Our origin story - The Eye's Mind study

The Eye’s Mind – a study of the neural basis of visual imagination and its role in culture was a research project, which launched in January 2015, funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Innovation Award. It was led by the neurologist Adam Zeman, who has a wide interest in the neural basis of experience, in collaboration with the art historian John Onians, who is a pioneer in the use of neuroscience in the humanities. The project united researchers and disciplines in order to study our distinctively human ability to imagine, highlight links between our experience, brain science and art, and throw light on the wide variation in our capacity to ‘visualise’. Our research investigated the ability from both scientific and artistic perspectives, pursuing three related strands of enquiry:

Strand 1 was a systematic meta-analysis of the large body of research that has examined what happens in the brain when we imagine – and specifically ‘visualise’ –  searching for consistent patterns in the varied and sometimes conflicting results of previous studies. 

Strand 2 reviewed the insights into and theories of visual imagination which artists, students of art, philosophers and others have proposed over the two and half thousand years since such thinking began. We asked what questions are raised, by these insights and theories, for the science of imagination. 

Strand 3 studied individuals whose visual imagery lies at the extremes of the vividness spectrum. A small proportion of otherwise typical people, perhaps two or three in a hundred, lack visual imagination completely, a phenomenon we have termed aphantasia, while others have imagery as vivid as ‘real seeing’ – hyperphantasia. 

Our current project, the Visual Imagery Assessment (VIA) study, is the final step of Strand 3.

Click here to learn more about the VIA study.