"Tell a man he shouldn't think of a pink elephant and he can't get that beast out of his mind!" This quote, from Curt Siodmak's 1974 novel "City in the Sky," describes how hard it can be to suppress ...

People with aphantasia may have a heightened resistance to involuntary intrusive thoughts. Tell a man he shouldn't think of a pink elephant and he can't get that beast out of his mind! This quote, ...

Imagine an apple floating in front of you. Now see if you can rotate it around in your mind. Look at it from the top, bottom – does it have any blemishes? How clearly can you see it? Some people see ...

"Think of a white sandy beach on a paradise island. Can you see it?" The ability to visualize a place, object, or place on request varies significantly between individuals. But some people cannot ...

We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors ...

When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and ...

Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein realized she didn’t have a mind’s eye. The vision scientist was sitting in a seminar room, listening to a scientific talk, when the presenter asked the audience to ...

Aphantasia denotes ‘the absence, or near-absence, of imagery’ 1. Since the term was coined in 2015, many studies have investigated the consequences of aphantasia on several cognitive processes, such ...

The last ten years were a wild ride for those of us who are interested in mental imagery. It was ten years ago that the condition of not having conscious mental imagery became known to the general ...

It hardly counts as breaking news that spending time in nature reduces stress levels. But according to a new study, merely imagining natural scenes has stress-reducing effects. The study used a ...