#mental-imagery

#mental-imagery

Close your eyes and picture an apple. Most people see something-a faint, slightly blurry image, less vivid than a real apple. A few, however, will see it as clearly as if it were sitting right in front of them. This ability is called hyperphantasia. Hyperphantasia, literally meaning "beyond imagination," refers to exceptionally vivid mental imagery. It is often described as the opposite of aphantasia, a condition in which people report little or no ability to form mental images.

Yes and no, says cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, who with Halely Balaban recently published a paper titled "The Capacity Limits of Moving Objects in the Imagination." If you're like most people, you probably thought about some of these things, but not others. People build mental imagery hierarchically, starting with the ideas of "person," "room," "ball," and "table," then placing them in relation to one another in space, and only later filling in details like color.

The emerging consensus is striking-the mind does not merely interpret reality; it actively participates in shaping it. Across research on the placebo effect, athletic peak performance, and self-fulfilling prophecies, a consistent pattern appears: what we expect, believe, and even feel profoundly alters how we experience the world. Put differently, the mind is not a passive observer. It is a predictive, generative, reality-filtering system-one that continually constructs the lens through which we live our daily experiences.