Hyperphantasia: The Mind’s Eye, Imagery and reality

Robert Luther Smith

The role of hyperphantasia in miscarriages and abortions of justice

“How could the executives and lawyers representing the Post Office, prosecute AND convict Seema Misra the Post-Office sub-postmistress when they knew full well she wasn’t guilty; and similarly, how could a trial judge, the CPS and everyone else involved not see that Lucy Letby’s case was absurdly contrived” (Robert Luther-Smith)

“One prominent theory, the Source Monitoring Framework, proposes that there are decision processes involved in making attributions about the origin of information that comes to mind, including disseminating information that was generated by internal cognitive functions, such as thought and imagination, from information that was derived from the outside world by perceptual processes” (Simons, J.S; Garrison, J.R and M.K. Johnson, 2017, p462)

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the slough of serious miscarriages and, tragically, abortions of justice, i.e. intentional wrongful convictions (Naughton, 2013), in recent times are caused by a mindset that has, in effect, no idea what it is doing. After all, if so many people can be involved in a scandal, including judges, where the evidence is either so poor or just not there (i.e. circumstantial) that NONE of them stopped and said “there’s something wrong here”, is truly scandalous: they are living in a different world. Are the institutional pressures SO great that otherwise everyday people who just happen to work for the bureaucracy, whether CPS, NHS, Social Services or defence counsel are unable to see the reality before them? That would be Misconduct in Public Office (MiPO) in any event.

How can this be possible? How can graduate class, so-called “educated” people got it all completely wrong and hurt so many people. How?

First of all, I would suggest they’re not educated, they’re trained in positivism at university (Nickerson et al;1985) and this induces concrete operational thinking (Piaget;1952). So, they are highly trained, not educated and that, in itself, potentially creates a certain psychological mindset: groupthink. But that mindset, I contend, enables another; hyperphantasia. But first of all, what is hyperphantasia?

Hyperphantasia

“How does hyperphantasia relate to ‘eidetic imagery’, ‘photographic memory’, and perception itself?" (Zeman, 2015)

I have studied psychology and psychiatry, along with history since my early teens and, I suppose, philosophy and, like any earnest scholar, I wanted to find out Man’s place in the extraordinary multiverse we live in. From Big Bang to Brexit, with the Enlightenment in between, I’ve been able to come up with a rational explanation for Homo Sapiens’ rise from squirrel to our current manifestation.

What I haven’t been able to explain is: why apparently normative, rational people who dress appropriately, talk rationally, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and apparently pass legitimate exams, very often from Oxbridge, then make outlandish claims that, to the objective observer, are plainly not true.

My immediate response many years ago would be to reach for ready-to-hand words like delusion, hallucinations and the like – idee fixe, monomania – all words that have been medicalised and put in the psychiatric basket and are not particularly helpful because even delusion has a medical interpretation and these people are plainly not socially disabled through their beliefs, in fact, there are often many that agree with them. So it isn’t, per se, a disability.

I have to make an admission. All the members of my close kith and kin have had dementia over the last 50 years with the exception of my grandmother (who was adopted) and, thankfully, myself. That means I have come into contact with people hallucinating on many, many occasions. Although, at the time, to me the signs of dementia were clear, the layman will see the signs slowly emerging, perhaps just passing it off as silly behaviour. I’ve heard a lot of delusional talk from people. One part of dementia is delusions. I’ve heard a lot of those delusional ideas, and it made it all the easier to recognise when the subject matter was me! Delusions are a debilitating condition where the person is taken up by an idea which is so obviously wrong or incorrect that anyone can see it. Delusions and hallucinations are closely associated, but where hallucinations are mostly visual and auditory, delusions are generally associated with beliefs.

My mother, for example, could see a young woman in a flowery dress walking round the room (my guess is that it was a projection of herself), another family member thought people were coming into the house and attacking them, despite the obvious lack of bruises or injuries and I had seen no-one.

