I came across this image yet again, and felt that now familiar frustration begin to rise within me. Wherever I came across the "red star test" I knew what was to follow: plenty of confusion and misunderstanding of what the experience of aphantasia and visual imagery in the mind's eye is actually like.
The dreaded "red star test" & "seeing black"
As the topic of aphantasia began to gain traction and generate interest, so did a popular image and meme. This image, known as "the red star test" began to be shared far and wide. It became almost an obligation that if one spoke about or mentioned aphantasia, they'd use this image as a litmus test to inquire what people out there were experiencing. You could find this image on forums, blogs, short and long form video content. It was everywhere. Check it out below:
And in the comments section of the post, you'd inevitably find questions and comments along these lines:
"I close my eyes and see just black. Do I have aphantasia?"
"I had no idea people actually see things when they close their eyes!"
...and dozens of other variations along this theme of seeing black with one's eyes closed.
Now, I don't fully blame this confusion on this image alone. I also don't fully blame our scientific literature around these topics, even though the literature has admittedly been pretty vague at describing different types of visualization. The reality is that when it comes to a purely subjective topic like visualization and the mind's eye, it's a huge challenge to accurately describe the different types of subjective experiences through language alone. One day we may have a device that can accurately display what someone is experiencing in their subjective mind scape, but for now, we must rely mainly on our words.
Even surveys like the widely used VVIQ (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, David Marks 1973) still relies solely on the subjective understanding and reporting of the individual who is participating in it. Simply put, if someone participates in the VVIQ, yet has internally misclassified aphantasia for themselves, their score could be the lowest possible option (16), although they may indeed be experiencing a functioning mind's eye.
Over the years I've been working with people 1:1, this has become apparent more times than I could count. For example, a few times, I've worked with someone who reported the experience of aphantasia to me (lack of visual thought). Even after hours of working with them, I thought they were experiencing aphantasia, since that's how they reported their subjective experience through language and subjective classification of their thoughts. It wasn't until quite far into their sessions that the realization hit them...
Them: "Oh, see the scene in my mind?? Well, I can do that!"
Me: "Oh really?? Okay, well, on a scale of 1-10, how present and vivid would you say that scene is in your mind?"
Them: "Oh it's super vivid, it's like I'm there. It's like a 9, probably a 10."
Me: "Uhm, okay! So it sounds like you're actually experiencing hyperphantasia, not aphantasia..!"
Them: "Yeah, I guess I am!"
When I noticed the difference between visualization types
This revelation came to me many years ago in 2010. I had always been a visual thinker. Indeed, I had never considered that other's couldn't visualize, like many of the common visualizers out there. Yet, I recall hearing something that truly made my gears turn. I was at a conference which focused on spiritual phenomena, and the teacher casually said the following: "When I close my eyes, I don't only see just black. I can actually see things". I remember thinking how cool it would be to do that, and that I was a little jealous of his experience!
So, when I got home, I thought I'd give it a shot. If he could do it, I could do it, right? We've got the same hardware, after all. So I came up with a simple process for myself (you can explore the techniques I came up with in my Visualization Training Mega Guide) to be able to create images against the blackness which I could physically see. And... It worked! Within that very day, I was able to create some lightly colored outlines against the blackness of my closed eyes. I even recall drifting into a deeply relaxed state, and having one of the outlines taking the form of a detailed face! Pretty wild results for just coming up with a system on the fly and giving it a shot.
In the following weeks it occurred to me that what I was doing was akin to using a mental projector to produce imagery in my physical field of view. So naturally, I began to refer to this type of imagery experience as "projected imagery". I didn't have a ton of people to speak with about these things back then, so I mainly referred to this type of imagery using this terminology with myself. I kept playing with this sense, and came to the realization that I could even produce these outlines with my eyes open.
In 2011, I also realized that I could see a static-like overlay against my environment. Many years later, I came across the term for this, known as "visual snow". Upon further observation, it occurred to me that the projected outlines of objects would almost form from the visual snow I could perceive against the blackness of my closed eyes (I'll only touch on the apparent relationship between visual snow and projected images, as I could write an entire blog post about just that).
