A new review in Consciousness and Cognition challenges a long-standing model of how mental imagery works. The traditional view treats imagination as a reversal of seeing—signals flowing backward through the same brain pathways used for ordinary sight. According to the review by Derek Arnold, Loren Bouyer, Blake Saurels and Samuel Schwarzkopf, this “backward-seeing” model “has been largely discredited, at least in its original form.”
The researchers argue that people with aphantasia—a lifelong inability to form mental images—offer crucial evidence that imagination depends on distributed brain networks rather than a single visual processing region. Aphantasia, derived from the Greek word for sense perception, affects people’s ability to visualize sights and often sounds, smells, tastes or touch.
Traditional neuroscience assumed the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain acts as a mental screen, similar to how eyes project images onto the retina. But several clinical cases contradict this model. One patient studied by Beatrice de Gelder and colleagues was completely blind due to destruction of both sides of the primary visual cortex, yet could still imagine an angry person. Brain scans showed his front and side brain regions responded as they do in sighted people. If imagination required that back-brain screen, such visualization should have been impossible.
Meta-analysis of dozens of imagery experiments by Alfredo Spagna and Paolo Bartolomeo found that imagination reliably engaged the front of the brain and the fusiform gyrus—a region on the left temporal lobe—while the primary visual cortex was often quiet. An architect who lost the ability to visualize after a stroke affecting this left temporal strip provided additional evidence.
Arnold’s team proposes an “emergent property framework” where mental images arise from coordinated activity across the prefrontal cortex, fusiform strip, and regions involved in movement planning. This distributed network model explains why brain damage in different areas can disrupt imagery differently.
Two of the review’s authors are themselves visual aphantasics. They describe their experience not as an empty mind but as “awareness of a set of spatial facts.” One author played Tetris well as a youth without picturing falling pieces, only through learned knowledge of spatial relationships. This suggests that questionnaires treating Tetris skill as proof of imagery may mischaracterize how the brain processes spatial information.
The research also reveals physiological differences in people with aphantasia. When Marcus Wicken, Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearson had people read scary stories, those with aphantasia did not sweat as others did, despite normal skin reactions to actual scary images. This suggests words typically reach emotional responses through imagery pathways. Brain imaging found weaker communication between the fusiform region and left front brain in aphantasics.
Key facts
- A new review argues the traditional “backward-seeing” model of imagination has been discredited
- People with severe primary visual cortex damage can still form mental images, contradicting the traditional model
- Imagination appears to require coordinated activity across prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, and movement-planning regions rather than activity in a single visual area
- About one-quarter of people with aphantasia report no imagined sensations of any kind—no inner sounds, smells, tastes or touch
- People with aphantasia show weaker physiological responses to scary words but normal responses to scary images