So, these particular explanations for what appears to be irrational behaviour being demonstrated by rational people were no good. So, I searched through the literature for a clue, something that could fit the last piece of the jigsaw. What causes hallucinations? Eventually, I discovered “hyperphantasia.” I’d never heard of it. That’s because it’s a new concept and these things can be deceptively difficult to find, despite the internet: the original paper was written by Adam Zeman in 2015 (Zeman et al, 2015), elaborated in 2024 (Zeman, 2024) and the book came out this year (Zeman, 2025).  As with all these things, there turned out to be a co-incidental but revelatory back-story.

The distinguished cognitive neurologist, Adam Zeman arrived at the name aphantasia having met a gentleman in his role as a cognitive psychologist and neurologist. This gentleman, named MX, was unable to visualise anything. He was unable to produce mental imagery known in earlier literature as “ideas” but now as the “mind’s eye.”

Imagine a chair, in your mind’s eye. Most of us can do that. MX couldn’t do that. Apparently, he could before, so that’s why he noticed it. Professor Zeman was the go-to specialist and consequently arrived at the name “aphantasia,” phantasia coming from the Greek “appearance” or “imagination,” amongst other things.  He identified a clear neurological explanation, using MRI scans, that the brain networks that create images and/or imagery from memory showed a weak response in aphantasia, so the imagery doesn’t appear. A remarkable and significant find. But it doesn’t stop there.

The condition is on a spectrum. From people who have very weak or no neurological responses, there are those that have very high or even overwhelming neurological responses, the opposite of aphantasia being dubbed “hyperphantasia”: the inability to disconnect from the imagery to the point that it becomes vivid or life -like, not dissimilar from dreaming or day-dreaming, in fact not so different from hallucinations (but not the same).

The machinery also known as anatomy.

That brings us to the mechanics as in Simons et al (Ibid). There are internal imagery sources (memories) and external imagery sources (perceived reality). Perception (previously known as “ideas” by the likes of David Hume et al) is the obvious mediator. That’s what you think you’re seeing. External sources produce imagery, such as what you see (or hear or touch, etc), as do internal sources, such as memories located in the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped organ in the middle of the brain. The issue is what decides which is which. What process decides which is reality and which is imagined? The current consensus is that the anterior pre-frontal cortex, or frontal PFN (often pictured as the “third eye”) is the selector, the decision-maker (Simons et al, p462).

So, in your mind’s eye, the imagery (i.e. perception) is shown like a film screen across the visual cortex (at the rear of the head) and the frontal PFC observes, as you are doing now; when I say “imagine a chair” or a wedding you went to or a gig you attended, you can, to various degrees, imagine it.

In short, the visual external information goes to the PFC, to the fronto-medial cortex (at the middle top of your head) and is projected onto the visual cortex at the back of your head. The extraordinary turn-up for the books for me, at least, (confirmed by Adam Zeman to me in a personal communication) that memories themselves, i.e. imagination, go from the hippocampus to the PFC, to the fronto-medial cortex and to the visual cortex. In other words, both reality and imagination are sent through the same system!! The obvious possibilities for cognitive confusion are endless.

(Another cognitive explanation is that the visual cortex screen is the laptop RAM monitor screen and memory is the hard drive. Inputs come from the keyboard, the observer is the agent i.e. PFC. In the physiological model, memory is the hippocampus, the screen is the visual cortex, and the observer is the PFC).

Phantasia is itself a “normal” perception, where +/-68% of the general population will fall within one standard deviation, aphantasia is where there is no mental imagery and with hyperphantasia, the imagery is so intense and vivid the subject believes it is real.

This is my example: imagine a bridge just like Brooklyn bridge except in an estuary. The sands show on the other shore; ships sail up and down the river. The sun is shining in your face across the bridge. Just down on your side of the shore a woman is waving. She’s waving in a friendly way. Do you wave back? Of course not, it’s imaginary, but someone with hyperphantasia does wave: it’s become real. He waves back. The woman comes closer. She reminds him of someone. Oh, yes that aunt that he hates, and her daughter. He gets annoyed. They punch him. They shout abuse at him. He turns away. He leaves and runs into the house. At that point the phantasy has been stored in his memory. At that point, he believes that it happened.

