Journal articles on the topic 'Hyperphantasia'

Lack of vivid sensory imagery has recently become an active subject of research, under the name of aphantasia. Extremely vivid imagery, or hyperphantasia, is at the other end of the spectrum of individual differences. While most research has focused on visual imagery in this paper I argue that from a neuropsychological perspective this phenomenon is much more widespread, and should be categorized as imagery sensory agnosia. After over twenty years of learning to play music phenomenology of auditory imagery agnosia is described from the first-person perspective. Reflections on other forms of imagery agnosia and deficits of autobiographical memories are presented and a hypothesis about putative brain processes that can account for such phenomena is discussed. Extreme individual differences in imagery and in autobiographical memory have implications for many fields of study, from consciousness research to education.

First described by Galton in 1880 and then remaining unnoticed for a century, recent investigations in neuroscience have shown that a condition called<em> aphantasia</em> appears in certain individuals, which causes them to be unable to experience visual mental imagery. Comparing aphantasia to <em>hyperphantasia</em> &ndash; i.e., photo-like memory &ndash; and considering the neurological basis of perceptual phenomena, we are revisiting Hume&#39;s division of perceptions into impressions and ideas. By showing different vivacities of mental phenomena and comparing them to neurological research, we are stating that not only impressions and ideas differ &quot;in the degrees of force and liveliness&quot;, but ideas and impressions amongst themselves as well. Such a gradual range of perceptions and mental images bears significant consequences for not only representational theory and historical interpretations but linguistics and semiotics as well.

Imagination remains one of the few uncharted complex terrains of the human mind. The original word for imagination comes from the Greek word phantasia. When the prefix a- (which means &lsquo;without&rsquo;) is added to the Greek word, the term aphantasia comes into existence. In fact, aphantasia was first coined by one of the world&rsquo;s few foremost experts on imagery extremes, Adam Zeman, who is currently aprofessor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter, UK. Aphantasia is described as a handicapping condition in which an individual is unable to visualize. The opposite of aphantasia is hyperphantasia (known as image-free thinking), which is the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. Between them, there is a spectrum of imagination-related types or subtypes. This short paper is loosely extracted from the author&rsquo;s recently published monograph The Spectrum of Imagination in Autism (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2023), which he has coauthored with Ming-Jie Deng, a postgraduate neuroscience candidature at the&nbsp;King&rsquo;s College, London, UK.

Prof. Zeman trained in Medicine at Oxford University Medical School, after a first degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and later in Neurology in Oxford, at The National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, London and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996, as a Consultant and Senior Lecturer (later Reader) in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and to the Peninsula Medical School (now University of Exeter Medical School) in September 2005 as Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology. His specialised clinical work is in cognitive and behavioural neurology, including neurological disorders of sleep.His main research interests are disorders of visual imagery and forms of amnesia occurring in epilepsy. He has an active background interest in the science and philosophy of consciousness, publishing a wide-ranging review of the field in Brain (2001; 124:1263–1289) and an accessible introduction to the subject for a general readership (Consciousness: a user’s guide, Yale University Press, 2002). In 2008 he published an introduction to neurology for the general reader, A Portrait of the Brain (Yale UP), and in 2012, Epilepsy and Memory (OUP) with Narinder Kapur and Marilyn Jones-Gotman. From 2007–2010 he was Chairman of the British Neuropsychiatry Association. He launched and continues to direct its training course in neuropsychiatry.For most of us visual imagery is a conspicuous ingredient of the imaginative experience which allows us to escape from the here and now into the past, the future and the worlds conceived by science and art. But there appears to be wide inter-individual variation in the vividness of visual imagery. Although the British psychologist Galton together with the Parisian neurologist Charcot and his psychiatrist colleague Cotard - recognised that some individuals may lack wakeful imagery entirely, the existence of ‘extreme imagery’ has been oddly neglected since this early work. In 2015 we coined the term ‘aphantasia’ to describe the lack of the mind’s eye, describing 21 individuals who reported a lifelong inability to visualise (Cortex, 2015;73:378–80). Since then we have heard from around 14,000 people, most reporting lifelong aphantasia, or its converse hyperphantasia, but also less common ‘acquired’ imagery loss resulting from brain injury or psychological disorder. Preliminary analyses suggests association between vividness extremes, occupational preference and reported abilities in face recognition and autobiographical memory. Many people with lifelong aphantasia nevertheless dream visually. Imagery in other modalities is variably affected. Extreme imagery appears to run in families more often than would be expected by chance. I will describe the findings of our recent pilot study of neuropsychological and brain imaging signatures of extreme imagery, and place our study of a- and hyper-phantasia in the context of the Eye’s Mind project, an interdisciplinary collaboration funded by the AHRC (http://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/research/neuroscience/theeyesmind/). In addition to our work on extreme imagery, we have reviewed the intellectual history of visual imagery (MacKisack et al, Frontiers in Psychology, 515:1–16. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00515), undertaken a recent ALE meta-analysis of functional imaging studies of visualisation (Winlove et al, Cortex, 20182018; 105:4–25) and organised an exhibition of work by artists with extreme imagery vividness (Extreme Imagination: inside the mind’s eye Exeter University Press, 2018.)

