Qualitative content is modelled by Kung on Peacocke’s notion of “scenario content” (Peacocke, 1992) and captures manifest properties. To take an example, when I visually imagine lavender potatoes on a plate, my sensory imagining is about (a) shapes and colours, and (b) the fact that there are lavender potatoes on a plate, rather than a similar tuber or potatoes with another herb. Kung, for instance, calls these two kinds of content “qualitative” (a) and “assigned” (b) content (Kung, 2010, p. I thank an anonymous referee for having raised this point. Anyway, the relationship between memory and imagination is a very complicated issue, which I do not purport to solve here, where I will only suggest some paths to follow (see discussion in Sect. Second, it might be stressed that imagination always makes use of past information, but the leap from this to the idea that when we imagine we are always remembering is questionable: past information might be treated subpersonally without giving rise to a full-blooded episodic memory at the personal level. First, more should be said to discard the possibility that these examples involve both episodic memory and sensory imagination. This is true, but two considerations are in order. The idea is that in conjuring up, for instance, the aroma of lavender, or the sound of The Sound of Silence I am simply retrieving past information. It might be pointed out that the right specific psychological attitude at stake in most of the aforementioned cases is episodic memory, rather than sensory imagination. This would explain in which sense they still possess imaginative abilities. Most aphantasics lack sensory imagination, but arguably can exploit other forms of imagination. Sensory imagination, however, does not exhaust the imaginative realm, therefore we shouldn’t jump to the hasty conclusion that aphantasics have no imagination. I show that core cases of aphantasia are better understood as impairments in sensory imagination only, but I indicate empirical strategies to investigate whether some cases of aphantasia rather involve impairments in mental imagery, which would point toward a plurality of forms of aphantasia. Drawing on this distinction, I suggest three possible conditions: (i) impairment in mental imagery only, (ii) impairment in sensory imagination only, (iii) impairment in both mental imagery and sensory imagination.

Can aphantasia tell us anything about the nature and role of our imaginative abilities? I contend that an important distinction that can shed light on this question has been largely overlooked, namely that between two senses of mental imagery: as a type of mental content (viz., mental imagery strictly speaking), and as a kind of psychological attitude (viz., sensory imagination).

Yet, aphantasics do not seem to be much affected by their condition. Intuitively it may seem that we cannot have a normal life without the possession of imaginative abilities. Aphantasia, a recently labelled spectrum condition affecting mental imagery, has brought to the fore the centrality of imagination in our lives.

Aphantasia eidetic imagery