Hyperphantasia describes exceptionally vivid mental imagery that can rival real perception.

Research suggests that vivid mental imagery acts as an emotional amplifier.

Understanding extremes of mental imagery provides valuable insight into individual differences.

Close your eyes and picture an apple. Most people see something—a faint, slightly blurry image, less vivid than a real apple. A few, however, will see it as clearly as if it were sitting right in front of them. This ability is called hyperphantasia.

Hyperphantasia, literally meaning "beyond imagination," refers to exceptionally vivid mental imagery. It is often described as the opposite of aphantasia, a condition in which people report little or no ability to form mental images. While most of us fall somewhere in between, a small minority sit at the extremes. Around 2 to 3 percent of adults report imagery as vivid as real perception, with estimates even higher in children.

People with hyperphantasia, sometimes called hyperphants, do not just "picture" things. Many describe their inner world as cinematic—sharp colours, fine detail, and movement that feels extremely realistic. While visual imagery is the most commonly discussed, some hyperphants can also vividly hear, smell, taste, or feel imagined experiences.

A Spectrum Hidden in Plain Sight

Psychologists have known for more than a century that mental imagery varies dramatically between individuals. In the late 19th century, Francis Galton famously asked people to describe how vividly they could imagine their breakfast table. Some reported near-photographic clarity; others saw nothing at all. Even Charles Darwin, Galton's cousin, fell at the vivid end of the spectrum. Yet for most of psychology's history, this variation was largely ignored. It was not until 2015 that aphantasia was formally named, and only recently has serious attention turned to hyperphantasia.

Although research is still catching up with personal accounts shared online, a growing body of evidence paints a consistent picture. Emerging literature suggests that people with hyperphantasia are more likely to work in creative professions, report strong autobiographical memory, experience synaesthesia, score higher on the personality traits openness to experience, discover their imagery differences early in life, and have family members with similar imagery abilities.

Around 90 percent of hyperphants report clear advantages associated with their imagery. But about 40 percent also report negative impacts on relationships, often linked to emotional intensity, distraction, or misunderstanding from others.

Imagination as an Emotion, Amplified

Mental imagery does not just help us visualize—it amplifies emotion. Imagining a future success can motivate us, but imagining a threat can trigger anxiety. Daydreaming itself is not inherently bad. It supports creativity, future planning, and emotional processing. But when imagination becomes repetitive and intrusive, it can slip into rumination—the mental replaying of problems without resolution. Research consistently shows that a wandering mind is often an unhappy one.

Hyperphantasia has been linked to mood disorders such as anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. The hypothesis is not that vivid imagery causes these conditions, but that it can intensify them, especially when thoughts become negative or uncontrollable. In contrast, people with aphantasia often report being less emotionally affected by imagined scenarios.

When Imagination Meets Reality

In some hyperphants, imagery does not remain neatly separated from perception. In laboratory studies, individuals with vivid imagery are susceptible to harmless pseudo-hallucinations (seeing shapes of objects in ambiguous visual environments, such as flickering light in a dark room). In more extreme cases, researchers have speculated that imagery vividness may interact with psychiatric vulnerability. One emerging hypothesis suggests that, in people already at risk of psychosis, hyperphantasia could contribute to sensory hallucinations, whereas aphantasia might be linked to nonsensory delusions, such as paranoia. For now, this remains an open and fascinating question.

Childhood, Memory, and the Brain

Large-scale surveys suggest that hyperphantasia is far more common in childhood and tends to fade with age. One explanation is that young brains encode experiences with rich sensory detail, gradually shifting toward more abstract representation in adulthood. Neuroscientific evidence points toward differences in connectivity between fronto-parietal networks (involved in attention and cognitive control) and visual regions of the brain. These networks support key stages of imagery—generation, maintenance, inspection, and transformation.

Interestingly, while people with aphantasia perform normally on most standard memory tests, they often show reduced autobiographical memory—the ability to richly re-experience personal events. Hyperphants, by contrast, tend to report unusually vivid recollections of the past and detailed imagining of the future.

Hyperphantasia is neither a superpower nor a disorder. It is a cognitive style—one that can support creativity, memory, and emotional depth, while also increasing vulnerability to overwhelm, distraction, or rumination.

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