Why you can’t picture your childhood or loved one’s faces: Sassy struggled with this little-understood but common condition. Now experts reveal the cause – and quiz that tells you if you’re a sufferer

If you ask Sassy Smith to tell you about her childhood, her mind goes blank. Or rather, her mind is blank because, while she remembers stories she’s been told, she cannot picture herself as a child. Or even what her teenage bedroom looked like.

She also can’t recall her first dance at her wedding to husband Russell in 2005.

That’s because Sassy has aphantasia – the inability to see something with your mind’s eye – as well as a related condition known as severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM).

Sassy has always been this way. However, she discovered it about herself only when she was 50. It explained many things she’d found confusing her whole life.

‘Like why I had no visual memory of my childhood. Why I could never recall experiences that friends and family talked about, and why I’ve involuntarily ghosted so many friends over the years,’ says Sassy, 56, a therapist from Bournemouth who specialises in neurodiversity.

It is only when Sassy sees people regularly or for extended periods of time that she remembers them. If she doesn’t, and has to rely on her memory, she stops recognising them.

For example, Sassy was out one night celebrating her birthday with friends when a man kept coming over and trying to dance with her. ‘I pointed to my wedding finger and he said, “Don’t you remember me?”’ He was an ex-boyfriend from her 20s, but Sassy had no recollection of him.

‘My friends thought it was hilarious, but I think he was pretty offended,’ she recalls.

Aphantasia is thought to affect one to five per cent of the population, and around half of those, like Sassy, also have SDAM.

Much about both conditions is still being unravelled, having only been formally identified by researchers in 2015.

The term aphantasia was coined by Professor Adam Zeman, a neurologist at Exeter University. ‘It came from the Greek word “phantasia”, which was how Aristotle described the mind’s eye,’ he told the Mail.

It’s not known what exactly causes it, or why there seems to be such variation in how individuals ‘see’ things in their mind. However, a recent study at the Paris Brain Institute used a powerful type of scanner – an ultra-high-field functional MRI – to examine the brains of people with aphantasia.

While being scanned they were asked questions about the visual features of familiar objects, words, faces and places. The study, published in the journal Cortex, found that while key brain areas involved in memory and visual processing were being activated in those with aphantasia, there was much less communication between these areas.

Jianghao Liu, a cognitive neuroscientist who led the research, noted: ‘This might explain why aphantasic people still retain accurate visual knowledge of objects – for example, they clearly remember that spinach is a darker green than lettuce.’

This makes sense to Sassy, who describes her childhood as a ‘series of “knowings”’ – she knows things happened, she just cannot picture them.

She says: ‘For example, I know my friends and I made camps on a road near my house. My oldest friend, Sam, tells me we used to read books in our camp, but I don’t remember doing that.’

More distressingly, since her beloved stepfather Derek died of cancer in 2011, Sassy cannot visualise how he looked or picture experiences they shared together. ‘I remember someone saying to me that I seemed to have moved on pretty quickly and hadn’t really grieved, which I found a bit hurtful,’ she says.

It was only in 2019, when Sassy started therapy following stressful events at work that left her depressed and struggling with insomnia (she was working in property at the time), that she realised this was all down to a difference in how her brain worked.

‘It ended up being a real turning point for me,’ Sassy says – though not in the way she expected.

The therapist kept asking Sassy to visualise herself as a child, to relive past experiences.

‘But I couldn’t see any pictures of my childhood in my head, and I realised the technique wasn’t going to work for me.’

It reminded her of something she’d read a few years earlier, in 2015, about people who are unable to visualise things. ‘That sounds like me,’ she remembers thinking at the time.

Desperate to explore anything that might help, she looked into it further and came across Professor Zeman’s work.

He had first encountered someone with aphantasia in 2003. ‘A patient was referred to me who’d lost the ability to visualise after a cardiac procedure, which was a symptom I’d never come across before,’ he explains.

‘Having previously had a very vivid mind’s eye, he found he could no longer picture anything after his operation.’

Professor Zeman published a paper in 2010 about this case, which was subsequently picked up by a science magazine.

‘Over the next year or so, I had about 20 people get in touch saying, “I’m like this guy, except I’ve always been this way”,’ he says. Many of them agreed to take part in further research where Professor Zeman asked them to imagine 16 scenarios – such as a sun rising or the wind shaking the leaves of a tree – and rate how vivid they are, from no image at all to completely clear (see panel). They also underwent brain scans.

This formed the basis of Professor Zeman’s identification of aphantasia, suggesting in his 2015 paper that some people have a completely ‘blind’ imagination and seem to be born with this difference. After publishing the paper, he says he was contacted by 20,000 people with varying degrees of it.

That same year, another researcher, Brian Levine, identified SDAM – writing about it in the journal Neuropsychologia. It was a paper that Professor Zeman read with interest.

‘I’d studied related forms of amnesia, such as severe autobiographical memory loss due to epilepsy, for many years, but hadn’t encountered the term SDAM before,’ he says.

Professor Zeman believes both are cognitive differences related to brain connectivity rather than impairments – in other words, the brain is ‘wired’ differently.

He also believes that most people with aphantasia have a genetic predisposition to it, although he has come across around 100 cases where people lost the ability to visualise after a stroke or head injury.

The emerging understanding about aphantasia potentially has implications for understanding how consciousness works.

For Sassy, reading Professor Zeman’s 2015 paper about aphantasia – and later about SDAM – was a lightbulb moment.

‘It was as though he was describing me and my inability to visualise anything. I diagnosed myself because, as yet, there is no official diagnosis for it on the NHS,’ she says.

She realised she must have SDAM as well as aphantasia, because if it was just the inability to create mental pictures then she would still be able to recall emotions – ‘hear’ people’s voices, as well as ‘inner voice’ details of her past – rather than having to endure a completely ‘memory-­less’ blank slate.

She then contacted others with aphantasia on social media, and says it was a huge comfort to realise she wasn’t alone.

Sassy says she struggles most with not being able to picture the faces of her loved ones when not with them – and she worries about what will happen after her parents, now in their 80s, die.

‘I’ve always been close to Mum and Dad. I’m terrified knowing I won’t be able to picture them or relive memories of our time together after they die.’

To help counteract this, Sassy has taken lots of photos and videos of her parents.

She wants others to understand that not everyone can visualise things and that not everyone has an inner voice – this is what drove her to retrain as a therapist in 2019.

‘Because when you have no memories or sound in your head,’ she says, ‘it sometimes feels as though there’s just a gaping hole. And it can feel awfully lonely.’

Unseen Minds, A Therapist’s Guide To Multisensory Aphantasia And Invisible Cognitive Differences, by Sassy Smith (£11.99, available from amazon.co.uk).