Hyperphantasia Affects About 3% of the Population. Here’s How to Tell If You Have It
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Driving a car is not an option for Jake S., a musician and artist in Hamilton, Ontario. When he first tried to get behind the wheel years ago, his mind would flicker between the road ahead and the stream of images and scenes that play through his mind. “It was very scary,” he tells SELF, and it put him off driving for good. Part of Jake’s constant distraction can be attributed to his ADHD, which he was diagnosed with and medicated for a few years ago. But that hasn’t lessened the constant imagery that flashes through his mind. “It’s like I’m constantly on my phone in my head,” he says.
Jake has hyperphantasia, which causes him to experience extremely vivid mental imagery. It’s the opposite extreme of aphantasia, the phenomenon of completely lacking mental imagery. According to research, about 3% of the population experience hyperphantasia, and they often say that seeing in their mind’s eye is just as vivid as real life sight. For Jake, hyperphantasia means that every thought he has usually triggers some kind of visual—“my mind is mostly thinking in video,” he says.
Hyperphantasia and aphantasia are not disorders, says Adam Zeman, MD, an honorary professor or neurology at the University of Exeter, honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and the researcher who coined the two terms. “They’re variations in human experience and in human psychological ability,” he tells SELF, “and there are pros and cons at each end of the spectrum.”
What is living with hyperphantasia like?
Research on hyperphantasia and its impacts is still in its infancy, so we’re only just starting to document the ways differences in mental imagery really affect people, says Reshanne Reeder, PhD, a lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Liverpool who studies differences in perception. But there are all sorts of possible implications—people with hyperphantasia might enjoy daydreaming more than others, for example, but also be more prone to maladaptive daydreaming (or spending so much time daydreaming and lingering on their mental imagery that they begin to neglect other parts of their lives), she says.
Despite the emphasis on mental imagery and vision, it seems like aphantasia and hyperphantasia also correspond to other senses as well. Jake says that when he imagines eating an apple, he imagines the mouthfeel, the taste, and the feeling of juice running down his throat, as if he’s experiencing it in real life. “This is very common,” Dr. Reeder tells SELF—if you have hyperphantasia for vision and images, that likely applies to other senses as well.
In her research, Dr. Reeder has spoken to many people with hyperphantasia who have told her how they use their abilities in their day-to-day lives. “One person with hyperphantasia once said that when he took a human anatomy course in college it was a breeze, because he could see the names of all the ligaments and things in the body right in front of him,” Dr. Reeder says. But that’s not to say that people with hyperphantasia have a better memory than others. The effect mental imagery has on memory “is much less than you might predict,” says Dr. Zeman. People with hyperphantasia, or aphantasia, have on average the same memory abilities as anyone else—but those with the former seem to be slightly better at remembering visual information, as well as first-person memories of their own lives.
Because of how vivid their mental imagery is, people with hyperphantasia are also possibly more at risk than others of having intrusive imagery when remembering negative experiences, and of being traumatized by scenes they’ve imagined, says Dr. Zeman. While more research is needed, it’s possible that extremely vivid imagery might also make these people more prone to believing false memories and hallucination, says Dr. Reeder.
How do you get hyperphantasia?
We don’t fully know how or why there’s so much diversity across the mental imagery spectrum, Dr. Zeman says, but “it probably is partly genetic.” In fact, you’re about 10 times more likely to have aphantasia if your sibling has it, he says. “I suspect the same is true of hyperphantasia, though we haven’t done the arithmetic yet.”
More research is needed, but there is some suggesting that mental imagery abilities can change over time. In one 2022 paper, researchers found that rates of very vivid mental imagery decline over time, suggesting that children are more likely to have hyperphantasia. Plus, it’s definitely possible to lose imagery following a stroke, other brain injuries, or psychiatric conditions, says Dr. Zeman. Dr. Reeder’s hunch is that it’s a “use it or lose it” situation, and that as kids grow up and stop engaging in immersive and imaginative play they start tuning out their mental imagery, and so that imagery dulls. That said, there haven’t yet been any longitudinal studies of individual mental imagery abilities changing over time, says Dr. Zeman, so we don’t know for sure if and how it changes throughout the lifespan.
Is there a test for hyperphantasia?
Since hyperphantasia is not a clinical condition or disorder, there’s no was to truly “diagnose” it. However, there are two go-to surveys to assess a person’s mental imagery: the Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), and the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire, both of which can be found online. There’s no standard cut-off for hyperphantasia, says Dr. Zeman, but researchers typically assume anyone with a score of 75 (or higher) out of 80 on the VVIQ have it.
Since these assessments are surveys where you need to self-score, critics say that they are prone to error and bias. Those are valid criticisms, but unfortunately we don’t yet have any hyperphantasia tests that can objectively and reliably say for sure whether someone has it, says Dr. Zeman.
If you suspect you might, Dr. Reeder also suggests reading about other people’s experiences—perhaps on Reddit or through other online testimonies—and seeing what resonates with you. And think about more than just whether your mental imagery is vivid, she says. When she assesses people, she often asks about their daydreaming habits, whether they get easily immersed in their own internal worlds, and whether they can imagine other senses as well.
And if you feel like your vivid imagery is hard to ignore, Jake recommends trying to work with it rather than pushing it down or away. “I used to have a really hard time falling asleep,” he says, “but then I learned that if I just…imagine myself walking in a wood-scape or something, then it can just naturally feed into my dreams.”
Related:
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Originally Appeared on Self