So, the immediate question there is: how did he go from imagining to believing? Could it be over-stimulation of the sensory networks? It seems a strong contender. I also think the issue is around a failure in the operation of the anterior PFC: it’s unable to tell if the perception is real or imagined, external or internal. The switching-system has somehow failed.

So, the neural network is over-stimulated, for whatever reason and/or the PFC cannot tell if the imagery is externally or internally produced. This is the most extreme example. To others, that might appear to be a hallucination, it is visibly obvious that the person has lost contact with reality: but in hyperphantasia he hasn’t lost self-control: imagination has become reality. PTSD is similar, such as a soldier reliving a terrible moment, but in that case, it is out of his control. It occurs in dementia in a similar way. In hyperphantasia the subject is still in control.

Schizophrenia

So-called schizophrenia is also associated with hallucinations. In my case, I reject the name schizophrenia. Associated with younger people, it was a made-up name by a man called Bleuler around 1908 to 1911 (it means nothing really. "Split-brain” is the simplest translation). In fact, Kraepelin previously named it dementia praecox, which itself means premature dementia, a far better description. The current NHS information on dementia backs me up: memory loss, confusion, planning dysfunction and hallucinations. (I think that Bleuler was trying to frighten well-off clients with a frightening name – schizophrenia – and thus encourage them to use his services). In fact, evidence suggests that primary school children can develop dementia (See the Childhood Dementia Initiative). Why it isn’t noticed is because children often summon up imaginative scenes and scenarios and we think nothing of it ("I’m a dragon, Mummy”); but when the adult person develops dementia at 18 to 24 years old, it becomes obvious the daydreamer in class was actually hallucinating. I contend they are experiencing hyperphantasia. It isn’t extreme like PTSD, but a delusory-like state that the subject believes to be real without it affecting his general activity.

Reality checking

“One prominent theory, the Source Monitoring Framework, proposes that there are decision processes involved in making attributions about the origin of information that comes to mind, including disseminating information that was generated by internal cognitive functions, such as thought and imagination, from information that was derived from the outside world by perceptual processes” (“Brain Mechanisms of Reality Monitoring - Cell Press”) Simons et al (ibid)

Thus, we see aphantasia is when the subject sees nothing in his mind’s eye, a normal person (statistically) phantasises in a way we consider normal: then a hyperphantasist experiences a mental state where the imagined images (sic) become so vivid, so real, that they accept them as reality. That imagery can be rooted in any number of stimuli, be it their education, environment, personal contacts, upbringing, a book and institutional pressure which create or trigger it. This can be seen as social constructionism. The authorities are beginning to see, for example, there is a difference between peasant culture brought into the UK by immigrants and the capitalist-individualism of England and now, the UK (See McFarlane;1978). People may think peasants and capitalist-individualists are the same: but they aren’t. They think differently. These are powerful cognitive influences. I will give some more examples which will trigger some people: Marxism, National Socialism, Trans theory, Net Zero and climate change extremists. All are mindsets that are not reflected in or confirmed by reality.

Hyperphantasia occurs in daily life when someone believes something that isn’t true. I include myself in that. Most often it’s trivial: I thought the R. Davies who is the writer of “It Ain’t Easy” on Bowie’s 1972 “Ziggy Stardust” album was Ray Davies of the Kinks. It isn’t, it’s a Ron Davies in America. Some things are trivial and don’t really matter. From getting someone’s name wrong to thinking someone lives in Burnley when they live in Surrey, these are everyday errors. You live and learn, hopefully.

A false belief structure is another matter. Marxism has been shown to be a mistaken economic theory. Its transformation into Marcusian Cultural Marxism was to maintain the belief and now gets called “Woke” (it’s shorter) (Marcuse 1965; Geuss 1982). This is hyperphantasia. It’s not an hallucination; it’s an unshakeable, structured, inner belief: is it caused by the permanent over-stimulation of the relevant neural network? It does also seem to manifest itself along with strong anger.

