I'm going to be giving a talk on #art and #aphantasia on Tuesday 16th December, for the fine folk at Aphantasia Network - you can watch online here: aphantasia.com/event/019a92...
Very glad to have talked to Larissa MacFarquhar for this beautiful piece on extremes of imagining. Goes deep into the experiences of artists Clare Dudeney and Sheri Paisley; more on their and others' practices in our research article here medicine-vet-medicine.ed.ac.uk/sites/defaul...
Thanks Aaron, your work looks really interesting. Yes please do submit a proposal - you would need to be able to get to Cambridge though
#callforpapers I’m co-convening a session at The AAH 2026 Conference with the wonderful Whitney Davis. If you're interested in the relationship between images in the head and in the world, what constitutes a picture, etc, drop us a proposal! forarthistory.org.uk/images-and-p...
How can you describe something if you can't visualise it?Fascinating insight into creative writing with #aphantasia by author Dustin Grinnell www.youtube.com/shorts/DAB-E...
Love this. Another poke in the eye of the genius/hero/human template of creativity.
aeon.co/essays/did-a...
Yes that sounds like future-oriented hoarding rather than past-oriented. I suppose the objects in both cases help to structure thought, in a way. Would be interesting to assess imagery of future-oriented hoarders
That's a good question, I'm not sure - in one of the papers this paper cites they find hoarders 'perceive throwing away as a threat to memory', the objects are more of a cue, that connect them to their past - so maybe in the same way that non-hoarders keep family photos
Enjoying Adam Zeman's takeover of New Scientist this week with all things imagination #scicomm #psychscisky
Very happy to declare that 'Global Culture after Gombrich: Art, Mind, World', is out!
Published by Intellect: www.intellectbooks.com/global-cultu...
Launch at the Warburg Institute on the 24th of June: warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/tradi...
#ArtHistory #Art #History #Culture
On imagining and its varieties, e.g. #2:
Individuals who hoard use objects as receptacles for memories; hoarding tendencies are associated with reduced visualising ability; so, 'visualisation difficulties may promote a reliance on objects to facilitate recall'
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
no hugging, no learning
Seinfeld's rejection of the formula providing 'opioid reassurance in the form of redemption and the simultaneous restoration of normality: the hero always achieves self-optimisation within the acceptable confines of bourgeois respectability' aeon.co/essays/why-d...?
There's so much great work on imagining and its varieties at the moment.
E.g. @eazanon.bsky.social, @kerblooee.bsky.social and others' introduction of #prophantasia: the ability to project mental images into the external world osf.io/preprints/os...
Not much. I was being flippant. Maybe 'hard to conceptualise' would have been better.
An interesting and provocative find regarding aphantasia and reading - but still find non-conscious imagery hard to believe in
Sounds just like a review AI would give 🧐 ... www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...
Here's a translation of @hnirom.bsky.social's article on aphantasic art-making - I sound so much more profound in French, but there you go artimescience.org/updates/f/ce...
Great to read of aphantasic art-making here and in the replies. This is an intro to our research on the subject -
theconversation.com/the-art-of-a... - and my website has the peer-reviewed stuff artimescience.org. New research participants are very welcome!
Here's a wee blog post, wondering if Michelangelo really did see angels in blocks of stone artimescience.org/updates/f/vi...
A drawing of 19th-century horse-drawn carriage, without the horses
On oldie but a goodie
Hello and thank you for reaching out - glad to hear these ideas make sense to you as a non-imager. More to follow!
Well this is nice. I've also gone and made a website with a blog (!) where I update on the book project and other things art, science, and imagining artimescience.org
