Imagine an apple. Do you see boxes full of colorful apples on display at a market? Or an orchard full of apples, some strewn around the ground? For some people, it’s easy to come up with these images. But for others with the neurological condition called aphantasia, they simply cannot produce an image of the apple in their mind at all.
Aphantasia is a different mechanism and strategy of dealing with everyday tasks, as Joel Pearson, professor of cognitive neuroscience, and founder and director of the Future Minds Lab at the University of New South Wales in Australia, says.
You can liken it maybe to solving a simple math calculation: Nearly everybody goes about it in a different way, but in the end the result is the same. What is certain, is that aphantasia is not an illness, nor a disease and it does not need to be cured.