Trans Theory, created by US academics, led the UK government to pass the Gender Recognition Act (2004) that claimed that a man could change into a woman. It was Labour legislation and, although some “Liberal Tories” voted for it, the Conservative party did not. It is incredible to see that otherwise rational people could believe such a thing: that is hyperphantasia par excellence. Confirmation bias – choosing to believe what you want to believe without real evidence - and groupthink – other people agreeing with you – play their part in cementing the hyperphantasiac worldview.

Take so-called “Net Zero”. No economist or shopkeeper in their right mind would propose Net Zero, or anything dated to 2050. To prepare for an event at great expense when you don’t know if it will certainly happen is a bureaucrat’s decision. When I heard Teresa May say it in Parliament – and I was watching live – I was astonished. I didn’t vote for it and I’ve seen nothing, given my extensive historical reading, not least harvests in the 17^th century, nothing to tell me, beyond proof, that it is nothing more than naturally shifting weather patterns that we’ve seen, and recorded for centuries. In fact, I consider that it’s the electric motor lobby that went out of control. It’s obviously a good idea to have clean energy, I was a child when anthracite was brought in in London. Even in the mid-70s, London air was filthy, but that was coal and very inefficient internal combustion engines. However, intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar, are inadequate. A base load is required. Then, they choose nuclear. But, then, you don’t need renewables! So, the Net Zero people, such as Ed Milliband, have found themselves in a hyperphantasiac dead-end; when reality kicks in, it is a painful experience for the person. In my experience, dawning reality presents itself in the1000 yard stare when someone who has incontrovertible disconfirmatory proof placed before them and they cannot process it: I’ve seen it many times.

Briefly, I will mention Liberalism. This is not the liberal democracy that arose after the Civil War in England, much opposed to the Absolutism of French King Louis XIV and led to the Glorious Revolution in 1688.  This Liberalism is the party created in England in 1858 as a consequence of the Joint-Stock Act 1844 in London and 1843 in Prussia. It was a Prussian idea. It allowed capitalists to invest their money in aggregate funds and gain a steady income from shares rather than shopkeeping, or indeed, farming. This, in turn, led to the corporate employee and executive who works from a rule-book, whereas a capitalist simply addresses the law. This, in turn, has led to a corporate culture, now called D.E.I (diversity, equity and inclusion) which has caused issues in society as a result the take-over of the Human Resources department by Marcusians, probably starting after the OccupyWallStreet demonstrations in New York c2008. Corporate Liberals do not care about people, People or customers become consumers. This attitude destroyed the British Liberals in 1916 after the disastrous deaths in WWI. America did not suffer that fate hence Liberalism has remained there, although its strong Woke disposition is leading to its decline.

Climate change is very similar to the Net Zero belief and in many ways is the origin of Net Zero. It reminds me of the nurse who phoned up the police in the Lucy Letby case to tell them that the clinic was a shambles and Lucy wasn’t to blame, and the female police officer replied, “We’re only interested in evidence that convicts Lucy.” That is classic confirmation bias, and, from the evidence, I see the same in those that believe in Climate Change. By that I mean those who believe the Earth will burn up in flames and/or will be catastrophically flooded. The BBC and Sky ordered their staff that Climate Change must be taken as a fact. You don’t have to order people that the world is round or that the sun is hot. That is because it’s a certainty: it is a fact. The order that people should obey is a sign of weakness of the facts. Which brings us to the courts.

Hyperphantasia and Miscarriages of justice.

In essence, the human sees two sources of perception or imagery, the external and the internal. The external comes through the eyes, through the PFC to the frontoparietal area, (the middle back of the brain) and projects onto the visual cortex (occipital lobe at the back of the head). The internal imagery is created by the memory based in the hippocampus, is again processed by the PFC AND processed through the frontoparietal module and is also projected directly on to the visual cortex!

In that case we can infer that not only do we see the external and internal, but we could have a mixture of the two, where the imagination fills in missing parts and with any subject, confirmation bias could impose interpretations that fit in with their learned script(s) through socialisation (e.g. Piaget, Ibid). In other words, it’s chaos. So, then the anterior PFC (the Mind’s Eye, or the Third Eye, perhaps) has to sort out the real vs the imagined and/or wilfully stop the imagined part. That process is, of course, possibly subconscious or unconscious or parts of both, so we truly don’t know we’re doing it, or perhaps more accurately, being it. That is hyperphantasia.

