Aphantasia and Creativity: What the Research Says
One of the most persistent myths about aphantasia is that it means you can't be creative. If you don't "see" things in your mind, the story goes, you're at a disadvantage for art, design, or invention. The research and the accounts of people with aphantasia tell a different story.
The Myth: No Imagery, No Creativity
Creativity is often linked in popular culture to vivid mental pictures—the artist "seeing" the painting before brushing, the writer "watching" the scene. So when someone has little or no voluntary visual imagery, it's easy to assume they're missing something essential. That assumption is wrong.
What Research Shows
Studies that compare people with and without strong visual imagery do not find that low imagery predicts lower creativity. People with aphantasia can score as high as others on standard creativity measures. They often use different strategies: conceptual thinking, verbal reasoning, trial and error, external sketches, or strong auditory or motor imagination instead of visual. Creativity is not one pathway; it's many.
In a large study with over 2,700 participants, people with aphantasia showed heightened use of verbal and symbolic information when creating from memory (e.g. more text in drawings) but spatial accuracy equal to controls and actually fewer memory errors. When drawing from direct perception rather than memory, there was no significant difference between aphantasic and non-aphantasic participants—so the difference is in how imagery is used for recall, not in fundamental creative or perceptual ability. Some research also suggests that lacking internal imagery can increase attention to the external visual world and motivation to represent it through art. Our visual imagination page spells it out: "If visual imagery is low, creativity is low" is a misconception. Creativity can be linguistic, conceptual, auditory, social, or procedural. Visual vividness is only one expression of imagination.
How People With Aphantasia Create
People with aphantasia work in a wide range of creative fields—animation, film, software, writing, science. Well-known examples include animator Glen Keane, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, Mozilla co-creator Blake Ross, writer Oliver Sacks, and genomic researcher Craig Venter. They don't rely on a mind's eye; they rely on language, structure, sound, movement, and external tools. The outcome can be just as original and valuable. The process is different, not deficient.
Why the Myth Persists
The myth persists because we tend to equate "imagination" with "mental images." In fact, imagination includes all the ways we simulate and recombine experience—in words, concepts, sounds, and body sense. When we measure imagination across six senses, we get a fuller picture. Someone with low visual imagery might have strong auditory or motor imagery that fuels their creative work.
What You Can Do
If you have aphantasia (or suspect you do), you don't need to "fix" it to be creative. You may find it useful to see your full imagination spectrum—including senses where your imagery is strong—and to lean into the strategies that already work for you.
The Imagination Index assessment gives you a profile across all six dimensions. You get a clearer picture of how you imagine, not just whether you see pictures. No cost to take the core assessment and get your results.
Further reading: Drawing from memory in aphantasia (PMC); When the mind is dark: making art (Psyche).