagery: The ‘Visibility’ of Figurative Language.” In The Enigma of Metaphor: Philosophy, Pragmatics, Cognitive Science, pp. 129-157. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2024.