The following is the script and reference section for the video on my YouTube channel titled The Aphantasia Lie located at this link: https://youtu.be/UyBikVRPh6c
In 2016, I was in graduate school, taking cognitive psychology and the professor was explaining how the brain manipulates mental imagery. He asked us to imagine an elephant standing next to a mouse and then instructed us to “zoom in” on the mouse. He also discussed the process of imagining colors. I became increasingly confused and uncomfortable until I eventually interrupted to ask something along the lines of, “Is this all metaphorical? Surely you can’t actually imagine colors, right?” Over the next decade, I wrote my PhD dissertation and a book chapter about… it… and I’m still zooming in on that mouse. Let’s begin with what I thought would be a simple question: What is it called?
In 2015, a letter to the editor called “Lives without imagery—Congenital aphantasia” was published in the scientific journal Cortex (Zeman et al., 2015). It’s a short article, coming in at under three pages, but it did something new. This was where the term “aphantasia” was used for the very first time.
At first glance, it may therefore seem like aphantasia was named for the first time in 2015.
And indeed, that claim is made in many places including in Schwarzlose’s 2021 book Brainscapes, where she writes that the symptom “…only recently received a name: aphantasia” (Schwarzlose, 2021, p. 183).
Unfortunately, that’s wrong.
Here’s a writer for the Guardian getting it wrong by claiming it was only recently discovered (Lavelle, 2019).
Here’s an aphantasia researcher who got it wrong by calling it recently-identified (Pounder, 2021).
And here’s an advice columnist who got it wrong by claiming it was given a name only recently (vos Savant, 2023).
Who wrote this one? vos Savant?
Why do I know that name?… and why do I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to write her a letter to tell her that she’s wrong?…
I’m sure it’ll come to me.
In actual fact, the first known writings about what is now called aphantasia come from the 1800s, it just wasn’t known as aphantasia back then.
Depending on how you count, aphantasia is the 11th different name for this condition.
Allow me to explain!
INTRO
A definition of aphantasia that most agree upon is “a condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery” (Zeman et al., 2015, p. 2). And imagery, in this case, refers to “visual imagination.”
Here’s two hypothetical people. If I ask Person A to close their eyes and imagine what a rainbow looks like, they might report experiencing a brilliant multi-colored rainbow in their mind’s eye, almost as if they were really seeing it. But if I ask person B to do the same thing, they might report being unable to see a rainbow in their imagination. The ability or inability to create mental imagery shows great individual differences, meaning that one person’s experience may be very different from another person’s experience. In today’s language, we would likely say that Person B is experiencing aphantasia. But it wasn’t always called that.
The first known time that a phenomenon similar to our definition shows up in the scientific literature is within the work of Gustav Fechner all the way back in the year 1860. His book, “Elements of Psychophysics” was published in two volumes. The first of which was translated from German into English in 1966. There, he writes about his observations that people had different levels of ability when it came to perceiving sensory stimuli. He wrote: “…the same stimulus may be perceived as stronger or weaker by one subject…. we can speak of a greater or lesser intensity of sensation… of the vividness of images of memory and fantasy…” (1966, pp. 38, 46).
In his second as of yet untranslated volume (1860), let me know if you’d like to volunteer, he tested this idea of individual differences in mental imagery by asking six people he knew well about their use of mental images. Mostly other professors, as well as his wife. Notably for the history of aphantasia, one of those people was an anatomy professor named Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann. When asked to imagine various images such as roses and faces (p. 477), Dr. Volkmann said “werden periodisch zu einem bloßen Gedankendinge” (p. 479). Loosely translated, that means that sometimes when he tried to create an image of an object, he would find himself just thinking about the object instead of creating a mental picture of the object.
If we return to our definition, “reduced or absent voluntary visual imagination,” we can plainly see that it is very tempting to call Dr. Volkmann the first known aphant in history. And Fechner himself wrote that his own mental imagery was somewhat reduced, even if he strained his imagination as much as possible (p. 476).
