If you could glance inside a hyperphantasic’s mind when you asked them to imagine a cow, what you saw might shock you. A hyperphantasic would see a cow in their mind’s eye as vivid and real as if it was standing just in front of them. They would not only be able to see the cow in pin-sharp focus, but they would also be able to smell its damp hide and feel the heat from its breath. To a hyperphantasic, images are not things that you think, they are things that you encounter.
Hyperphantasics tend to spend more time daydreaming than the average person. They are more prone to emotions such as regret, longing and nostalgia; they experience both greater anxiety and greater empathy than most; and they can find reading about a gory incident extremely distressing.
Research into hyperphantasia is producing techniques that can help syndromes like post-traumatic stress disorder. Patients suffering from intrusive memories, it has been discovered, can be calmed by being presented with alternative strong visual imagery, such as playing the game Tetris – the mind can only hold one mental image at a time, and the vividness of the new image overwrites the old intrusive one.