People recalling a familiar image use different brain mechanisms to focus on a component than those who are viewing the situation live, a new study indicates. The reasons why the brain has evolved a different process for this task are not known, but might hold the key to understanding why some people have this capacity and others do not. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

A few years ago, many frequent Internet users were astonished to discover that some people have no “mind’s eye”, the capacity to visualize things that they cannot see at the time, also known as aphantasia . A smaller group were at least as amazed to learn that other people can, and that references to such capacities were not merely metaphorical.

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