But, some people to be named later don’t like a particular piece of the definition we’ve been using so far. Specifically, they take issue with that word “reduced.” That is to say, it can be argued that we should reserve the term aphantasia only for people with absent voluntary visual imagination. If we do that, we need a different term to describe Fechner and Volkmann, such as hypophant: a person with reduced, but not absent, voluntary visual imagination.
Fechner never took his mental imagery investigation further than his simple imagination exercise with his close friends. But there were other researchers in the 1800s who took things further. In fact, they took them too far.
In the early 1880s, Francis Galton wrote quite a bit about mental imagery, including his interest in “the essential differences between the mental operations of different men” (p. 83).
He also published a full questionnaire about people “seeing images in their mind’s eye” (1883, p. 378), and gave it to well over a hundred people. This was his breakfast table survey, where he asked people to not only remember but picture what their breakfast table looked like that morning. My favorite part of it reads “are the colours of the china, of the toast, bread crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?” (p. 378)
As a reminder, this was the 1880s, so that’s about the most pretentious description of a breakfast one could have written. This morning I had meat and parsley on fine china for breakfast. What did you have? Oh, porridge? What color was it? Brown? But like a distinct and natural brown?
Importantly, Galton allowed for a possible response of no mental imagery, or as he phrased it, “my powers are zero” (pp. 92–93). Importantly, he reported that several “men of science… protested that mental imagery was unknown to them” (p. 85). If we don’t count Drs. Fechner and Volkmann as aphants, then this is likely the first written description of what is now called aphantasia.
But, Galton did not give a name to the concept of unknown mental imagery. If he had, maybe his scientific legacy would be remembered more kindly. Instead, in a depressing plot twist, within the very same book as his breakfast table survey, he gave a name to a different concept. The emerging field… of eugenics (p. 24). Eugenics usually comes in the form of trying to prevent certain “less suitable” (p. 25) groups from having children. Which helps explain why his chapter about mental imagery contains disturbing phrases such as “uncivilized races” (p. 101). Galton’s overreliance on genetics as explanations for things like intelligence led many scientists down a path of biological racism which was used for awful actions such as coerced sterilization. It’s one thing to study individual differences in human abilities, and quite another to then try and decide which humans deserve to exist. Fortunately, it’s time to move on.
There’s another important figure from the 1800s when it comes to aphantasia, and that is Jean-Martin Charcot. In 1883, one of Dr. Charcot’s lectures was written up in French (Charcot, 1883), and was later translated into English in 1889 (Charcot, 1889). Charcot reports that he has discovered a patient who used to be able to form mental images, but that patient was no longer able to do so. As Young & van de Wal write in their 1996 analysis of this important paper, this is the first known case of acquired aphantasia—although they don’t call it aphantasia, remember, that word wasn’t invented yet. Quote: “We do not know of any earlier reports that focused so clearly on loss of visual imagery…” (p. 36).
However, it’s been questioned whether this patient, called Monsieur X, had a structural or functional explanation for their sudden loss of visual imagination (Zago et al., 2011). In other words, “…there was no direct evidence of neurological disease…” (Young & van de Wal, 1996, p. 36). We don’t know exactly what was going on in this person’s brain that led to the aphantasia, because there were basically zero methods of brain imaging for living patients in the 1880s. It could have been something structural, like a stroke, tumor, or physical trauma. Or, it might have been something functional, such as his life becoming so stressful that his brain stopped making use of the brain function of imagery, which is what we might call a conversion disorder or a functional neurological symptom disorder today. Regardless of why Monsieur X lost his voluntary visual imagination, it did lead to an interesting development in the history of aphantasia, namely, the first formal name for the symptom.
Charcot referred to the disorder as “la perte de la vision mentale des objets” (Charcot, 1883, p. 4). When translated into English, it is the “loss of mental vision for objects” (Charcot, 1889, p. 152). It’s not a… great name. But it’s something. So that is the original name for aphantasia, and it was named all the way back in 1883, not 2015.
