When I use a word . . . The mind’s eye—phantasia, aphantasia, and hyperphantasia

In 1880 Francis Galton studied people’s ability to create mental images in their mind’s eye. Most people were able to do so, but scientists seemed to struggle more. In 2015 Zeman and colleagues labelled this inability aphantasia. The ordinary visual ability they called phantasia and the heightened ability hyperphantasia. People with aphantasia, aphantasiacs, have poor autobiographical memory and dream conceptually, not visually, but they may still be good artists. They may be on the autistic spectrum and have relatives who are also likely to be aphantasiac. And they don’t suffer from a disadvantage that some phantasiacs have, when, having formed visual images of people and places in novels, they are disappointed or even angry when those people and places are realised in a movie and don’t correspond to the images that they have formed in their mind’s eye. People with Charles Bonnet syndrome are blind but nevertheless see visions, labelled as hallucinations, in their mind’s eye; presumably they are phantasiacs. The American radio journalist Susan Stamberg (1938‒2025), who was the first woman to host a national news programme in the USA, is credited with having observed that “the pictures are better on radio,” presumably contrasting it with television. When asked what she meant she explained that “anything you can imagine is better than anything you can see.”1 Using Stamberg’s epigram as a book title,2 Adam Carroll-Smith described how, as a sports reporter for a UK national newspaper agency, he would write his report based on the radio commentary, thanks to which “I had an excellent visual image in my mind, which I could then commit to paper.” In 2005 England's cricketers were playing Australia in the fourth test match at Trent Bridge. Carroll-Smith missed Jonathan Agnew's commentary on the final moments of the match, about which he commented …