So from way back then, 15 years ago, the two experiences of visualizing in my mind's eye and projecting images into my field of view was extremely obvious. The former I had done naturally my entire life, the former I never had naturally but I developed for myself.
The experience of "projected imagery"
Before I continue, let me clarify the differences between the mind's eye and projected imagery. If you leave this post unclear still, I have not done a great job, and I've only helped perpetuate the confusion.
Here's the important thing to recognize: it seems that most visualizers from hypophantasia (weak mind's eye imagery) to hyperphantasia (super vivid mind's eye imagery), most of these people will still just see black when they close their eyes. If you beg to differ, I'd encourage you to chat with hundreds of visualizers and non-visualizers, like I have over the past 7 years, before drawing that conclusion. You'll find most people, if you really dig in with them to dissect what & how they're experiencing their imagery, do not physically see the images they are conjuring.
It seems that even with most hyperphantasics, they often times will have a tough time differentiating between what is physically seen and what is imagined since their mind's eye is so life-like, but dig in with them long enough and with the correct phrasing and questions, and most will eventually differentiate between their mind's eye and the (mostly) blackness they see with their eyes closed.
Let's start with defining the mind's eye. My favorite definition and description of the mind's eye BY FAR is this: the mind's eye is the feeling of sight without ever actually seeing anything. I came up with this definition independently after years of conversations, but I did see it mirrored in some official literature at some point (unfortunately, I cannot locate the article which I saw it defined this way... If I ever find it again, I'll cite it here). So the most important thing about the mind's eye, is that it is felt more than physically seen (especially when lower down on the spectrum of mind's eye vividness). It's the sense of what something looks like, but you never physically see it. If you can imagine sounds in your mind, you've likely had the experience of getting a song stuck in your head. Well, let's compare that experience with the mind's eye. When you have a song stuck in your head, you likely don't physically hear the song in your ears as an auditory hallucination, rather you get the sense of the song playing in your thoughts to varying degrees of vividness based on the individual. In the same way, the mind's eye occurs only in the mind. Where as projected imagery IS physically hallucinated into one's field of view.
Okay, instead of trying to nail this down any further with language, let me show you some visual aides that hopefully will help clarify. Here's a chart I created a few years back:
On the left, you have a rough representation of the mind's eye experience. While I've placed the imagery on this side in the head, it's not always experienced by visualizers in this way. The "where" of the mind's eye experience is not easy to communicate, as the imagery would occur in the same "location" that one thinks from or imagines their favorite song from... And where is that? Where is the "location" where thought occurs? Most describe it as being in or around their head.
On the right, the black area in front of the face represents the blackness one sees when they close their eyes, and this area is the physical location that imagery will appear. It's much easier to comprehend projected imagery. You either physically see it - or you don't.
Now there's one nuance I want to address real quick before moving on, and that is the idea of using one's mind's eye to overlay extra imagery into the surrounding environment. So let's say a visualizer is sitting in a cafe at a table with their friend, looking at an empty table across from them. Their friend asks them if they can imagine an apple on the empty adjacent table. The visualizer looks across to the empty table, imagines the apple, and reports "yeah, I can see the apple".
This report can be quite confusing without knowing what the visualizer is actually experiencing. Instead of projecting an apple into their physical field of view as a hallucination, they are recreating the scene of the table in their mind, but adding an apple on the table. So physically, they still see an empty table. In their mind's eye, they perceive the table, with the apple added in. Please note, I've taken some license to "dim" the quality of the mind's eye view a bit, as to not give the impression that it's a super hyperphantasic doing this pretend scenario.
So notice, although the visualizer has communicated that they "see" the apple, nothing has changed in their physical view. An aspect that seems to bridge languages of the world is our limited vocabularies to describe these subjective experiences. We tend to use the same verb for when we see something with our eyes, and when we visualize. That verb of course is: "to see". No wonder we always get tripped up when people we speak to about this topic say they "see" the objects in their minds.
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The birth of the term "prophantasia"
So now we've established a better framework for what mind's eye is and isn't, and how it differs from projected imagery. This was my internal context of all these things for years before I ever came across the official term "aphantasia". So next, let me describe the process which led to me recognizing the need for a new term to specifically describe projected imagery.