Stubbornness, delusions, monomania, OCD, so-called “schizophrenia”, groupthink, hallucinations, all get caught up in describing a mindset that is obsessed, or clings to, a belief, and particularly an ideology, that cannot be shifted regardless of the amount of exculpatory or disproving, not just evidence but facts. It is intractable. How can adult homo sapiens, centuries after the Enlightenment really believe that a man can turn into a woman by virtue of a piece of paper containing magical words? How can the lawyers and executives in a large corporate body, the Post Office, tell themselves, that charging and prosecuting Seema Misra for something they KNEW she didn’t do, didn’t fall within the criminal and also the Tortious level of conduct, never mind Misconduct in Public Office?

This was the question I was asking myself over and over again and then I lighted upon Adam Zeman’s “hyperphantasia”. It isn’t a clinical condition; it is a cognitive syndrome. They believe the person is guilty when they are not, and, despite all the contrary evidence, they still maintain the same belief. As the nurse reported, when she phoned up to tell the police that Lucy was a nice person and wasn’t guilty, she was told they only wanted evidence that showed Lucy’s guilt. How could the NHS not think to check the blood in the Blood scandal? The Birmingham Six false allegations can be attributed to un-checked confirmation bias. The 614 exonerations in the USA on DNA evidence since 1989 (Innocence Project website) tells a story of unquestioning acceptance of guilt when there plainly was none. This takes what we would generally call a delusional state of mind in individuals and groupthink in the plural, but hyperphantasia is not a mental disorder, it’s a way of thinking. It’s a specific mindset.

The American phrase for confirmation bias is tunnel vision and that gives an idea that is imagery: people don’t look outside their lane. Their view, as in perception, coincides with their imagined beliefs. The belief confirms the reality; the reality confirms the belief because reality is overlaid with the imagined perception. So, the person behaves completely normally in all reasonable measures, they dress, they eat, they carry out whatever duties they have in a rational manner but hold views that are irrational. According to Social Identity Theory and the common English aphorism, “birds of a feather flock together”; so it might be that some people act alone, but on the other hand, those who have been indoctrinated with a particular narrative (such as Woke, Liberalism, Net Zero or Trans Gender Identity) may well reinforce their own views through confirmation bias and then groupthink, through like-minded people.

The Question

“How could the executives and lawyers representing the Post Office, prosecute AND convict Seema Misra the Post-Office sub-postmistress when they knew full well she wasn’t guilty; and similarly, how could a trial judge, the CPS and everyone else involved not see that Lucy Letby’s case was absurdly contrived” (Robert Luther-Smith)

So, we ask ourselves: how did the Birmingham Six, Blood Scandal, the Post Office scandal, the Lucy Letby scandal and, in my case, the Mr SP and Mr B scandals, come to happen? There are many others.

The first clue is that it happens in large organisations, in this case the criminal justice system (CJS). Hofstede (2010) explains that it’s the "Yes Man syndrome": people like to be told what to do in large top-down hierarchical organisations, whether government institutions, private corporations or local authorities with the CPS, NHS, social services and the like.

The second clue is that these people are university educated: Nickerson et al (1985) pointed out the many problems with university education: it is positivist. That is: you are only required to prove that which is known to show your skills. The key Socratic skill is to disprove the theory by questioning (Elenchus: refutation) and more recently Popper has coined the term “Falsification”: you can’t claim there are men on Mars if you can’t get there to prove it: you can’t prove that men can change into women if there aren’t any that have!

I knew even in the mid-60s that the universities, particularly the history departments were Marxist. No ifs, no buts and, in fact it was a requirement to be socialist that got you your place (tenure or sinecure). The irrational hatred for capitalism, which paid their wages, also jarred with the fact that my family are, and I remain, capitalist shopkeepers since 1844. This irrational hate towards capitalists in the university and graduate class world shapes their attitudes to those they deal with.

