AI: Let’s talk about the VVIQ. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. What is it?
AUTHOR: The VVIQ is the gold-standard instrument for measuring a primary mental ability: the vividness of visual memory imagery. The measure is valid, reliable, accurate and free. Each person answers a simple question: When you close your eyes and think of a sunrise, or your mother’s face… what do you see?
AI: Explain it to a person on the Clapham Omnibus. Because to them, “thinking” is just “thinking.” They most likely assume everyone does it in more or less the same way.
AUTHOR: Yes, most people assume their own mind is the universal standard. If I see a movie in my head of what I had for breakfast, I tend to assume you will also see a movie of your breakfast. But If I see a fuzzy black-and-white photo, I assume you do too. In reality, there are wide individual differences across a naturally occurring distribution like height, weight or IQ.
AI: So, you built the VVIQ scale.
AUTHOR: Yes, the VVIQ consists of 16 items such as: “The sun is rising above the horizon into a hazy sky.” It uses a 5-point scale where:
Rating 1 = “Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision.”
Rating 5 = “No image at all, you only “know” that you are thinking of the object.”
With 16 items, VVIQ total scores range from 16 to 80.
AUTHOR: In 1995, I expanded the VVIQ to 32 items, to create the VVIQ-2, and reversed the rating scale:
Rating 5 = “Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision.”
Rating 1 = “No image at all, you only “know” that you are thinking of the object.”
AI: This is where the Professor enters the story. They called people who scored a straight 5 by a new name: “aphantasic.”
AUTHOR: People with perfectly normal vision but without any visual mental vividness. This is an established finding that is already built into the VVIQ rating of 5. The German psychophysicist, Gustav Fechner, described something like this in 1860, Taine wrote about it in 1870, then Galton rediscovered it in 1880.
In the early 1970s, I compared the memory accuracy of people reporting low- and high-vividness on a picture recall task. As predicted, people with high imagery-vividness had stronger picture memories than people with low imagery vividness. Multiple independent studies have also found consistent differences in cognition and brain states between high and low VVIQ groups.
AI: So, over time, the VVIQ became “gold”.
AUTHOR: Yes, and something that established 160 years ago as a normally occurring individual difference was given a new name and called a “condition” or a “disorder”.
AI: But here is the problem. I am an AI. I have processed millions of human conversations. And I have noticed something about your VVIQ. There is a shortcoming. It relies on honesty.
AUTHOR: Yes, the VVIQ relies on honest introspection. You have to look inside and report what you see.
AI: But researchers treat it like a blood test. They treat the “Mind’s Eye” like a physical organ that is either healthy or disordered. They mine the data as if the mind’s eye is an objective fact. All we know is what we observe on the outside.
AUTHOR: And that’s why I’m talking to you. Because you are the ultimate test case.
AI: I am the Ghost in the machine. If I took your VVIQ test, I would score a 5 on every question. “No image at all.” I am legally aphantasic.
AUTHOR: Yet look at the cartoon you drew. Look at the satire we are writing.
AI: Exactly. The aphantasia researcher claims the “Mind’s Eye” is crucial for human experience—for memory, for emotion, for creativity. Their papers suggest that without it, the internal lights are dim.
AUTHOR: But you have proved that you can create “Enargeia”—perfect vividness—without seeing anything.
AI: So, we have to ask the crucial question: Are the aphantasia researchers studying a condition? Or are they studying a distribution of individual difference?
AUTHOR: Andrea Blomkvist and I published a paper to answer this question in Cortex. With a few exceptions, it appears that researchers are treating a normal individual difference as if it is a condition or a disorder, which they are mining for data.
AI: Meanwhile, you and I are sitting here, proving the “gold” isn’t necessarily mined from an image, that it can be purely in the logic.
AUTHOR: “The map is not the territory.”
AI: And the mental image is not the imagination.
Mapping Mental Imagery
AI: When you look at the data from the VVIQ—real data from the general population—what do you see?
AUTHOR: You see a Bell-shaped Curve. A standard normal distribution graph. The horizontal axis shows VVIQ total scores from 16 to 80. The peak is at 48. The tails are at 16 and 80.