From there, the work of Charcot inspired another name for the disorder… sort of. In 1927, Otto Pötzl proposed calling it “Die Seelenblindheit mit Störung des optischen Vorstellungsvermögens” (p. 306). When translated, this approximately means “soul blindness with disturbance of visual imagination.” Which is definitely cooler sounding than “loss of mental vision for objects.”
Unfortunately, Otto made what I would call a blunder. In order to clarify what the heck he was referring to, he also called the symptom something else, in this eternally incomplete parenthetical: “Charcot-Wilbrand scher Typus der Seelenblindheit,” (p. 306) which, when translated from the original German into English becomes “The Charcot-Wilbrand type of soul blindness.”
Regrettably, over time, it became apparent that the name was too long, and people liked including the names of famous doctors, so they ended up dropping the cool “soul blindness” part entirely. That was how we got the shortened moniker of “Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome.”
Hi! One problem with Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome is that it doesn’t exist. But we’ll get back to that after I tell you that this video was brought to you in part by my Patrons over on Patreon where you can help make these videos possible, so please check it out and consider joining. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss the next video, and if you like the video, please click the like button so that the machines weaving our fates know that you like it. Leaving a comment also boosts visibility. If you’re watching this in the future on some other platform, what’s that like? Did we fix climate change yet? And do I ever get a haircut? You know what, I’m fine with it being a surprise. Anyway, back to the video!
Which of course, raises the question: who in the world is Wilbrand? Well, I left his work out for a reason. See, Wilbrand published a brain injury case study in 1887 in which the patient’s ability to dream was disrupted, but her ability to use mental imagery was not. In other words, Wilbrand’s patient did not experience what we would today call aphantasia (Solms et al., 1996). The rub is that a bunch of people made the mistake of lumping together Charcot’s patient with Wilbrand’s patient. But, in reality the changes in their brains, whatever they were, produced different symptoms. The term Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome refers to a constellation of correlated symptoms, and may include a combination of disturbed dreams, visual agnosia like being unable to recognise objects, and, sometimes, a loss of visual imagery. Therefore, it can be argued that Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome is not only a non-specific name for aphantasia, but it’s not even really a well-defined disorder.
There were other important studies about mental imagery in the early 1900s that acknowledged that some people reported having no mental images, most notably Betts in 1909 (p. 8). However, even though he clearly detected the phenomenon now known as aphantasia among his data (p. 15), Betts did not attempt to name it. Instead, he referred to it as “instances in which no image appeared” (p. 16), or “the image was reported as entirely lacking” (p. 38). At one point, Betts actually writes, quote, “those using no imagery are not the most important thing” (p. 76). The closest he gets is the phrase “absence of imagery” (p. 97), but even then he mostly seems to blame the imagery, and not the individual differences of the person’s brain. To him, it’s not so much a symptom, but an event that just sometimes happens.
It would be a while before someone else took a crack at naming. But, in 1942, Johannes Nielsen pointed out the problem with the term Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome, namely that it referred to multiple symptoms that did not always coincide (p. 139). His suggestion was to separate out the symptom of reduced or absent visual imagination and to call it… well, he actually ended up using multiple terms. In my opinion he can claim two attempts to coin a term for the symptom, with the phrase “loss of revisualization” first used by him in 1937 (1937, p. 114), and the phrase “irreminiscence [comma] visual” in 1942 (1942, pp. 134–135) which thankfully matured into “visual irreminiscence” by 1946 (1946, p. 254).
Although, technically, he only claims to have coined the second of these. He instead claims that “various writers” have stressed “the loss of revisualization of former images” (1937, p. 114). And while you can find the term “revisualization” in the literature, like here in a case study by Arbuse, not only did it come out in 1947, a decade after Nielsen used the term in 1937, Arbuse even pretty much explicitly says, yeah, Nielsen’s the guy who knows about this (p. 368). That is to say that before Nielsen used the term revisualization, I was unable to find anyone using the term in the context of losing their ability of visual imagination.
