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Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia

<p>Halloween movies often feature kids sitting around a campfire sharing gory, spooky stories, trying to get someone to scream in fear.</p> <p>This weekend you might be doing the same – sharing a horror story with friends. You may find one friend doesn’t get scared, no matter how frightening a scene you try to paint in their mind.</p> <p>So why are some people more easily spooked by stories than others? We ran an experiment to find out.</p> <p><strong>Can you see it in your mind?</strong></p> <p>One reason some people are more easily spooked could relate to how well they can visualise the scary scene in their mind.</p> <p>When some people listen to a story they automatically conjure up the scene in their mind’s eye, while others have to focus really hard to create any sort of mental image.</p> <p>A small proportion cannot visualise images at all. No matter how hard they try, they do not see anything in their mind. This inability to visualise is known as aphantasia.</p> <p>Although we have known people vary in their ability to visualise <a rel="noopener" href="https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm" target="_blank">for many years</a>, the term aphantasia was not coined until <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945215001781?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">2015</a>.</p> <p>We don’t yet know exactly how many people have aphantasia. But <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945220301404?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">estimates vary</a> at 1–4% of the population.</p> <p><iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KuWSh4n5AiI?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> <em><span class="caption">Do you have aphantasia?</span></em></p> <p><strong>How scared are you?</strong></p> <p>If the ability to visualise images and scenes in the mind plays a role in how we react to spooky stories, what does that mean for people with aphantasia? How do they react when reading scary stories?</p> <p>We <a rel="noopener" href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267" target="_blank">ran a study</a> to find out. We had people sit in the dark and read a number of short stories – not ghost stories, but ones with frightening, hypothetical scenarios.</p> <p>One example involved someone being chased by a shark, another being covered in spiders.</p> <p>As people read these stories, we recorded their fear levels by measuring how much the stories made them sweat.</p> <p>We placed small electrodes on their fingers and ran a tiny electric current from one electrode to the other.</p> <p>When you sweat this allows the electric current to flow from one electrode to the other easier, due to less resistance, and this results in <a rel="noopener" href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1094428116681073" target="_blank">increased skin conductance</a>.</p> <p>This measure can pick up even very small increases in sweat you wouldn’t otherwise notice.</p> <p><a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429220/original/file-20211028-13882-16y7l51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429220/original/file-20211028-13882-16y7l51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="Scared man rowing away from sharks" /></a> <em><span class="caption">Imagine being chased by sharks. Some people can’t conjure up the image in their mind.</span> <span class="attribution"><a rel="noopener" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/escape-crisis-613248632" target="_blank" class="source">Shutterstock</a></span></em></p> <p>For most people who could conjure up images in their mind, their skin conductance increased when they read these stories. But people with aphantasia didn’t show a significant increase in their skin conductance levels when reading the same scenarios.</p> <p>There was no difference between the two groups when viewing scary pictures. This suggests aphantasic people’s lack of a reaction to these stories wasn’t due to a general dampening of emotional responses.</p> <p>Instead, we concluded the lack of a change in skin conductance in these people with aphantasia is specific to being unable to <em>visualise</em> these fear-inducing stories.</p> <p><strong>What’s going on in the brain?</strong></p> <p>Very little work has been done to measure neural activity in people with aphantasia to give us a firm idea of why they cannot visualise images.</p> <p>One <a rel="noopener" href="https://academic.oup.com/cercorcomms/article/2/2/tgab035/6265046" target="_blank">study</a> shows both the frontal and visual regions of the brain are linked to visualising images. And in people with aphantasia, the connection between these two areas is weaker.</p> <p>Another study found the pattern of activity in visual regions of the brain <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.jneurosci.org/content/37/5/1367.abstract" target="_blank">is correlated</a> with the vividness of the mental images.</p> <p>So any reduction in connectivity between the frontal and visual regions may result in less control over the visual regions. This might lead to the inability to visualise.</p> <p><strong>So what if you have aphantasia?</strong></p> <p>If you have aphantasia, it might just mean reading a <a rel="noopener" href="https://stephenking.com" target="_blank">Stephen King novel</a> is unlikely to ruffle your feathers.</p> <p>Theoretically, remembering fearful experiences might also be less scary. We did not test personal memories in our study, but we hope to look at these in the future.</p> <p>People with aphantasia report their personal memories (<a rel="noopener" href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13421-014-0402-5" target="_blank">autobiographical memories</a>) are <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7" target="_blank">less vivid</a> and <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945220301404?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">detailed</a> than people with visual imagery.</p> <p>People with aphantasia may also be less likely to develop disorders associated with fear memories, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).</p> <p>Another possibility is they still may develop PTSD but it presents <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7" target="_blank">in a different way</a> to people with visual imagery – without flashbacks. But more research is needed.</p> <p><em><a rel="noopener" href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/rebecca-keogh-301841" target="_blank">Rebecca Keogh</a>, Research Fellow, Department of Cognitive Science, <a rel="noopener" href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/macquarie-university-1174" target="_blank">Macquarie University</a></em></p> <p><em>This article is republished from <a rel="noopener" href="https://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a rel="noopener" href="https://theconversation.com/not-spooked-by-halloween-ghost-stories-you-may-have-aphantasia-170712" target="_blank">original article</a>.</em></p> <p><em>Image: Shutterstock</em></p>

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Having a blind mind’s eye: What is aphantasia?

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Try imagining a scene at the beach. For some people, the experience will be intensely visual and feel like they are looking at a photo, others might see it hazily or missing some of the colours.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For an even smaller group, they will think of the beach scene more in concepts. They know what a beach looks like but can’t actually see one in their mind’s eye.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This condition, called aphantasia, affects between one and five percent of the population though many don’t realise they have it until they share their experiences with someone without the condition or encounter it online.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While this leads to a lot of self-diagnosis, researchers are looking for more objective diagnostic tools.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Researchers at Macquarie University have experimented with identifying new methods of diagnosis. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In one experiment, the researchers attached electrodes to people’s skin to measure how much they sweat while imagining scary scenarios. The results showed that people with aphantasia didn’t sweat in the same way as people who could see images in their mind’s eye, but they did when shown actual scary images.</span></p> <p><strong>All in our heads</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the condition has technically been known since the 1800s, a history of imagery research as a low-priority field meant the condition was only named in 2015 when neurologist Professor Adam Zeman and colleagues coined the term - ‘a’ meaning none, and ‘phantasia’ meaning imagery.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though historical research surrounding survivors of strokes and traumatic brain injuries had found they had reported losing the ability to visualise images, the advent of neuroimaging fast-tracked research in the area.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Neuroimaging includes commonly known techniques such as MRIs and CT scans, and this family of techniques showed that specific visual regions of the brain are activated when we imagine things.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, if you were shown a picture of a tree, a pattern of activation would occur in these visual regions. When you go to imagine that tree later, your brain attempts to recreate that neural pattern - meaning that you reactivate the neurons in a similar way to how they were activated when you first saw the tree.</span></p> <p><strong>Why do we visualise things?</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the reason isn’t fully clear, being able to visualise things can help us remember things from the past and imagine future scenarios to make decisions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">People with aphantasia aren’t that disadvantaged though, instead finding other ways to help them remember things and plan for the future.</span></p>

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