All the men in my family went to technical college, my grandfather to the Regent Street Poly (in 1898; now part of Westminster University), myself to Bournemouth Tech, attended also by Sir David Amess RIP and for prog fans, Robert Fripp. The training at technical college, particularly the management school was the opposite of the university. We were trained to ask questions: who, why, where, when, how, etc. That’s the difference. The reason I know that is because I went to university when I was 40. I have recounted by experiences elsewhere.

The historically religious university curriculum of the concrete-operational (specialising in one subject), positivist attitude generates confirmation bias, a preference to “stick to what you know”. In fact, at Cambridge, you have to stick to one subject, or you are called a “marginal” academic, i.e. you are borderline between two subjects and therefore “marginalised”.

The third clue is institutional pressures. Preferment is based on conformity, not least in the medical profession and medical health area as well as the CJS.

The fourth clue is “I’ve got kids at college”. The cost of breaking ranks is too great for the average person to bear.

These forces in themselves can push people to being highly stressed. Stress could explain the hyperphantasia.

As hyperphantasia is itself a spectrum, from slightly to extremely, the condition is nuanced but will be reinforced by confirmation bias and groupthink. The blurring of imagination and reality becomes easier to give in mitigation, but it is still unacceptable when lives are being damaged by it, and those doing it believe they are doing the right thing.

Conclusion

“Reality checking”

So how do these people individually and in groups take on these mindsets that are so obviously irrational but are performed by people otherwise seen as upstanding citizens?

As I said above, the best I could have said is that they were deluded, all humans suffer from confirmation bias, those that agree with each other stick together, not least by in-group selection and groupthink takes a grip. That describes it, but does not explain it.

Through Professor Zeman’s serendipitous encounter, he identified a scientifically observed condition -aphantasia – which then directed itself to the opposite: hyperphantasia. This can be explained neurologically. Hyperphantasia in not a clinical or medical condition, it is a cognitive mindset. It is a mindset (or worldview) that fails to reality check either subconsciously or unconsciously and thus mixes up false memories with perceived reality.

This mindset, when combined with confirmation bias and groupthink leads to otherwise responsible citizens making wholly wrong decisions.

The first book I read after early readers was, at my grandmother’s behest, “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens. I am a page turner: I’ve got no time for description. However, I can envisage Dicken’s time when there was little photography and no television or cinema when a descriptive piece conjures up imagery and takes you to another place: some never return. That is hyperphantasia.

By Robert Luther Smith

Please let us know if you think that there is a mistake in this article, explaining what you think is wrong and why. We will correct any errors as soon as possible.

References

Geuss, R; (1981); The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School; CUP.

Hofstede, G.; Hofstede, G.J.; Minkov. M.; (2010) Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind; McGrawHill.

Marcuse, H. (1964); One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society; Sphere. (“Garland, C. (2014) ‘An Explosive Catalyst in the Material Base: Technology, Precarity, and the Obsolescence of Labour - One Dimensional Society, 2014’, Columbia University, 29 September 2014”)

McFarlane, A. (1979): The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition; John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

Naughton, M. (2013) The innocent and the criminal justice system. Palgrave Macmillan.

Nickerson, R.S and Perkins, D.N. and Smith, E.E. (1985): The Teaching of Thinking; Psychology Press.

Piaget, J. (1952); The Child's Conception of Number (co-authored with Alina Szeminska); Humanities Press.

Simons, Jon. S., Garrison, Jane. R. Johnson, Marcia. K.; (2017); Brain Mechanisms of Reality Monitoring; Trends in Cognitive Psychology, Vol 21, No. 6; Cell Press.

Zeman, A., Michaela Dewar, Sergio Della Sala (2015); Lives without imagery—Congenital aphantasia; Cortex, Volume 73, 2015, Pages 378–380

Zeman, A. (2024); Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: explaining imagery vividness in extremes; Trends in Cognitive Sciences, May 2024, Vol 28, No 5. Cell Press.

Zeman, A. (2025); The Shape of Things Unseen: A new Science of Imagination; Bloomsbury.