![]() ![]() That changed in 2003, when Zeman got a call from a colleague who said: “I’m sending you a patient because he can no longer imagine.” The man was a 65-year-old building surveyor known as MX who reported losing his mind’s eye after heart surgery. “It was an academic blind spot,” says neurologist Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter, UK. Surveys show that most people have fairly vivid mental imagery only 2 to 3 per cent report a completely image-free mind.įor a long time, no one gave much thought to what caused this. It asks people to imagine various scenes and rate the clarity of the mental picture. Today there is a standard way to probe the acuity of the mind’s eye: the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. But a few individuals drew a total blank. Some found it easy to imagine the table, including Galton’s cousin, Charles Darwin, for whom the scene was “as distinct as if I had photos before me”. In 1880, Francis Galton conducted an experiment in which people had to imagine themselves sitting at their breakfast table, and to rate the illumination, definition and colouring of the table and the objects on it. We have known of the existence of people with no mind’s eye for more than a century. Which ones are rotated versions of this shape, and which are not? Then scroll down and find three similar objects. To begin, stare at this shape until you can remember it. Why am I different? How do I navigate life without a mind’s eye? Could I ever train my mind to see – and would I want to? ![]() And he says the same thing now: “It’s like having a computer store the information, but you don’t have a screen attached to the computer.” That’s exactly how I feel too – and so my questions began. He spoke then of how he attributed his academic success to an unusual way of thinking, using purely concepts with no mental imagery whatsoever. So I got a shock when I saw a TV interview with Craig Venter, the biologist who created the first synthetic organism. And it wasn’t as if I have trouble with tasks that you imagine might require such a “mind’s eye”, like navigating around town or recognising friends. I have never had that ability, so I didn’t know what I was missing. At the time, I didn’t think anything of the fact that I couldn’t conjure up a mental image of my girlfriend at will. It is the same for landscapes and sunsets, parks and rivers: when it comes to mental imagery, I am blind. But when my girlfriend and I had to move to opposite sides of the US for work, we faced an obstacle that few others do. ![]() The paper, "How visual perspective influences the spatiotemporal dynamics of autobiographical memory retrieval," was published in Cortex.LONG-DISTANCE relationships aren’t easy at the best of times. Iriye is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. The lead author on this paper is Faculty of Science alumna Heather Iriye, who conducted this research as part of her Ph.D. This work builds on St Jacques' previous research on visual perspective in memory, which found that the perspective from which we recall a memory can influence how we remember them over time. "This may be an effective way of dealing with troubling memories by viewing the past from a distance and reducing the intensity of the emotions we feel." "Adopting an observer-like perspective involves viewing the past in a novel way, which requires greater interaction among brain regions that support our ability to recall the details of a memory and to recreate mental images in our mind's eye."Īdopting an observer-like perspective may also serve a therapeutic purpose, explained St Jacques. "These findings contribute to a growing body of research that show that retrieving memories is an active process that can bias and even distort our memories," added St Jacques. Specifically, the results show that recalling memories from an observer-like perspective-instead of through your own eyes-leads to greater interaction between the anterior hippocampus and the posterior medial network. "Our perspective when we remember changes which brain regions support memory and how these brain regions interact together," explained Peggy St Jacques, assistant professor in the Faculty of Science's Department of Psychology and co-author on the paper. ![]()
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