The more scientists study the human brain, the more they realize they know nothing about it. So, a few years ago, the world community actively discussed such a phenomenon as aphantasia. However, in the early 2000s, no one suspected that there were people without imagination. Today we want to discuss what aphantasia is and tell you what to do if the text shows a positive result and is an aphantasia cure. This information may be helpful to you.
What Is Aphantasia?
You may have never heard of such a phenomenon as aphantasia and then decided to improve your memory and accidentally stumbled upon this term. What is aphantasia? We can easily understand this phenomenon if we break this term into 2 parts – “a” means “without”; “phantasia” – means “fantasy.” So it means people who don’t have a fantasy. What does it mean? Most people on the planet, closing their eyes, can imagine almost any image in their imagination, but about 2% of the people cannot do this.
Now that you have learned what is aphantasia, we want to talk more about studying this issue. For the first time, Francis Galton spoke about this phenomenon back in 1880. He interrogated his servants and asked them to imagine their breakfast food in their creation. It turned out that out of 100 people, 2 could not do it. When he shared his research with his colleagues, they ridiculed him and said that now there are a lot of more important areas to work on. Research on this phenomenon stopped for several decades until Professor Adam Zeman encountered this phenomenon in 2005. Then he was approached by a man who previously had a good imagination but, after the operation, lost this ability. Zeman watched this man for several years and wrote a detailed article on this issue, which attracted the attention of many people who identified this ability.
How To Identify Aphantasia?
Today there is a straightforward aphantasia test you can do at home from the comfort of your couch. To do this, you need to follow a few simple steps:
- Relax and close your eyes;
- Think about what you want to represent (it could be something as simple as a geometric figure);
- Try to imagine it in your creation.
If you managed to pass the aphantasia test and imagine the selected geometric figure, then you do not have such a feature, and this article was not written for you. However, if you are unsatisfied with the test result, you should learn more about this phenomenon.
How To Treat Aphantasia?
To begin with, this does not mean that you have some brain disease that can cause this phenomenon to appear. Scientists have examined a considerable number of people with aphantasia and have not identified any significant health problems in them.
Many researchers say that an aphantasia cure is not mandatory because it is not a disease. Most scientists define it as a unique feature, not a condition.
However, if you want to eliminate this feature, you can try it. There are no entirely successful attempts to isolate aphantasia today. But there is a person who was born with this phenomenon and, thanks to training, learned to imagine images in his mind while falling asleep. In people with aphantasia, the part of the brain responsible for imagination sleeps when awake but wakes up when a person falls asleep. It leads to people with this feature having very colorful dreams.
If you decide to treat aphantasia, you should train both memory and imagination. You should read more and try to play what you read in your dream, like a movie; walk around beautiful places and try remembering them before bed; look at bright images and reproduce them.
You can also use the memoryOS mobile app. It was created based on a methodology developed by Jonas von Essen, a two-time memorization champion. It has many vivid images and 3D models, which help to develop the imagination. In addition, there are many practical and simple exercises to improve memory. If you want a good result, you must exercise every day for 15 – 20 minutes before bed.
