Aphantasia in the UK in 2026: a decade of research, and little recognition

Suppose you go to your GP and say that you cannot picture anything in your head. No faces, no places, no sheep. What happens next?

In most cases we cannot say, because we could find no NHS page on aphantasia, no NICE guidance and no formal route to a diagnosis. We looked.

This post sets out what we found when we did: what UK researchers have established, what they still disagree about, and where the gaps are in healthcare and in schools. Where we could not find something, we say so. That is not the same as saying it does not exist, and if you know of something we have missed, please tell us.

How many people have aphantasia?

You will see very different figures quoted, from under 1% to nearly 14%. They are not in conflict. Studies count different things. Some include only people with no voluntary imagery at all. Others also count people whose imagery is faint. Some ask about visual imagery only, and some ask about every sense. Most rely on a questionnaire called the VVIQ, and the score used as a cut-off differs from study to study.

Estimate	What was counted	Source
0.9%	No imagery at all, across 9,063 people from combined studies. A further 3.3% had weak imagery.	Wright et al. (2024)
About 1%	Extreme aphantasia, from a review by Professor Adam Zeman. His earlier work gave 0.7%.	Zeman, University of Exeter
3.9%	Aphantasia including weak imagery, in 1,004 people. This is the figure most often quoted.	Dance, Ipser and Simner, University of Sussex
13.9%	Aphantasia in at least one sense, in nearly 2,000 UK participants aged 18 to 30.	Cortex (2026)

The 1 to 4% we use on our website covers the first three rows. The fourth is a different kind of measurement. It comes from a young sample, and it counts someone who cannot imagine smells, for example, even if their visual imagery is typical. It should not be compared directly with the visual-only figures.

We did not find a study that set out to measure aphantasia across the whole UK population. Every figure above comes from a sample that was collected for another reason, was self-selected, or covers a narrow age group. The honest summary is that nobody knows the exact number, and the true figure depends on where you draw the line.

A decade of UK research

The word itself comes from the UK. Professor Zeman coined "aphantasia" in 2015, and groups at Exeter, Edinburgh, Sussex, Liverpool, Birmingham City and Westminster have produced much of the research since. Three recent findings stand out for anyone trying to make sense of their own experience.

Aphantasia often reaches beyond pictures. In the 2026 Cortex study of UK adults aged 18 to 30, 59.2% of those with aphantasia in one sense had reduced imagery in several. That matches what many people describe to us, that inner sound, smell and touch can be quiet as well.

There are different kinds. Two 2026 papers in Neuropsychologia, from Edinburgh and Exeter researchers, look at subtypes of aphantasia and at lived experience. The second draws on a survey of 6,436 people. A 2024 review from Exeter found that many people with aphantasia still dream in pictures, and linked aphantasia to differences in how parts of the brain connect.

People describe it in their own terms. A qualitative study of congenital aphantasia from the University of Westminster, published in 2025, takes its title from a participant: "I just see nothing. It's literally just black."

Researchers also disagree about basic questions, and we come back to that below.

What it means for therapy

Many talking therapies ask people to form mental pictures. Guided imagery, imagery rescripting and visual relaxation all lean on it, and our guidance for clinicians covers how they can be adapted.

The most useful UK evidence on how this plays out is a 2024 study by Mawtus and colleagues at Birmingham City University, published in Collabra: Psychology. People with aphantasia reported that therapies built on mental imagery, visual imagery in cognitive behavioural therapy in particular, worked less well for them than controls reported. Participants also pointed to a lack of awareness among professionals.

The study did not find that people with aphantasia were more likely to have been misdiagnosed, or to have had a diagnosis missed. We mention this because some summaries say otherwise, and we would rather report what the paper found.

A study at the University of Liverpool on aphantasia and psychosis received a favourable ethics opinion on 21 October 2025. It will look at diagnosis and treatment within the NHS, and its results will be worth watching.