Abstract Although Galton recognized in the 1880s that some individuals lack visual imagery, this phenomenon was mostly neglected over the following century. We recently coined the terms “aphantasia” and “hyperphantasia” to describe visual imagery vividness extremes, unlocking a sustained surge of public interest. Aphantasia is associated with subjective impairment of face recognition and autobiographical memory. Here we report the first systematic, wide-ranging neuropsychological and brain imaging study of people with aphantasia (n = 24), hyperphantasia (n = 25), and midrange imagery vividness (n = 20). Despite equivalent performance on standard memory tests, marked group differences were measured in autobiographical memory and imagination, participants with hyperphantasia outperforming controls who outperformed participants with aphantasia. Face recognition difficulties and autistic spectrum traits were reported more commonly in aphantasia. The Revised NEO Personality Inventory highlighted reduced extraversion in the aphantasia group and increased openness in the hyperphantasia group. Resting state fMRI revealed stronger connectivity between prefrontal cortices and the visual network among hyperphantasic than aphantasic participants. In an active fMRI paradigm, there was greater anterior parietal activation among hyperphantasic and control than aphantasic participants when comparing visualization of famous faces and places with perception. These behavioral and neural signatures of visual imagery vividness extremes validate and illuminate this significant but neglected dimension of individual difference.

The aim of this research was to establish prevalence estimates for aphantasia, hypophantasia, typical imagery ability, and hyperphantasia in a large multi-national cohort. In Study 1, the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire was completed by 3,049 participants. Results indicated prevalence estimates of 1.2% for aphantasia, 3% for hypophantasia, 89.9% for typical imagery ability, and 5.9% for hyperphantasia. In Study 2, to replicate these findings in a larger sample, the Study 1 data were combined with openly available data from previous prevalence studies to create a total sample of 9,063 participants. Re-analysis of this data confirmed prevalence estimates of 0.9% for aphantasia, 3.3% for hypophantasia, 89.7% for typical imagery ability, and 6.1% for hyperphantasia. These robust and up-to-date estimates provide enhanced clarity to researchers regarding the prevalence of differing visual imagery abilities and provide a platform for future studies exploring the role of visual imagery in various cognitive and behavioral tasks.

Whether the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961) became psychotic after his mid-thirties is much debated. His recently published Black Books, a seven-volume journal, reveal new insights into this debate. Based on a phenomenological analysis of his self-reports in these books and in other writings, we here identify several types of anomalous perceptual experiences: hypnagogic-hypnopompic experiences, hyperphantasia, hallucinations, personifications, and sensed presence. We argue that these experiences were not indicative of a psychotic disorder, but rather stemmed from extremely vivid mental imagery, or hyperphantasia, a condition Jung’s contemporaries and later biographers were unable to take into account because it had not yet been conceptualised. Recently, the degree of vividness of mental imagery and its potential to become indistinguishable from regular sense perception has been the subject of extensive studies. Unknowingly, Jung may have foreshadowed this line of research with his psychoanalytic concept of reality equivalence, i.e., the substitution of an external world for an inner mental reality that he encountered in individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. There is a need for future research to investigate the possible role of hyperphantasia in psychotic experiences, but to Jung, psychosis was ‘a failure to contain and comprehend’ the content of one’s experiences in the context of one’s own life, whereas he himself did manage to put the content of his perceptual experiences into context, to find meaning in them, and to share them with others - to great acknowledgement and acclaim.

