By Carl Zimmer
June 8, 2021
Dr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images.
Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia,
For example, a scientist who had been a grad student under the famous psychologist Leon Kamin, co-author with Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose of the anti-hereditarian book