What it means in school

We found no guidance from the Department for Education, Ofqual or the exam boards that mentions aphantasia. What exists is commentary. Professor Julia Thomas wrote in Tes in March 2025 that aphantasia is education's blind spot in the teaching of reading. A teacher's guest post on Teacherhead in February 2026 argued that traditional assessment often relies on visualisation, and proposed alternatives based on verbal reasoning and hands-on work.

The only large school study we found is from Australia. According to a University of New South Wales summary published in July 2026, the researchers measured the mental imagery, the science test results and the teaching experienced by 1,451 pupils in years 7 to 10 at seven private schools in Sydney. The teaching in question is called load reduction instruction, which makes each step of learning clear and gives pupils plenty of practice and feedback. Pupils with weaker imagery tended to score lower. The summary reports that their results improved by about 20% when teachers used this approach, and by about 10% for pupils with stronger imagery. We could not tell whether those figures are relative changes or percentage points. The design looks like a large survey of how these things go together, and not a trial in which teaching was changed. It is also one study, from a different country, and we have so far read the university's summary and not the paper. We include it because it is a large school-based study that looks at imagery and teaching together.

Where recognition stands

Here is what we searched for, and what we found.

Body	What we looked for	What we found
NHS	A page on aphantasia	None found
NICE	Guidance that mentions aphantasia or adapting therapy for it	None found
DfE, Ofqual and exam boards	Guidance for schools or assessment	None found
UK Biobank	Information for people who completed its visualisation questionnaire	Links to two non-official websites
UK Parliament	How aphantasia is described in its published vocabulary	Listed under Autism, and defined as a "spectrum disorder"

These searches were done in October 2026. A website search is a weak test, and an empty result does not prove that no guidance exists.

The last row needs a comment. Parliament publishes a vocabulary that it uses to index its documents and data. In it, aphantasia sits as a narrower term under Autism, and the definition calls it a "spectrum disorder". It is a cataloguing tool, and we have not found any parliamentary statement or policy that rests on it. We mention it because Parliament is among the most authoritative sources in the country, and the entry does not match the research. Studies of autism and aphantasia give mixed results. Some find aphantasia reported more often in autistic samples, while a 2026 study of 327 autistic people found visual aphantasia no more common, although being unable to imagine smell and taste was. An overlap between two things does not make one a subtype of the other, and most researchers do not treat aphantasia as a disorder at all.

Recognition without a diagnosis

There is an obvious objection to what we are asking for. We describe aphantasia as a difference in how people experience the world, and we also want the health service to recognise it. These two positions fit together once you are clear about what recognition would involve.

It would mean a GP, therapist or teacher knowing that some people cannot picture things, and knowing to ask. It would not need a diagnostic label. Researchers themselves disagree about whether aphantasia should be called a condition. Blomkvist and Marks have pointed out that there is no agreed test for it, and that the VVIQ cut-offs used to identify it are arbitrary and differ between studies. Without an agreed test, a formal diagnosis is hard to define, so awareness is the sensible place to start.

The need is real even so. A 2023 study by Monzel and colleagues concluded that aphantasia has no general pathological significance. It also found that a little over a third of the people with aphantasia in its sample reported distress, which was linked to lower well-being and to higher anxiety and depression. Most people with aphantasia are well and some are not. In both cases it helps if the person across the desk knows what the word means.

What you can do

If you think you have aphantasia, or know you do, a few plain sentences can change an appointment or a lesson:

"I can't make pictures in my mind. It's called aphantasia. Could you explain this in a way that doesn't ask me to picture it?"

You can also help us directly:

• Share your experience. If you have raised aphantasia with a GP, therapist or teacher, we would like to know how it went, whether well or badly. Use the Get involved page.
• Offer your expertise. If you are a researcher, clinician or teacher, we want to hear from you, particularly if you know of guidance we could not find.
• Check our work. If any figure here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

The Aphantasia Foundation is an unincorporated charitable association working toward registration as a charity. Our first job is to show where things stand. After that, we want to help change them.