Word Of The Day — Aphantasia (And Why Is It Always Apples?)
Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 18:17
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Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday 5 February 2026 at 00:03
I'd never met this word until yesterday, and had to look it up. It's a recently introduced word and hasn't made it to the OED yet, but Merriam-Webster defines it as
: the inability to form mental images of real or imaginary people, places, or things
People vary in the extent to which they form mental picture of things and there is a scale, with some of us forming very vivid images and others forming very little and I suppose visualising things in a more abstract way. Think of an apple (don't think of an elephant! We'll come to that later) — what do you 'see' in your mind's eye? If you Google the word and look for images, you will get 700 k hits, many labelled 'aphantasia tests' and typified by this one from the related Wikipedia article
Apple are the most popular choice but birds and horses etc. are also prominent, and there are generally five degrees of ability to form mental pictures.
I never thought about this before and found it quite surprising. I have to say that if I try to rank myself on this scale I come in a firm 4, with only a vague mental picture. It's not that I can't think about an apple, I can, and I can describe its appearance pretty well, and I daresay I could draw a very passable picture of an apple. But I wouldn't be copying some kind of apple picture that's in my head, I'd be creating an image from what I know about apples.
The word aphantasia was coined in a 2015 paper by Zeman et al. [1], the first element meaning 'without' and the second coming from Greek phantasia, 'imagination' or 'appearance'. It's still a rare word (about 1 occurrence per million words on average) but it's Google n-gram shows an exponential growth curve in that short time.
Back to the elephant (had you forgotten it?). There is some other intriguing research [2] about mental imagery that suggests it is harder to visualise oneself moving an imaginary thing if its real-life counterpart would be difficult to move physically. You can try this experiment for yourself. Start a timer on your phone, close your eye and imagine an elephant facing away from you. Visualise yourself rotating the elephant 180 degrees to face you. When you feel confident you have turned the elephant 180 degrees open your eyes and check the time taken for this mental task.
Now repeat the experiment with a smaller animal, a cat say? Do you find a difference. I do (although as I've indicated i don't have very vivid picture of either animal.)
Oh and why are apples used so often? Well my guess is an early version used apples and others have just lazily copied it.
[1] Adam Zeman, et al., "Lives without imagery—congenital aphantasia," Cortex, vol. 73 (December, 2015), pp. 378-80.
Word Of The Day — Aphantasia (And Why Is It Always Apples?)
I'd never met this word until yesterday, and had to look it up. It's a recently introduced word and hasn't made it to the OED yet, but Merriam-Webster defines it as
People vary in the extent to which they form mental picture of things and there is a scale, with some of us forming very vivid images and others forming very little and I suppose visualising things in a more abstract way. Think of an apple (don't think of an elephant! We'll come to that later) — what do you 'see' in your mind's eye? If you Google the word and look for images, you will get 700 k hits, many labelled 'aphantasia tests' and typified by this one from the related Wikipedia article
Apple are the most popular choice but birds and horses etc. are also prominent, and there are generally five degrees of ability to form mental pictures.
I never thought about this before and found it quite surprising. I have to say that if I try to rank myself on this scale I come in a firm 4, with only a vague mental picture. It's not that I can't think about an apple, I can, and I can describe its appearance pretty well, and I daresay I could draw a very passable picture of an apple. But I wouldn't be copying some kind of apple picture that's in my head, I'd be creating an image from what I know about apples.
The word aphantasia was coined in a 2015 paper by Zeman et al. [1], the first element meaning 'without' and the second coming from Greek phantasia, 'imagination' or 'appearance'. It's still a rare word (about 1 occurrence per million words on average) but it's Google n-gram shows an exponential growth curve in that short time.
Back to the elephant (had you forgotten it?). There is some other intriguing research [2] about mental imagery that suggests it is harder to visualise oneself moving an imaginary thing if its real-life counterpart would be difficult to move physically. You can try this experiment for yourself. Start a timer on your phone, close your eye and imagine an elephant facing away from you. Visualise yourself rotating the elephant 180 degrees to face you. When you feel confident you have turned the elephant 180 degrees open your eyes and check the time taken for this mental task.
Now repeat the experiment with a smaller animal, a cat say? Do you find a difference. I do (although as I've indicated i don't have very vivid picture of either animal.)
Oh and why are apples used so often? Well my guess is an early version used apples and others have just lazily copied it.
[1] Adam Zeman, et al., "Lives without imagery—congenital aphantasia," Cortex, vol. 73 (December, 2015), pp. 378-80.
[2] Flusberg, S.J., Boroditsky, L. Are things that are hard to physically move also hard to imagine moving?. Psychon Bull Rev 18, 158–164 (2011). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-010-0024-2 [Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-010-0024-2]
Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons 'Aphantasia apple test'