Multisensory Aphantasia

Detailed Explanation

While classical aphantasia describes the absence of visual imagery, multisensory aphantasia extends to other senses. Affected individuals cannot imagine inner sounds (auditory aphantasia), smells (olfactory aphantasia), tastes (gustatory aphantasia), or touch sensations (tactile aphantasia). Studies show that many people with visual aphantasia also report weaker imagery in other senses, while others are only visually affected. A complete absence of imagery in all senses is not rare: in one study it applied to around 26% of participants with aphantasia (Dawes et al. 2020). These differences suggest different subtypes of aphantasia.

Keywords

• multisensory aphantasia
• sensory modalities
• auditory aphantasia
• total aphantasia

Learn more

• Types of Aphantasia
• MST-21 – Multisensory Imagery Test

Related Terms

• AphantasiaAphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create mental images. People with aphantasia cannot visualize faces, places, or objects in their mind's eye, although they can recognize and describe them. The term was coined by neurologist Adam Zeman in 2015.
• PSIQ (Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire)The PSIQ is a questionnaire that measures imagery ability across seven modalities: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, bodily sensation, and emotional feeling. It is more comprehensive than the purely visual VVIQ (Andrade et al. 2014, doi:10.1111/bjop.12050).
• Mental ImagesMental images are internal visual representations that arise without external stimuli. They enable seeing objects, scenes, or people before the "mind's eye," such as when remembering, dreaming, or planning.