For most of you , the power to recall what your parents present look like is no bother at all . But for some , this chore is impossible . A few years ago , researchers eventually described a status in which hoi polloi can not imagine things in their " brain ’s optic " , calledaphantasia .
Only described recently , a mountain of people have grow up assuming that when mass asked them to “ visualise ” something in their mind , they were simply talk metaphorically . But now researchers are starting to unravel the truth behind aphantasia , which could affect up toone out of every 50 people(although this is a pugnacious estimate ) .
One of the hard things to determine is whether or not aphantasia is actually real , something that a late field of study publish in the journalCortexset out to work . The problem stem from the fact that I can not know what you’re able to or can not see , and frailty versa . This means that when people are asked to imagine things and then describe that they see , there is no accusative measuring . We could be seeing the same thing and describing them differently , or seeing different things and describe them the same .
To quiz this , the researchersdevised an experimentknown as binocular competition . participant were give a pair of 3D glasses , where one lens shows a unripened rotary with horizontal line and the other lens testify a red circle with vertical lines . Thebinocular rivalryillusion induces a province where the images in the two eyes are incongruent and what we see fluctuates between the different images , in this lawsuit the bleached circles . Before commit these on , however , the participant were asked to imagine one of the biased circles beforehand . If they can indeed picture things in their mind , then the colored traffic circle they were necessitate to imagine should become the dominant image they see . Those who could not imagine thing account no result on the binocular competition trick .
So it seems that rather than there being a specific issuing with self - reporting , those with aphantasia genuinely can not reckon things in their mind . The next obvious question then is why this is the face , and if anything could be done to aid those who have it .
The most commonly accepted account is that when we re - run a memory in our thinker ’s middle , we attempt to reactivate the same pattern of activeness as when the computer memory was take form . It is thought that somehow these neurological pathway are disrupted , or that the brain simply can not reactivate these pathways in the same way .
If researchers are able-bodied to figure out if this is indeed the case , then it could be conceivable for a handling to be develop that could aid people imagine things . On the flip side , it could also be used to treat those with over - brace natural process patterns , which some think might trifle a purpose in addiction , as well as some human body of post - traumatic focus disorderliness .
