Scientists say that a rare condition that makes people unable to visualize images in their imagination could have a bigger effect on the mind.
Aphantasia, also known as being blind in the mind, has been known about since the 19th century.
The studies are showing us more about how aphantasia can affect people and how important mental imagery is to other brain functions.
A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia found that people with aphantasia had a reduced ability to remember the past and envision the future.
Some scientists have discovered new evidence of aphantasia's impact on our memories and imaginations.
The new findings show that Episodic memory and future prospection are functionally the same.
" Both are everyday cognitive processes involving the reconstruction of events and scenes, typically accompanied by anecdotally vivid online sensory replay, in the form of visual imagery."
There is still a lot we don't know about how these images factor into our ability to remember episodes from the past.
An experiment was conducted with about 60 people, half of whom experienced aphantasia, with the other half being people without the condition.
The participants completed an adapted version of the Autobiographical Interview in order to assess components of autobiographical memory.
In the version conducted here, participants were asked to remember six life events and imagine six future events, with detailed written descriptions of each event.
The results showed that aphantasic participants produced less information than the control group.
The researchers found that people with aphantasia scored similar to the controls on spatial imagery ability.
The researchers wrote that the current study provides the first robust behavioral evidence that visual imagery absence is associated with a reduced capacity to simulation and construct the future.
phantasic participants generated less internal details than controls regardless of temporal direction, indicating that their event descriptions were less rich and specific than participants with visual imagery.
The ability to generate visual imagery is important for the mental construction of events, whether reconstructing real-life memories, or imagining scenarios that have not taken place.
The constructive episodic simulation hypothesis states that future prospection is a cognitive process that assembles fragments of past memories to paint a picture of possible future events.
"Internal're-experiencing' and 'pre-experiencing' events should both involve the recombination of stored perceptual, temporal, and conceptual information, and thus rely on similar cognitive processes."
The researchers note that this doesn't mean that people with aphantasia can't remember past events.
Their ability to reconstruct internal scenes is diminished compared to people with the condition who have a richer amount of mental visual imagery.
There's still so much we don't know about how this condition works, but studies like this one are helping to fill in the details.
The researchers wrote that the interactions between visual imagery, episodic event construction, and autobiographical memory are likely complex and complicated by the many individual differences that moderate each of these cognitive processes.
Aphantasia offers a unique model to begin exploring these interactions and build a broader taxonomy of cognitive simulation in the human brain.
The results are reported in a journal.
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