Aphantasia Training Is Testing How Flexible the Mind’s Eye Really Is

Aphantasia is moving from description to intervention

For years, aphantasia was mainly discussed as a striking difference in inner experience: some people can summon vivid mental images, while others report little or no visual imagery at all. New Scientist now describes a newer development. People with aphantasia are not only comparing experiences and language online; some are actively trying training programs designed to improve their mental imagery.

That shift matters because it changes the scientific question. Instead of asking only what aphantasia is, researchers and self-organized communities are also asking whether it can be modified. If imagery can be trained, even partially, then aphantasia may look less like a fixed trait and more like a spectrum with some degree of plasticity.

Communities are pushing the research frontier

One of the most interesting elements in New Scientist’s reporting is that much of this experimentation is happening outside formal academia. Online groups such as Cure Aphantasia have become places where people compare methods, discuss progress, and treat the problem as something that may be worked on rather than simply accepted as given. That does not mean every claim emerging from those spaces is validated. It does mean public curiosity is now generating hypotheses faster than the traditional research pipeline often does.

The article notes that aphantasia was only scientifically named in 2010 by neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues. That relative newness helps explain why intervention-oriented research is still early. Before scientists can determine whether training works, they have to define what counts as improvement, how reliably imagery can be measured, and whether reported changes reflect true visualization or better use of nonvisual strategies.

Why the question is so consequential

If aphantasia turns out to be trainable, the implications would go beyond the community directly affected by it. New Scientist points out that this would challenge the idea that low imagery is necessarily an innate, permanent difference. It would also raise a second question with wider reach: if people with very low imagery can improve it, could people with ordinary imagery alter or strengthen their own mind’s eye as well?

That possibility touches core debates in cognitive science. Mental imagery sits at the overlap of perception, memory, attention, and language. A changeable imagination would suggest that at least some of these systems can be tuned through practice. A largely unchangeable one would point in the other direction, toward deeper individual differences in how thought is represented internally.

The difficulty of measuring inner experience

The challenge, of course, is that mental imagery is hard to observe directly. New Scientist captures this through a simple example: when asked to picture an apple or a potoo bird, different people report radically different internal experiences. Some see a clear image. Others get a vague outline. Some see nothing at all. Because no one can directly inspect another person’s inner imagery, subjective reporting becomes essential and problematic at the same time.

That measurement difficulty is one reason training programs remain scientifically provocative. A person might feel that their imagery has improved, but researchers still need to distinguish between richer visual experience, stronger verbal description, improved memory for visual details, and greater confidence in introspection. Those distinctions are subtle, yet they determine whether the field is looking at real visual change or at adjacent cognitive adaptation.

What training represents right now

At this stage, the most important contribution of aphantasia training may be conceptual rather than therapeutic. It forces researchers to treat mental imagery as something that might vary not just between people, but within the same person over time. That possibility has consequences for neuroscience, psychology, and even education, where visualization is often assumed rather than examined.

New Scientist is careful to frame aphantasia as a difference, not a disorder. That is a useful guardrail. The goal of this research should not be to pathologize people who think differently. Instead, the value lies in understanding whether mental imagery is a stable cognitive trait, a trainable skill, or some combination of both.

For now, the answer remains open. But the direction of travel is clear: people with aphantasia are no longer just subjects in a scientific taxonomy. They are active participants in testing the boundaries of the mind’s eye, and in doing so they are pushing neuroscientists toward a more dynamic understanding of how thought may be formed.

This article is based on reporting by New Scientist. Read the original article.