Conditions exist that are little more than unimaginable. Paradoxically, one of them is fantasy: the inability of some people to evoke memories or visualize mental images. Broadly speaking, his inability to imagine. Or what is the same: lack of imagination, something that is mysterious to those who do not suffer from it.
This pathology was first described in 1880, but just a few years ago the expert in cognitive behavior, Adam Zeman, gave it the attention it deserves and coined the name fantasy. Now, it is proven that many people suffer from it – it is even estimated that one in 50 people, at least in Europe. But its origin, or the differences between one patient and another, are still being studied by neurology.
The commonly accepted explanation for fantasy—and also studied by Zeman and his team—is that when we run a memory in the pineal gland (our «mental eye»), we are trying to reactivate the same patterns of activity as at the moment when the memory It was formed. It is a brain procedure that could be interrupted in some way, perhaps due to a failure in the neurons responsible for this task.
That is why they also call it «mental blindness», although this name could make it seem that those who suffer from fantasy are condemned to the immediate, and that they can only live in the moment; but it’s not like that. Niel Kenmiur, a patient from England with fantasy, perfectly remembers the events, but perceived with other senses that he stores as memories. His memories are rather “conceptual”, while those of an average person are based on the pictorial construction developed with the help of what is captured by the pineal gland and stored by the brain.
In this sense, that of patients with aphantasy could be a memory that is sometimes less «corrupted» by the fantasy of the imagination itself. This plays such an important role in the generation of the brain «file» of memory, that sometimes it can even distort them. This has already been documented by Oliver Sacks studying the experience with his own memories of World War II, some of which he discovered, traumatically, to be untrue.
Those are just the rants of memory. But imagining itself is a capacity that, although not always reliable, feeds our fantasy and is essential even for living in the present. For this reason, hundreds of neurologists are already studying the possibility of creating a treatment that helps the brain of patients with phantasy to do what it naturally does: make us imagine anything.
Some psychologists have also generated a small test which can guide us about the capabilities of our pineal gland or even let us know if they are nil and we suffer from fantasy (or if they are highly developed and we suffer from its opposite: hyper-fantasy).
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