I remember it was either late March or early April 2018. And the experience I had tried to look up before that my cousin and roommate had independently described where they couldn't visualize anything seemingly had a name: aphantasia. I was stoked to see the development of this topic! I remember trying to google it back in 2011, but I couldn't find any info describing the experience of not seeing anything in your mind's eye. So I dove in headfirst. It was fascinating and exciting.
I remember one of the first things I came across was a video by the YouTube channel "Braincraft" describing aphantasia and what we knew so far. In that video, Vanessa Hill (the creator of the channel) described what they found with Patient MX in the fMRI scans that were done. I remember thinking "well, if the brain is using different areas than the visual cortex to process thought, let's just try to overlap those other areas with sensory information and see what happens". And I came up with a few ideas for exercises using words to describe sensory information.
Then, I came across a video by Photography Insider describing image streaming. I watched it, and some of the concepts were very close to what I had already dreamed up, so I figured I was on the right track. Though, one thing bugged me!
When I heard the process of image streaming described, the context was to describe what one sees on the black canvas of their closed eyes. And right away, I thought to myself "but, that would be practicing projected imagery, not regular mind's eye imagery".
And as I scoured forums, read comments, and read the official papers, it was painfully clear that there was a huge amount of confusion around what the experience of the mind's eye actually occurs like. So even back then, in my very early videos, I began to address the differences between projected imagery and regular mind's eye.
And after about 4 videos, I decided one thing would really help the conversation: to have a dedicated term for the skill of projected imagery. And I came up with a catchy sounding term, which fit the description of the skill extremely well: prophantasia.
So now we had these terms:
Aphantasia - lack of mind's eye imagery.
Hypophantasia - weak mind's eye imagery.
Phantasia - common-strength mind's eye imagery.
Hyperphantasia - extremely vivid mind's eye imagery.
And now, prophantasia - describing any physically perceived and projected imagery into one's visual field.
My hope in creating the term was that I could help dispel some of the confusion around the mind's eye experience and the projected imagery experience. I assumed the term would take some time to catch on, since me, a seemingly nobody, had come up with it. But as it caught on, it began to fulfill the exact aim I had for it. And finally, that dreaded "red star test" could make a lot more sense to a lot more people.
It's worth saying about the red star image, it's honestly a pretty perfect example of how prophantasia looks at different vividness levels. With that last example of the fully red and clear star being super rare as far as we can tell. They even got the visual snow against the blackness, which absolutely tends to be present for most projectors.
And I'm happy to report, that as of 2022, the term "prophantasia" has been immortalized into an official piece of literature. I collaborated with UK-based neuroscientists on a paper titled ‘A new visual mental imagery classification system for imagery “extremes”…’ which explored visual working memory, visual priming, anomalous perception, and more. One of our aims was to better understand the rarity and characteristics of projected imagery. You can check out the publication here.
Why language is important
When it comes to subjective, internal experiences such as the mind's eye and projected imagery, using proper language to describe the different variations of experience is incredibly important. Especially when it comes to proper research and scientific exploration. The harsh reality is, without proper definitions of these different types of visualization, no one will be able to relate to one another on these different aspects of cognition. And not only that, we simply won't be able to get solid data from studies because every participant would be fully unclear as to what type of visualization we're trying to study. Not to mention, without proper definitions, proper diagnosis cannot exist, giving us mixed testing pools right from the get go.
I cannot tell you how many people over the years I've spoken with over zoom, who jumped on the call assuming they experienced full blown aphantasia, but left realizing they have some measure of a functional mind's eye. The first 5 years, I'd say that that exact scenario accounted for about 85% of the calls I would conduct.
Now, thanks to the term prophantasia catching on, and there existing a broader understanding of the differences between internal mind's eye imagery and projected imagery, that percentage has fallen significantly. Though, on most forums, if you search even surface deep, you'll still see comments trying to clear the same old confusion points in something like "Wait, do visualizers actually see something when they close their eyes?" I always see this sort of question is an opportunity to help illuminate the differences between visual thought experiences.
The more clearly we can define the subjective and unseen, the more we’ll understand—not just each other, but the nature of our reality.
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