Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Aphantasia
/ˌeɪfænˈteɪʒə/noun
The inability to form voluntary mental images.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
without
φαντασία
phantasía
imagination, appearing
Literally: “without image-making”
The story of the word
Adam Zeman and colleagues at Exeter named the condition in 2015, reaching back past modern psychology to Aristotle, for whom φαντασία was the faculty that produces images in the mind. Francis Galton had already stumbled on it in 1880 when he asked scientists to picture their breakfast table and some of them said, flatly, that they could not. The same root gives phantom and fantasy, both of them things that appear without being there.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 2015
Same family
fantasyphantomphasephenomenon
In a sentence
He learned at fifty that he had aphantasia, and that counting sheep had always been a figure of speech for him.