Phantasia: The Power of Mental Imagery

We perceive the outside world through the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. People can be divided into 4 groups according to their level of visual vividness, which is the purpose of the VVIQ (Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) questionnaire. The first group consists of hyperphantasic persons, who have a very vivid mental imagery, followed by the neurotypical or average group, whose members are not very vivid but still have a very vivid imagery. Beyond this, the hypofantasists are the low imaginative group, those who have difficulty and/or are not very vivid in their mental "seeing", "hearing" or "feeling". So the majority of people "see" certain images in their minds, think with the help of imaginary images, but about 2-5% of people cannot do this, they are the fourth group, the aphantasizers. 

People with aphantasia have thoughts, mental representations of things in the world, but they are not "seen", not "heard", not "felt". This can be most easily thought of as a computer, where even if the monitor is switched off and only the black screen is visible, the computer itself runs in the background without any problems.

We usually have no access to the consciousness and mental contents of others, so it is possible that a person with aphantasia may not even suspect that sentences beginning "IMAGINE..." can be interpreted literally, but most people might jokingly reply "Okay, in colour, or maybe in black and white?"...