![]() ![]() “MX”, the subject of the first case study of acquired aphantasia, could give detailed descriptions of scenes and landmarks around his native Edinburgh: “I can remember visual details,” he commented, “but I can’t see them”.Īphantasia prevents the generation of mental images based on knowledge of what things look like, but it does not prevent that knowledge serving as the basis for an image made with pencil and paper. We’ve found that aphantasics retain such standards. To draw it, you only need to know how it looks, or would look.Īs the psychologist of art Rudolf Arnheim noted, a draftsperson working from memory “may deny convincingly that he has anything like an explicit picture of in his mind” – yet, as he works, “the correctness of what he is producing on paper” is judged and modified “according to some standard in the mind”. The first point to consider is that there is a difference between knowing or remembering what something looks like and generating a mental image of that thing. Disney/Google Developers/YouTube Knowing vs picturing How is it, then, that a person like Keane can draw a picture of Ariel without a mental picture to guide him?Īn early-stage sketch of Ariel from the Little Mermaid by Glen Keane. Intrigued by the seemingly counter-intuitive notion, we gathered a group of these people together and curated an exhibition of their work. When aphantasia was named and publicised, a number of creative practitioners – artists, designers and architects – contacted the researchers to say that they too had no “mind’s eye”. Perhaps surprisingly, Keane is not alone in being a visual artist who cannot visualise. ![]() This is because he has aphantasia, a recently-identified variation of human experience affecting 2-5% of the population, in which a person is unable to generate mental imagery. He had no preconception of what he would draw. But when he sat down to design Ariel, or indeed the beast from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Keane’s mind was a blank. Glen Keane, the Oscar-winning artist behind such Disney classics as The Little Mermaid (1989), was once described by Ed Catmull the former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios as “one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation”. ![]()
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