When I use a word . . . The mind’s eye—phantasia, aphantasia, and hyperphantasia

In 1880 Francis Galton studied people’s ability to create mental images in their mind’s eye. Most people were able to do so, but not scientists. In 2015 Zeman and colleagues labelled this inability aphantasia. The ordinary visual ability they called phantasia and the heightened ability hyperphantasia. People with aphantasia, aphantasiacs, have poor autobiographical memory and dream conceptually, not visually, but they may still be good artists. They may be on the autistic spectrum and have relatives who are also likely to be aphantasiac. And they don’t suffer from a disadvantage that some phantasiacs have, when, having formed visual images of people and places in novels, they are disappointed or even angry when those people and places are realised in a movie and don’t correspond to the images that they have formed in their mind’s eye. People with Charles Bonnet syndrome are blind but nevertheless see visions, labelled as hallucinations, in their mind’s eye; presumably they are phantasiacs.