What Is Aphantasia and is it fixable?

How We Navigate Grief with Blair · Mar 4, 2026 · 8m

For most of my life, I thought when people said, “Close your eyes and picture a red apple,” they were being poetic.

Apparently… they weren’t.

Some people can literally see images in their mind like a movie screen. They can rotate objects, picture faces, and imagine landscapes.

I see nothing.

Just darkness.

This condition is called aphantasia, which simply means the absence of a voluntary “mind’s eye.” Research suggests that roughly 2–4% of people may experience aphantasia, though many don’t realize it until adulthood. Cool, I love being unique.

But here’s the twist. Even though I can’t…