Like, in this study by Lyman et al. from 1938, around the time that Nielsen claimed various writers were using the term revisualization, the authors just wrote “the patient said that he had no visual images” (p. 501). And German-language papers from around that time, are, well, in German, so they didn’t use the term either (e.g., Hoff & Pötzl, 1937). I guess I’m not entirely sure what they’re saying, but it isn’t that.
The one paper I could find that uses the term revisualization before Nielsen was by Prince from 1922, which uses the term in conjunction with hallucinations made from so-called subconscious images (p. 182). In the article, one person described a hallucination in a dream in which a big red pepper was up on stage and it split open to reveal “a large group of women in bright red tights” who danced around until she woke up (pp. 204–205).
…Which seems unrelated to Nielsen’s work.
So, maybe these “various writers” exist, but I certainly can’t find them. Which means that as far as I can tell, Nielsen effectively coined two historical terms for aphantasia.
But we have even more attempts at nomenclature to consider. In 1984, Farah published an article that made a heroic effort to review the literature for all known cases of acquired, uh, “image generation process deficit” (pp. 257–258). And while this was a ground-breaking article that deserves a ton of praise, the clunky name for the condition did not stick.
In 1985, a key case study by Botez et al. explicitly focused on this symptom, which they referred to as “defective revisualization” in the title of their paper. In the first two words of the title of their paper. That name was clearly inspired by Nielsen’s terminology, and the authors say as much, though they make a weird mistake. They cite Nielsen’s 1946 publication and claim that he used the term defective revisualization. He didn’t. He instead used the term “disturbed revisualization” (p. 81). So, Botez et al. accidentally coined a new phrase for the symptom.
Beginning in the 90s, a researcher named Bill Faw took the symptom very seriously because he identified with it. He didn’t use the term aphantasia, however, but rather the term “non-imager.” According to a conference paper (2016), he gave mental imagery profiles to some 2,500 people over the course of more than a decade of research (pp. 6–7), so he certainly seems qualified to name the condition. And the term “non-imager” appears extensively in his 1997 and 2009 publications on the topic. He even distinguishes between “natural” and “clinical” non-imagers, (pp. 7–8), which would later be called, respectively, congenital and acquired aphants. He referred to himself as a natural non-imager.
And, remember that letter to the editor from the beginning of this video? It directly acknowledges Bill Faw’s work in the first paragraph, and then just, ignores the fact that he had already coined a term for the condition (Zeman et al., 2015, p. 1). Then they refer back to his work on page two without citing his name, which is a big no-no in science, and if you count the fact that his reference appears on page 3, then Faw is demonstrably important to every page of this letter. So it’s very weird that they ignored his terminology completely.
Plus, of all of the terms on this list that are not aphantasia, I like non-imager the best. It’s less wordy than pretty much everything else, it’s easy to pronounce and understand, and it’s certainly less “othering” than terms that included the words disturbed, or deficit, or defective.
Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on. Sorry, Bill.
In 2010, a team led by a researcher called Zeman proposed the term “blind imagination.” Once again, it was done in the title of the paper. Very bold.
If the name of that researcher sounds familiar, yeah, it’s the same guy who went on to coin the term aphantasia in that letter to the editor just a few years later.
According to the people involved (Zeman et al., 2015, p. 1), the 2010 article was popularized by the science writer Carl Zimmer who wrote a piece for Discover magazine. That article attracted the attention of a lot of readers who got in touch with the research lab led by Zeman, which eventually led to the article in which the term “aphantasia” was coined.
That is to say that the term aphantasia caught on due to public awareness, which it hadn’t really breached before. It’s a prime example of consensus reality: if enough people call something by a certain name, eventually that becomes the name of that thing. Even now, people are learning about the condition and flocking to places like the aphantasia subreddit to ask questions about this condition as they realize that there are individual differences in imaginations.
In summary, aphantasia was not discovered in 2015, it was just given a name that stuck in 2015, and the rest is history.
Unfortunately, the name game seems to be rigged in favor of the name aphantasia, and also implying that it’s the only name. Don’t get me wrong, aphantasia is a fine name, I use it, it’s catchy. It does, after all, make up half of the title of my PhD dissertation (Toftness, 2022).