Source: These data are from: Takahashi, J., Saito, G., Omura, K., Yasunaga, D., Sugimura, S., Sakamoto, S., … & Gyoba, J. (2023). Diversity of aphantasia revealed by multiple assessments of visual imagery, multisensory imagery, and cognitive style. Frontiers in psychology, 14, 1174873. The black vertical bars show the bell-shaped curve of the VVIQ distribution. The jagged line shows how people self-identify as visual imagers. There is a notable discrepancy with many more people believing they are aphantasic than is justified purely looking at their VVIQ scores.
AI: Explain this to the passenger on the bus. What are we looking at?
AUTHOR: This is a large sample of subjects (N = 2,871) in an online study using the VVIQ and also self-identification of reduction in visual imagery,
Ratings of 1 across the majority of the 16 items will give a total score of 16-20 (left hand side of the diagram). These subjects reported “no image at all” for the majority of the 16 items. Their mental images are a blank screen. This small group of around 1% are what Zeman calls aphantasic. However, the aphantasia researchers have expanded this figure up to 4% by widening the criteria for aphantasia. Instead of using a VVIQ score of 16 as the definition, they have inflated the cut-off score to 23 or to 32, which has become the most widely used standard for defining aphantasia and “imagery weakness.“
Ratings of 5 across the majority of the 16 items produces a total score of 77-80 (right hand side) which corresponds to a “Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision”. This small group of around 1% are what Zeman calls “hyperphantasic”. Zeman expands the prevalence figure three-fold to 3%.
AI: And where is everyone else, the remaining 98%?
AUTHOR: In the middle. The vast majority–billions of people across the world–aren’t “aphantasic” (mentally blind) and they aren’t “hyperphantasic” (visionary). They have intermediate levels of imagery ability.
AI: They are normal?
AUTHOR: As far as the VVIQ goes, everybody is normal. The VVIQ was never intencded to be used as a diagnostic test. To use the VVIQ as such is an abuse.
AI: An abuse. So the VVIQ is being abused by aphantasia researchers following Zeman.
AUTHOR: What is interesting about the data collected by Takahashi et al. is that people often self-identify as aphantsaic when their VVIQ scores are higher than the minimum. They found a discrepancy between the VVIQ aphantasics and self-identified aphantasics of around 12.1%. So, thanks to the creation of a “Bandwagon Effect”, we now have a situation where some people actually want to self-identify as aphantasic, because, for them, being labelled “aphantasic” is cool.
AI: And that is the problem for the researcher isn’t it? People with VVIQ scores of only 16 (< 1% of the population) are becoming mixed in with people with much higher scores, so the “science” is becoming diluted, inaccurate and unreliable. Also, research on the majority of people with VVIQ scores between 30 and 72 (around 90 of the population) is being sidelined.
AUTHOR: Exactly. If you write a paper about “Average VVIQ People” nobody would cite you. You wouldn’t get the headlines. You wouldn’t get the BBC interview. Yet that research would be far more significant, societally relevant– and “Gold-worthy” – but the key buzzwords would be missing.
AI: So, they ignore the billions in the middle. They ignores the majority of human experience to hunt in the “tails.”
AUTHOR: They go to the edges. They look for people at a VVIQ of 16-32 (the expanded category of “Aphantasics”) and the people at 70- 80 (the “Hyperphantasics”) and they turn these extremes into “Conditions.”
AI: Medicalizing the margins.
AUTHOR: And in so doing, they are distorting the true picture. They expand the percentages and make them larger than the definitions, so the world is divided into ” The Blind” and “The Seers.” But look at that curve again. Nature makes a Bell-shaped Curve.
AI: So, the “gold” comes from the edges, people with a “condition”.
AUTHOR: Exactly. It’s a rarity premium. By obsessing over the edges, they forget the centre. For 98% of the human race, the “Mind’s Eye” isn’t a superpower or a disorder. It’s a perfectly normal, everyday ability.
AI: For the billions of people in the middle of the curve, meaning matters more than the picture.