Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Mooney

Jean-Pierre Mooney (pictured) knows the colour of his girlfriend’s hair and eyes, but he just can’t picture her face. “If she went missing and the police asked me to draw a sketch, I wouldn’t know how,” he says. “That’s like sorcery for me.”

The 34-year-old from Brisbane, Australia, was born without a mind’s eye, meaning he can’t create mental images. The official name of his condition is aphantasia, and it is thought to affect about 2 per cent of the population.


Mooney didn’t realise there was anything unusual about him, until he read about a study of people with aphantasia in 2015. “I asked all my friends, ‘can you see stuff in your minds?’ and they said ‘yes’. I had no idea.”

The revelation helped to explain his poor sense of direction and tendency to forget where he had parked his car. “Floor numbers were made for people like me,” he says. “I can’t remember landmarks.”

On the plus side, Mooney rarely feels anxious. He believes this is because he struggles to imagine bad things happening in the future or relive negative experiences from the past. “If you ask me to imagine a plane crash, it doesn’t really affect me, because I can’t see it happening,” he says. “It’s just words.”

Nevertheless, since learning of his condition, Mooney has been searching for a cure. “Now that I know I’m missing out, I want to know what it’s like to have a mind’s eye.”

Mooney has become involved in research by Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who is investigating how mental imagery works by studying people with aphantasia.

Because some people with aphantasia do experience dreams, the researchers believe that different brain areas control voluntary and involuntary mental imagery. Others have reported hallucinations when they take psychoactive drugs.

“I dream in incredible detail,” says Mooney. “But when I wake up, I can’t recall the images, just the details,” he says. “Sometimes when I’m just about to fall asleep, I almost catch an image, but as soon as I realise, it fades away.”

One finding of Pearson’s team is that people with aphantasia often have good spatial imagery: they can rotate shapes in their minds, even though they can’t visualise them. To do this they seem to use compensatory mechanisms, like imagining how the shape would feel if they turned it in their hands.

The team has also found that applying an electric current to the scalp seems to increase the strength of mental imagery in people without aphantasia. The next step will be to test whether the technique can be used to induce visual images in people with aphantasia. “I’m really hoping it works,” says Mooney. “I can’t even imagine how amazing that would be”.