From the Founder

I didn't realise my mind worked differently until I was at university. I was struggling to sleep, and someone suggested I try counting sheep. I'd heard the phrase all my life, but that night I actually thought about it, and realised I had no idea how anyone was supposed to do it. There were no sheep. There was nothing at all.

That sent me digging, and I found the word for it: aphantasia. I have total aphantasia, which means I can't create any mental images. When most people are asked to picture a beach, something appears. For me, nothing does. I'd just never known that other people could actually see things in their mind's eye.

Looking back, it explained a lot. At school, so many of the techniques I was taught were visual. Spelling was "look, cover, write, check", which relies on picturing the word you've just covered. Creative writing started with "imagine the scene". For memorising names and dates, we were told to build mind maps we could picture later. I struggled with all of them, and I didn't know why. Sometimes I wondered whether I just wasn't very clever, whether I had a bad memory, or whether I was lazy without realising it.

Nobody ever says, "By the way, most people can see pictures in their head." Why would they? It's so normal to most people that it goes unsaid. That's exactly why so many people with aphantasia go through life never knowing their mind works differently, and why some of them, like me, spend years quietly blaming themselves.

There are already organisations working on aphantasia, and they do valuable work. But few are based in the UK, and fewer still focus on changing day-to-day practice. I believe what's needed now is real change, led from here in the UK: to how teachers teach, how clinicians and therapists support people, and how aphantasia is recognised in the systems that shape our lives, starting in England and Wales.

That's why I've founded The Aphantasia Foundation. I'd like a student to be offered a way to learn spelling that doesn't depend on seeing the word. I'd like a therapist to offer a non-visual route as easily as a visual one. And I'd like the next person who can't count sheep to know, straight away, that there's nothing wrong with them.

If you have aphantasia, whether you've known for years or only just realised, I'd love to hear what has and hasn't helped you. If you're a teacher, clinician, therapist, researcher or policymaker, I'd love to hear from you too. You can read more about our work, and how to get in touch, on the Get involved page.

Thank you for being here at the start.

Daniel Measor
Founder and Chair, The Aphantasia Foundation