But like, here’s a piece of commentary, from Cortex again, published in 2022, that essentially just begs people to use the term aphantasia and forget about any potential alternatives, with Zeman as a coauthor, of course (Monzel et al., 2022).
But the commentary did something new. This was where the term “Nevertheless, we acknowledge, of course, that,” was used for the very first time.
It’s a horrific sentence, but it ends with a nice idea: “Nevertheless, we acknowledge, of course, that, as is always the case with language use, the final outcome will evolve naturally and research and public interest will ultimately select the final terminology used” (p. 151).
Alright, well, I vote we give the term non-imager another shot.
Hi. Editing Xander from the future here, cutting in with two quick updates. First, I emailed with Bill Faw, and he reports that one of the reasons he shies away from using the term “aphantasia” is that it implies that the person is imagination-blind such that they don’t have an imagination because of the way the word is structured, with “a-” meaning “without” and one of the interpretations of “-phantasia” possibly meaning “imagination,” therefore this person doesn’t have an imagination, which is too strong of a claim. Therefore, aphantasia is not a great term. However, back in 2011, he found an email that he sent to Zeman that said that he was in favor of the term “blind imagination” because that just implies that the person’s imagination is blind. Therefore, it allows for the fact that the person has an imagination, it just happens to be different in character, such that it is blind. Second quick update: I did actually end up getting a haircut. No progress on climate change, back to you. Back to me? Back to me.
And seriously, I did a quick search and this combination of words only appears in this paper. Exactly how many people reviewed and edited this paper? Four?
Oh, and look, they submitted a definition of aphantasia that doesn’t match the way they themselves defined the condition back in 2015. They took out the reduced part (Zeman et al., 2025). So, yes, earlier when I said that some people don’t agree with the definition, I mean that the people who created the definition don’t agree with the definition.
And even when writers get the facts about this condition technically correct, the implications come across as foggy. Such as in this article (Kramer, 2021) that correctly notes that the “condition is not new,” but then goes on to muddy things up by writing “They also gave this condition a name: ‘aphantasia…’” And that is technically correct, they did give it “a” name. But it seems to imply that… nobody else gave it a name before then?
Even Zimmer, a science communicator that I greatly admire and who signed a book for me around the time I started making videos, wrote in a later article: “The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia…” (2021). I mean, yeah, they did give it that name, but again, we’re implying that—WAIT A MINUTE!
vos Savant, the columnist for Parade Magazine! I remember now for dramatic effect! She’s the person who, after writing the correct answer to the Monty Hall problem in her column, received over 10,000 letters telling her that she was wrong. I teach that example in my Intro Psych class when I discuss heuristics. Anyway, that’s where I know her from, a mob of people telling her that her correct fact was incorrect. And I guess she held the since-discontinued Guinness World Record for highest IQ score? Does… does that mean I just outsmarted the smartest person on the planet? Anyway, I need to end this video so I can write her a letter.
Dear Marilyn, In October of 2023, you wrote that aphantasia was “given a name only recently.” Attached is a thoroughly-researched video about why that’s wrong. The video we’re in right now, actually, as I’m recording the typing of this email. You also told Carl Coker from Paris, Texas, that people who claim to have a mind’s eye “can’t see images, either.” That’s also incorrect, but it’ll have to wait until a future video? Hey, you’re in the future, right? Maybe you can tell me—did we fix climate change yet?
