About The MIR
Advocacy for Research
When science labelled our mental metaphors as a clinical 'deficit', it stripped away the only language we had to describe how our minds actually work. For people like our founder, common words about the mind—"imagination," "visualise," "picture this," "mind's eye"—were always understood as figures of speech, used to detail mental reality. We mapped our own internal senses onto those terms because it was the only language available. We did not know others were any different.
The discovery and definition of aphantasia changed that. It gave a name to the absence of visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and tactile imagery, which retroactively revealed that those common words we thought were figure of speech, were meant literally for others. This suddenly left our own positive experiences we had attributed to those terms—the intuition, inner speech, or emotional pattern-sensing we do have—without any language or definition at all.
Our advocacy is simple: you cannot research, discuss, or understand something that has no name. We are Apple Macs in an Android world, with researchers trying to define our internal systems by Android manuals. To address this problem, we have proposed a key—a framework of 16+ mental imagery modalities and 4 vividness variations—and are calling for its development. We use and document evolving language to describe these experiences, holding the conceptual space open for a formal lexicon.
View our foundational paper:
The study of aphantasia reminds us how easily invisible differences can escape detection.
Professor Adam Zeman
Anonymouse Calling
Ishtar’s Sh*thouse Poetry is a personal blog where raw, irreverent verse and philosophy collide. Written under the pseudonym Anonymouse Calling , Hayley de Ronde explores human nature with absurdity, brilliance, and contradiction. This is not a place for the tame—it’s a space for unfiltered, unapologetic thoughts that break the bounds of convention. It is where it all began, with a poem and an understanding there was a word to define this newly discovered neurodivergence.
Notable posts on mental imagery include:
