French scientists from the Paris Brain Institute studied the nature of phantasy, a rare thought anomaly whose owners are unable to create visual images in their imaginations. To work published in the scientific journal Cortex.
Disappointed people can’t remember portraits of their friends, parents, or any other picture, but they do remember features of their mother, such as hair color. In some, aphantasia is congenital, while in others it results from a head injury or stroke.
The researchers recruited 117 volunteers, 44 of whom were aphantheses, 31 were hyperfantasy (the ability to imagine things in detail), and 42 had normal visualization. Participants were then subjected to visual perception tests, in which they were shown various objects and asked to compare their properties.
The results showed that people with phantasy were slower than others at processing visual images, especially when it came to shape or color. They also tend to doubt the accuracy of their answers.
“Participants in the fantastic group correctly perceive elements of reality and do not show any disturbances in memory and speech processing. We believe they exhibit a slight flaw in what we call factual consciousness. This means they have access to information about shapes, colors, and spatial relationships, but this visual information is not converted into a visual mental image in conscious experience,” explains study lead neuroscientist Paolo Bartolomeo.
Scientists hope to further unravel the neural mechanisms underlying phantasy. With this knowledge, the researchers aim to create tools for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and learn how to “turn off” the painful images that arise in patients’ memories.
ancient scientists determined areas of the brain associated with the manifestation of delusions and hallucinations.