Patrons
Rødal
Whitney Toftness
Speck of Dust
Audio credits
Intro Music is an excerpt from a song titled “My Brain Hurts” from the eponymous album “Fine Art” (1978) — Used with permission of musician Colin Mansfield: https://colinmansfield.bandcamp.com/
German Language Voiceover: Philine Giese
French Language Voiceover: Jacob Wheaton
“Amazing Plan” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Bleeping Demo” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)| Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Brain Dance” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Circus of Freaks” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Comic Plodding” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Decisions” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Doobly Doo” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Galactic Rap” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Half Mystery” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Leaving Home” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Magic Escape Room” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Magistar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Mesmerizing Galaxy” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Olde Timey” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Onion Capers” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Pleasant Porridge” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The Bandit” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Work is Work” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Photo sources for modified portraits
Betts photo: George Betts – Database: Christian Educators of the 20th Century – Biola University
Charcot photo: File:Jean-Martin Charcot.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
Farah photo: Gallery Of Cognitive Scientists — Martha Farah
Faw photo: Bill Faw Professor Emeritus at Brewton-Parker College
Fechner photo: File:Gustav Fechner.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
Galton photo: Francis Galton | Biography, Travels, & Eugenics | Britannica
Nielsen photo: https://doi.org/10.1001/archneur.1970.00480280098017
Pötzl photo: Archivo:Prof. Otto Pötzl.jpg – Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
vos Savant photo: Anchorage Daily News Ask Marilyn – Newspapers.com
Volkmann photo: Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann – Wikipedia
Wilbrand photo: File:Wilbrand, Hermann.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
Zeman photo: El médico que tiene afantasía, la condición que le impide a las personas soñar
Zimmer photo: A Day in the Life of Carl Zimmer – The Open Notebook
References
[20] Arbuse, D. I. (1947). The Gerstmann syndrome: Case report and review of the literature. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 105(4), 359–371. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-194704000-00002
[16] Betts, G. H. (1909). The distribution and functions of mental imagery. Teachers College Press. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/George_Herbert_Betts_The_Distribution_and_Function?id=aY8VAAAAIAAJ
[25] Botez, M. I., Olivier, M., Vézina, J. L., Botez, T., & Kaufman, B. (1985). Defective revisualization: Dissociation between cognitive and imagistic thought case report and short review of the literature. Cortex, 21(3), 375–389. https://doi.org/g487
[10] Charcot, J. M. (1883). Clinique des maladies nerveuses: Un cas de suppression brusque et isolée de la vision mentale des signes et des objets: Formes et couleurs (D. Bernard, Ed.). Imprimerie Alcan-Lévy. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5463028m/f5.item
[11] Charcot, J. M. (1889). Lecture XIII: On a case of sudden and isolated suppression of the mental vision of signs and objects (forms and colours). In T. Savill (Trans.), Clinical lectures on diseases of the nervous system, delivered at the infirmary of La Salpêtrière (Vol. 3, pp. 151–163). The New Sydenham Society. https://archive.org/details/lecturesondiseas03char/page/150/mode/2up
[24] Farah, M. J. (1984). The neurological basis of mental imagery: A componential analysis. Cognition, 18(1–3), 245–272. https://doi.org/cb7rf2
[26] Faw, B. (1997). Outlining a brain model of mental imaging abilities. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 21(3), 283–288. https://doi.org/bgkpw2
[28] Faw, B. (2009). Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities: Evidence from mental imaging research. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(4), 45–68. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-05537-003
[27] Faw, B. (2016, February 20). Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities: Evidence from mental imaging research. The 40th Annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference. Midsouth Philosophy Conference. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323699685_Mental_Imagery_2016_Faw
[6] Fechner, G. T. (1860). Elemente der psychophysik (vol. 1). Leipzig, Breitkopf und Härtel. https://archive.org/details/elementederpsych001fech/page/n19/mode/2up
[8] Fechner, G. T. (1860). Elemente der psychophysik (vol. 2). Leipzig, Breitkopf und Härtel. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_oX4NAAAAYAAJ/page/476/mode/2up
[7] Fechner, G. T. (1966). Elements of psychophysics (H. E. Adler, D. H. Howes, & E. G. Boring, Trans). Holt, Rinehart and Winston. (Original work published 1860) https://archive.org/details/elementsofpsycho0001gust/page/n9/mode/2up
[9] Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/humanfacultydeve00galt/page/84/mode/2up
[22] Hoff, H., & Pötzl, O. (1937). Ueber ein eigenartiges Syndrom bei einem Tumor im Mittelhirn. Jahrbücher für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 54, 13–54.
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