Aphantasia in education

Teachers dealing with human resource at primary level of education must be cognizant of various cognitive, perceptive and psychological peculiarities of children. From one angle, these mental differentials are considered aberrations: to view the spectrum of physiology of human mind from this oblique angle is altogether wrong. Cognitive diversity in human ecosystem is as undeniable a reality as is biodiversity in biosphere.

One such cognitive peculiarity among children is aphantasia: a deficit in voluntary mental imagery. The child faces difficulty in deliberately replaying images in mind.

Wordsworth says in his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: “They (daffodils) flash upon that inward eye”. The poem points out two factors that contribute to image formation: the flowers and the mind’s eye.

Why are phonemes taught to children with words stapled with pictures on primers? Obviously, to feed into mind the images of objects and their names. Some of these objects in the pictures a child has already seen and experienced. The remaining objects along with their names are programmed into the memory when letters or words are pronounced and simultaneously objects or their pictures are shown to learners. This method in pedagogy is called teaching via audio-video (AV) aids.

Similarly, instead of teaching word meanings on the whiteboard, an utterly abstract practice, words and their actions must be enacted by the teacher as well as students. For instance, in English grammar, verbs, which are called action words, could be performed to etch them on the children’s memory. The pathway from body memory, also termed as muscle memory, to mental memory is considered a convenient way to deal with aphantasia.

The children with aphantasia require comparatively more time to process the information before coming out with the right answer but teachers who treat all children ‘equally’ and award high rating to the ready wits, do garble the image formation.

Actually, such a child is not built for abstract knowledge at an early level of education. He loves to learn through empirical involvement in the information to be learnt. Sensory experiences enrich the child’s cognitive gallery with a variety of colourful pictures which can be retrieved after a little contextual stimulation of the mind.

Mental imagery comes into action when a student reads a text. Students create mental models during reading to understand the words and sentences: these models cannot be created without mental imagery. For example, after reading a sentence such as “the ranger saw the eagle in the sky”, students tend to be faster to create an image of an eagle soaring slant in the blue sky, rather than an image of an eagle perched on a tree. Language comprehension is actually mental simulation of what has been described or written.

Educators should realise that lacking the ability to form mental imagery doesn’t denote lack of imagination. Not at all! The University of Glasgow curated an art exhibition featuring work by artists with aphantasia and those with hyper-phantasia (extremely vivid mental imagery). It shows people with aphantasia also pursue creative vocations in fields such as visual art or writing.

Accepted that our internal thought processes are insular to others, people around assume everyone’s mind functions the same way, but health of our cognitive faculty becomes visible in active interactions with parents and teachers who are always in a better position to note any aphantasia-like cognitive peculiarity. They must be vigilant and proactive lest their children be declared obtuse.

Aphantasia is one of different modes of cognition, not a drawback in any sense. People may define thinking as simulating past sensory experiences but people with aphantasia think through empirical involvement. Educators must be trained to tap into the cognitive diversity of students. With a concerted effort, they can channelise students’ faulty [sic] cognition into its full potential.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 12^th, 2024.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.