3% of people can’t create a mental picture in their heads—this test will tell you if you’re one of them

Most people can visualize a loved one’s face or the best meal they’ve ever had, but there are others whose minds go blank when they attempt to do the same.

This phenomenon is known as aphantasia.

Simply put, aphantasia is “the inability to have a visual experience when we are thinking about things in their absence,” says Dr. Adam Zeman, honorary professor of neurology at the University of Exeter with extensive research on aphantasia.

And people with aphantasia usually aren’t able to picture how characters look, or visualize the settings they’re in, while reading books, Zeman tells CNBC Make It. They may also struggle to recall the face of someone dear to them who has passed away, he adds.

People who experience aphantasia account for 3% to 4% of the world’s population, and Zeman has met and spoken to over 10,000 of them.

In 1973, a psychologist named David Marks developed a vivid imagery questionnaire that prompted people to visualize different scenarios and rate their ability to picture the images in their mind on a scale of one to five.

These are a few scenarios from the test that you can think about and then rate how vividly the images appear in your mind:

Try to visualize the sun rising.

• Can you picture the sun rising above the horizon into a hazy sky?
• How about the sun rising when the sky is blue and clear?
• Are you able to visually see clouds and a storm with flashes of lightning?
• What about a rainbow stretching across the sky?

Rate the visualizations above using the questionnaire’s scale:

1. No image at all
2. Dim and vague/flat
3. Moderately clear and lively
4. Clear and lively
5. Perfectly clear and lively, almost as real as seeing it

How do people get aphantasia? Can it be reversed?

If you weren’t able to see any of the images in your mind, then you likely have aphantasia. And more often than not, aphantasia is something that people are born with, according to Zeman.

“We think it may be, to some extent, genetic because it certainly seems to…