Let's do a test first, please close your eyes and imagine an image, the sea in the distance, the sea water is shining bright blue, the white sand beach is undulating with the terrain, and the seagulls are circling in the sky...

Do the corresponding images pop up in your brain right away? You may think this is an easy task, but for some people, they can't do it because of a very special symptom - heart blindness .

1. People who have lost the "eye of the soul"

"Heart blindness" is also known as "imagination disorder" and "phantom visual deficit disorder". The study found that the prevalence of heart blindness is about 2%, that is, it may occur in one in 50 people.

Heartblind people can't imagine images in their brains, their brains just seem to be blank. However, their memory and language functions were intact. For example, if a red apple is placed in front of them, they can clearly describe the characteristics of the apple, including size, color, etc., although they cannot recall the image of the apple in their brains. This suggests that the mentally blind can solve the problem of visualizing words based on memory of facts. Therefore, it is difficult to find the difference between patients with heart blindness and ordinary people.

Second, how does heart blindness come about

Physiological: Generally speaking, when people use their imagination, neural networks consisting of different brain regions are activated, some involved in decision-making and others in memory or vision. But the results of the study of people with heart blindness showed that when he imagined pictures, there was very little activity in the visual cortex and some adjacent areas of the brain, while areas of the brain involved in decision-making were more active. The findings suggest that people with heart blindness use different strategies for processing visual imagery tasks in their brains.

Psychological: The researchers asked patients to imagine an image, then presented an image in front of their eyes, pressing the left button as soon as possible if the image was in the left eye, and the right button as soon as the image was in the right eye. The researchers recorded their reaction times.

In general, if heart blind people can't imagine images, their reaction time should be faster than the average person. But the experimental results showed that the reaction times of the patients with heart blindness differed slightly from those of ordinary people, suggesting that their brains were able to imagine images without realizing it. So why do they suppress the brain's imagination? At present, this question has not been answered, and researchers will continue to explore more secrets of heart blindness.

In addition, some researchers have found that heart blindness has a genetic factor. From what has been learned about the patient's situation, parents with this symptom have a higher probability of having children with the same symptoms than ordinary parents.

Third, heart blindness also has advantages

1. Stronger spatial memory ability, more preference for theory

A scientist at the University of Chicago in the United States found through experiments that patients with heart blindness have a very good memory for the spatial location of objects in images. They can accurately describe the structure of the room and the layout of objects, and the accuracy rate is much higher than that of ordinary people. The researchers speculate that this may be because their brains devote more resources to remembering spatial location information. The proportion of people with heart blindness who work in science or mathematics is higher, perhaps because they lack imagination, but they are good at logic and theory.

2. Focus more and work more efficiently

Studies have shown that people with heart blindness have lower sensory sensitivity, and they may be less affected by the sensory world than the average person. People with heart blindness can get rid of the distraction of cluttered information and be more focused.

3. Will not make up for embarrassing or sad things

Heart blindness will not appear in front of the image of the past, it will not bring strong stimulation to the brain and produce strong emotions. Sometimes remembering too clearly can affect the mood.