Aphantasia and the paranormal
There is so much to the paranormal that we don't understand. Why do some people see things and others don't. Why does one person have an experience when the person next to them experiences nothing at all? Why do we see or feel things that are not there? Do we scare ourselves into thinking something paranormal is happening? Do we all have psychic abilities? I could probably sit here and type out dozens and dozens of questions. While we don't have any hard answers, we do have some clues. Much of it seems to relate to a person's brain chemistry and more specifically how their brain is wired. The way our brain processes things has a direct effect on our perception of the paranormal. It is one of those areas that I particularly like looking into because I do often wonder if this is one of the answers as to why two people can experience the same thing completely differently. I also wonder how it ties in with things like psychic ability.
In the past I have looked at a condition called synesthesia and whether it has a relation to psychic ability. Synesthesia is a neurological condition where instead of just one of your senses picking up information through stimulus, several of your senses try to interpret this information. For example, instead of just hearing music, some people say they can see the music with colour. Remote viewing is an activity where a person can psychically 'see' an item from a great distance without physically being present. It turned out that the top three remote viewers in the United States for the famous 'Project Stargate' remote viewing exercise were all synesthetes. Did their condition mean they had an advantage? It makes you wonder what other neurological conditions could impact our perception of the paranormal and a possible link to psychic ability.
A friend of mine recently sent me some information on a condition called Aphantasia knowing that she would send me down a rabbit hole. Well, here we go!
What is Aphantasia?
Aphantasia is something some people don't even realise they have. It is an inability to mentally visualise an image. For most people, you may ask them to visualise a house. They are not physically seeing a house, but they are seeing it in what we call our 'mind's eye'. Many can visualise it so vividly that they can describe every single detail down to the fixtures. Those with Aphantasia cannot picture the house at all. They don't see mental images.
In order to test if a person has Aphantasia, they are asked to visualise an Apple.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
- A perfectly clear Apple as if it was in front of you
- Realistic and reasonable clear vision of an Apple
- Moderately realistic and clear vision of an Apple
- Dim or vague outlines of an Apple
- No image at all
No 5 is considered to be someone with Aphantasia.
You can also complete a questionnaire here.
Of course, like many neurological conditions, you have people on different ends of the spectrum.
Some can “hear” in their minds, while others can’t imagine either vision or hearing. Some have excellent autobiographical memory, while many do not. Some have involuntary flashes of mental imagery. Most dream in images, but some cannot. Most are born with aphantasia, although a small minority acquire it after injury. “Aphantasia is not a monolithic phenomenon
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/
So if someone can't visualise something mentally, does this mean they can't see a ghost? I do say this with the utmost curiosity. For me, I believe that when a person sees a ghost or apparition it is what we refer to as a telepathic hallucination. The person is not imagining they are seeing a ghost but rather the spirit or entity whatever we are dealing with, is making you see them in your mind's eye through an act of telepathy. They are transmitting the image. I think this is why one person can see a spirit yet the person next to them doesn't. I think this is why if a person is carrying a camera they may see the spirit with their own eyes yet the camera shows nothing. It is something they see in their mind's eye rather than it being a physical manifestation. This is what I think in some cases anyway. So let's say for a moment that is the case, what does this mean for someone with Aphantasia who can't see with their mind's eye? Do they still see a ghost? If so, it certainly offers some more clues into just what it is we are seeing and how we are seeing it.
Aphants and psychic ability
Those with this condition call themselves 'Aphants'. When I first discovered this condition, my mind immediately wondered how a person with Aphantasia would process certain psychic abilities. For example, a medium is someone who communicates between us here in the physical world and the spirits that are on the other side. They are the medium in between - hence the name. Often this process involves a person receiving mental images much like in the telepathic way I have theorised above. They can often describe what the spirit they are talking to is wearing or what they look like. They can describe a place. A person with Aphantasia would not be able to do this with their 'mind's eye' as they are not physically capable of mentally seeing these images. This doesn't mean however that they would not be incapable of psychic ability.
