“Lives without Imagery—Congenital Aphantasia”, 2015 (; backlinks; similar):
Presents a case report of 65 year old man. He became unable to summon images to the mind’s eye after coronary angioplasty. Following a popular description of their paper, they were contacted by 20 twenty individuals who recognized themselves in the article’s account of ‘blind imagination’, with the important difference that their imagery impairment had been lifelong.
Here they describe the features of their condition, elicited by a questionnaire, and suggest a name—aphantasia—for this poorly recognized phenomenon. 21 individuals contacted them because of their lifelong reduction of visual imagery. They explored the features of their condition with a questionnaire devised for the purpose and the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ).
Participants typically became aware of their condition in their teens or twenties when, through conversation or reading, they realized that most people who ‘saw things in the mind’s eye’, unlike our participants, enjoyed a quasi-visual experience.