Conjuring For Beginners – The Visualisation of Images.

When the nascent Aphant first discovers that the majority can visualise or shall we say conjure images at will their first reaction is incredulity. What is this magic trick, how is it done, why do more people not discuss it more often and why is it not seemingly put to greater use? For example in a court of law one almost never hears a lawyer asking a witness to close their eyes and call forth an image of a scene or a culprit – instead they are asked to verbally recall from memory what they saw - which would seem far less accurate than calling the image to mind. Similarly the Aphant artist immediately assumes that the ability to conjure images of people and places would be an undoubted advantage when trying to create a life-like representation in pencil or paint and yet there seems to be a considerable gap between the conjured image and the ability to render it on paper. Similar arguments can be made in film and media in general having the ‘sandpit’ of imagining a scene should be a marvellous time saving and enhancing tool, but again it seems it isn’t. 

One of the reason our poor Aphant may not have not noticed they can’t conjure images is because it is rarely discussed by the general public and does not seem to proffer the enormous advantage that one might first expect. There may be numerous reasons for this. One reason may be that the Aphant is not without visual memory otherwise they would be like a small baby constantly negotiating the world for the first time. The Aphant stores visual information from ‘seeing’ much like the wider populous but lacks the mechanism to re-render the images. The memories are nonetheless there and can be actualised for example on paper. So personally (warning first person anecdotal evidence) whilst I struggle to bring to mind an image of any kind I can start to draw that image and as the image takes shape on the page adjust it to greater reflect my visual memory of it. In a sense I see the image not in a mind’s eye but on the page and very much in the moment. In so doing I am aware that the information for this process is coming from some part of the brain I do not have immediate conscious access to. Rather like when one is searching for a name of a person and ‘racking one’s brain’ until it pops into ones consciousness almost as if retrieved by a team of unseen librarians. In contrast the visual conjurer can be lured into thinking that they are looking into or at a series of images somewhat akin to a photograph album stored in their brain rather than a construct created or re-created from some form of data set which may be the same as that of the Aphant.

 

This is not to minimise the potential and usefulness of being able to conjure images but we should perhaps distinguish this process from imagination as understood as the creation and/or innovation of novel approaches to say solving problems, creating narratives or artworks etc. To be blunt that most people can conjure visual images does not automatically lead to their being imaginative. Historically however the conjuring of images has been so associated with definitions of imagination that for many the two are inextricably linked hence the term a-phantasia translating as without-imagination.     

 

Cognitive psychologists have fretted long and hard over the nature of ‘seeing’ and the process whereby images are created both at the moment of seeing and then in the mind’s eye but most have worked on the assumption that everybody can conjure images. That a small minority don’t adds a form of control dimension that might lead to a re-examining of many basic principles.