Aphantasia is a condition characterized by a deficit of mental imagery. Since several psychopathologies are partially maintained by mental imagery, it may be illuminating to consider the condition against the background of psychological disorder. After outlining current findings and hypotheses regarding aphantasia and psychopathology, this paper suggests that some support for defining aphantasia as a lack of voluntary imagery may be found here. The paper then outlines potentially fruitful directions for future research into aphantasia in general and its relation to psychopathology in particular, including rethinking use of the SUIS to measure involuntary imagery, whether aphantasia offers protection against addiction, and whether hyperphantasia is a potential risk factor for maladaptive daydreaming, among others.

Mental imagery differs markedly between people, with research tentatively identifying three categories, namely aphantasia, mid-range imagery, and hyperphantasia. Further, aphantasia poses interesting questions as to how people with low imagery experience reading. Accordingly, we used Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) on a sample of adults (n = 287) to see what distinct imagery profiles exist empirically. Second, we tested different imagery profiles for associations with different reading enjoyment and absorption experiences. The online correlational study asked participants to complete measures including the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ-2), the Story World Absorption Scale, and a measure of reading enjoyment. LPAs were run to identify imagery profiles and correlations were run with reading enjoyment and absorption. Results of the LPA validate the existence of three profiles. All groups reported moderate to high enjoyment and absorption, however, significant group differences existed between the lowest and highest imagers. Future research needs to better understand what these experiential differences are and how they may or may not affect reading ability.

Differences in mental imagery ability between individuals have been reported since Galton in 1880. Despite much progress in the mental imagery field, particularly with the advent of neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging, the neural bases of mental imagery and why individual differences exist in mental imagery ability are not fully understood. Several subjective and objective methods have been proposed and utilized to investigate the strength of visual mental imagery, and even to predict the content of imagery. Recent evidence has shown that people with opposite extremes of visual mental imagery ability, aphantasia and hyperphantasia, have selective impairments and enhancements of ability to visualize visual elements in imagery. We argue that this heterogeneity is generalizable to the population who have relatively normal imagery ability. Current studies have overgeneralized specific paradigms and stimuli to apply to visual mental imagery ability of all types of stimuli, under the presumption that this ability is homogenous. Future studies would benefit from both increased granularity and expanded scope of paradigms and stimuli used.

Abstract Predictive processing theories state that our subjective experience of reality is shaped by a balance of expectations based on previous knowledge about the world (i.e. priors) and confidence in sensory input from the environment. Divergent experiences (e.g. hallucinations and synaesthesia) are likely to occur when there is an imbalance between one’s reliance on priors and sensory input. In a novel theoretical model, inspired by both predictive processing and psychological principles, we propose that predictable divergent experiences are associated with natural or environmentally induced prior/sensory imbalances: inappropriately strong or inflexible (i.e. maladaptive) high-level priors (beliefs) combined with low sensory confidence can result in reality discrimination issues, a characteristic of psychosis; maladaptive low-level priors (sensory expectations) combined with high sensory confidence can result in atypical sensory sensitivities and persistent divergent percepts, a characteristic of synaesthesia. Crucially, we propose that whether different divergent experiences manifest with dominantly sensory (e.g. hallucinations) or nonsensory characteristics (e.g. delusions) depends on mental imagery ability, which is a spectrum from aphantasia (absent or weak imagery) to hyperphantasia (extremely vivid imagery). We theorize that imagery is critically involved in shaping the sensory richness of divergent perceptual experience. In sum, to predict a range of divergent perceptual experiences in both clinical and general populations, three factors must be accounted for: a maladaptive use of priors, individual level of confidence in sensory input, and mental imagery ability. These ideas can be expressed formally using nonparametric regression modeling. We provide evidence for our theory from previous work and deliver predictions for future research.