A new review in Consciousness and Cognition by Derek Arnold, Loren Bouyer, Blake Saurels, and Samuel Schwarzkopf challenges the influential model that imagination is ordinary seeing run backward through the same brain hardware. Their condition, aphantasia, describes a lifelong inability to form mental images. The review argues that the people best placed to disprove the backward-seeing picture are those who cannot visualize at all.

The authors contend that a set of brain regions from the front to the sides of the brain fail to work as a team in people with aphantasia. Two of the authors themselves cannot picture anything, supporting the view that a mental image is something many parts of the brain make together.

Stronger evidence comes from patients who kept their mind's eye despite extensive damage to primary visual cortex. One patient studied by Beatrice de Gelder was blind across his whole field of view yet could imagine an angry person with front and side brain regions responding normally. Alfredo Spagna, Paolo Bartolomeo, and colleagues found imagining engages the front of the brain and the fusiform gyrus, while primary visual cortex is often quiet. A case by Sandra Thorudottir showed an architect lost imagination ability after a stroke to this left temporal strip.