People Who Can't Picture Anything Are Rewriting the Science of Imagination

A new review in Consciousness and Cognition argues that the popular model of imagination as backwards-flowing visual perception through the primary visual cortex is largely discredited. Research on people with aphantasia and on patients who retain imagery despite primary visual cortex destruction points instead to a distributed network spanning prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, and parietal areas.

Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at dailyneuron.com. Read the original for the full text.

The 2019 backward-seeing model proposed that imagining an object runs the visual processing pipeline in reverse, reactivating the primary visual cortex as if it were a shared screen for real and imagined perception. The new review by Derek Arnold, Loren Bouyer, Blake Saurels, and Samuel Schwarzkopf challenges this on several empirical grounds.

Key points

Patients whose entire primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine faces and scenes, with frontal and temporal brain regions responding in the expected pattern; this directly falsifies the backward-seeing account.
Pooling dozens of imagery studies, Alfredo Spagna and colleagues found that imagination reliably engages the frontal cortex and the left fusiform gyrus while the primary visual cortex is often quiet.
The backward-seeing model's evidence, scanners reading which image a person imagines from primary visual cortex activity, may reflect attention effects rather than image construction.
The review proposes an emergent-property framework: a mental image arises from coordinated activity across the prefrontal cortex, fusiform strip, and motion-planning areas; the primary visual cortex acts as a sharpening helper rather than a canvas.
Because the network can fail in many places, aphantasia shows up differently across individuals; some lack only visual imagery, others lack all inner senses, and some aphantasics dream in pictures while others do not.
There is still no objective test for aphantasia; the authors call for convergent evidence from self-report, behaviour, and brain scans rather than any single measure.