hyperphantasia
noun

- hyperphantasia is characterised by an abundance of mental imagery — a vivid imagination in which mental images have a near-lifelike quality. The phenomenon extends beyond vision to sound, smell, taste and bodily sensation.

- the condition of having an unusually vivid or "photo-like" quality of visual mental imagery, representing one extreme of the human phantasia spectrum, with aphantasia at the other.

- an abundance or "photo-like" quality of visual imagery, characterised as one of the two extremes of phantasia, or visual imagery vividness.

Aphantasia Network, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, ScienceDirect 

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WORD ORIGIN

Hyperphantasia was coined by British neurologist Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter around 2015, in parallel with his more widely known coinage aphantasia.

Hyper- — from Greek ὑπέρ, meaning over, beyond, excessive. The same root appears in hyperbole, hypertension and hyperactive.

Phantasia — from Greek φαντασία, meaning appearance, image, imagination. Derived from phantazein (to make visible), from phainein (to show, to bring to light). The same lineage gives us phantom, fantasy, fancy and fantastic.

The compound therefore means, literally, excessive or extreme imagery. Zeman borrowed the Greek root directly from Aristotle, who used phantasia to describe the mind's capacity to form images — making this a rare case of a 21st-century neuroscience term rooted directly in 4th-century BCE philosophy.

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THE BRAIN’S PRIVATE CINEMA

Hyperphantasia means the mind generates images that are so vivid, so detailed and so persistent that they can be almost indistinguishable from real perception. When hyperphantasics close their eyes they don't see a vague impression of their kitchen — they see the steaming coffee cup, the grain of the table, the smudge on the window. Opening their eyes, the images don't fully leave.

Neurologically, there seems to lie unusually strong connections between the front of the brain and the sensory processing regions at the back. The signal doesn't just suggest an image — it produces one.

About three per cent of people experience this. For many, it's an asset — artists, writers and musicians are over-represented among hyperphantasics.

Nikola Tesla was almost certainly hyperphantasic, he said, "I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start building it in my imagination."

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

cinema of the mind, compulsive visualisation, eidetic imagery (memory), endless inner film, excessive imagery, extreme visual imagination, fertile imagination, high imagery ability, hyperactive imagination, HYPERPHANTASIA, hypnagogic vividness, hyper-vivid recall, inner eye in overdrive, inner film running on loop, intense visual imagery, lifelike mental imagery, mental cinema (projection, visualisation), mind's eye clarity, near-photographic imagination, opsimathy of the senses, over-active inner world, overloaded imagination, photo-like recall, photographic imagination (memory,) picture-perfect recall, runaway imagination, seeing with the mind's eye, strong visual imagination, synaesthetic/teeming imagination, unbidden imagery, uncontrollable inner pictures, unending mental theatre, uninvited mental imagery, unwanted inner visions, visual hyperaesthesia, visual thinking, vivid inner life (mental imagery)

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Neither HYPERPHANTASIA nor its opposite, aphantasia, is classified as a disorder, they just lie at the extreme ends of a spectrum.”

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