I recently posted an article about the 4 main intuitive senses. Obviously, being clairvoyant (clear seeing) is out because they cannot see the images. They could however receive their information through Clairaudience (clear hearing), Clairsentience (clear feeling) and Claircognizance (clear knowing). They can still hear things, feel things and interpret things, they just cannot visualise them. It does make me wonder, in some ways does this make the information more likely to be genuine? If they are able to put the information together via their imagination, does that make what they receive more reliable? (I don't know the answer it is just something I wonder). It then leads me to wonder about how they would perceive the paranormal.
How do Aphants perceive the paranormal?
I had a little bit of a thought when I was doing some reading in thinking that maybe an Aphant would be less likely to incorrectly perceive something as paranormal because their imagination works in a different way. It turns out, that research suggests that aphants don't 'scare so easily' when it comes to things that go bump in the night. A catalyst for this is thought to be that they are unable to mentally visualise the things that go bump in the night meaning that emotionally they tend to be less fearful.
After using multi-method verification of aphantasia, we show that this condition, but not the general population, is associated with a flat-line physiological response (skin conductance levels) to reading and imagining frightening stories. Importantly, we show in a second experiment that this difference in physiological responses to fear-inducing stimuli is not found when perceptually viewing fearful images. These data demonstrate that the aphantasic individuals' lack of a physiological response when imaging scenarios is likely to be driven by their inability to visualize and is not due to a general emotional or physiological dampening. This work provides evidence that a lack of visual imagery results in a dampened emotional response when reading fearful scenarios, providing evidence for the emotional amplification theory of visual imagery.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267
When you think about it, some people go into a location hearing all of the stories. Dark history intertwined with supposed attacks of a paranormal kind on investigators. It is common when going into these locations that fear levels in some individuals can be heightened by this expectation. An aphant however could be more level-headed as they are not able to mentally visualise this happening to them. As they have quite literally a lack of imagination in the sense that most people associate it, are they more likely to perceive a situation as it is without our brain telling us it is something else? This led me to think about pareidolia. This is the phenomenon where we see faces in clouds etc. You can read about it here.
There was no research in this area that I was able to find so instead I had to rely on internet forums. What I found interesting was that most of the responses from people with Aphantasia were that they commonly experience pareidolia when looking at things. I was surprised as I had wrongly assumed that because they can't mentally visualise something they wouldn't experience pareidolia. Now again my source for this is some internet forums and reddit groups of people comparing experiences so this is not any sort of official figure. It is also important to point out that these were regular discussions about how they interpret their surroundings and no mention of the paranormal and ghosts. It is me of course that is introducing that link because of how often people are fooled into thinking they are seeing a ghost because their eyes are playing tricks on them. So in this instance, people with Aphantasia are just as suspectable to pareidolia as the next person.
So in short, we don't really have any answers on this topic, but what I do hope is that it has sparked a bit of thought and maybe some people with Aphantasia might come forward and tell us about their experiences with the paranormal.
I think the takeaway from this is that firstly, I can really get lost in weird and wonderful trains of thought. I hope you enjoyed going down this rabbit hole and I hope it keeps at least one person thing. The other takeaway is that we all have individual and unique brain make-ups that make us the people that we are. While some may experience more challenges in some areas than others, we are all unique and special. I don't like the word normal because it assumes some sort of conformity. I don't think we can lump any group of people into a normal category because none of us are the same (unless you are essentially identical twins). We are all the weirdos mister!
References
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-2024080
https://medium.com/@annavoznaya/unlocking-the-inner-world-a-journey-into-aphantasia-and-the-power-of-the-mind-e9e7287636ce
https://neurosciencenews.com/aphantasia-visual-ptsd-23901/
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2021/03/i-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghosts--people-with-mind-blindness-not-so-e
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267
https://www.futuremindslab.com/aphantasia
https://aphantasia.com/guide/?srsltid=AfmBOophSaBe7QieR-HsQYN-YUbKtREu8D2jId95PCbM22ZC0t44zcrf
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Comments
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Loyd Auerbach 2 months ago
Great article and you raise many good questions. There actually is a research project on aphantasia happening within the field of Parapsychology. It's a joint project with John Kruth of the Rhine Research Center and Christine Simmonds-Moore of the University of West Georgia.