Although the psychologist Francis Galton had noticed in the 1880s that there were people whose 'power of visualization was zero', this individual difference was largely neglected for over a century. Rare cases in which the ability to visualize was lost as a result of brain disorder were described, but the much more common phenomenon of lifelong absence of the mind's eye went under the radar.

In 2009 I, Adam Zeman, described a single case of imagery loss, using the term 'blind imagination.' The science journalist Carl Zimmer wrote a popular account of the case in Discover magazine, following which, our research team was contacted by around 20 people who recognized their own experience in Zimmer's article- except their experience had always been that way.

We coined the term aphantasia (a= without, phantasia= the mind's eye) to describe this characteristic in a subsequent paper. The term caught on, attracting a quite unexpected level of public interest. The entrepreneur Blake Ross wrote a spirited Facebook post about his realization that he was aphantastic; Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and recent winner of the Turing prize shared his experience with the BBC.

Interest in the phenomenon has been sustained, presumably because we live so much of our lives in our heads and are intrigued to discover that the experience of others can be so unlike our own. A number of documentaries have focused on the topic; the independently run Aphantasia Network has been created to provide an information hub for the growing community.

One pleasing surprise was contact from many aphantastic artists: our Eye's Mind study team organized an exhibition of art by people with aphantasia and its converse, hyperphantasia, in 2019. Since the term aphantasia was coined in 2015, well over 50 scientific papers have been published on the subject, which I recently reviewed in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

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