Matthew MacKisack

Very glad to have talked to Larissa MacFarquhar for this beautiful piece on extremes of imagining. Goes deep into the experiences of artists Clare Dudeney and Sheri Paisley; more on their and others' practices in our research article here medicine-vet-medicine.ed.ac.uk/sites/defaul...

Thanks Aaron, your work looks really interesting. Yes please do submit a proposal - you would need to be able to get to Cambridge though

#callforpapers I’m co-convening a session at The AAH 2026 Conference with the wonderful Whitney Davis. If you're interested in the relationship between images in the head and in the world, what constitutes a picture, etc, drop us a proposal! forarthistory.org.uk/images-and-p...

YouTube video by Dustin Grinnell, Sci-fi With Heart Aphantasia: How to Write Without a Mind’s Eye

How can you describe something if you can't visualise it?Fascinating insight into creative writing with #aphantasia by author Dustin Grinnell www.youtube.com/shorts/DAB-E...

Love this. Another poke in the eye of the genius/hero/human template of creativity.

aeon.co/essays/did-a...

Yes that sounds like future-oriented hoarding rather than past-oriented. I suppose the objects in both cases help to structure thought, in a way. Would be interesting to assess imagery of future-oriented hoarders

That's a good question, I'm not sure - in one of the papers this paper cites they find hoarders 'perceive throwing away as a threat to memory', the objects are more of a cue, that connect them to their past - so maybe in the same way that non-hoarders keep family photos

Enjoying Adam Zeman's takeover of New Scientist this week with all things imagination #scicomm #psychscisky

Very happy to declare that 'Global Culture after Gombrich: Art, Mind, World', is out!

Published by Intellect: www.intellectbooks.com/global-cultu...

Launch at the Warburg Institute on the 24th of June: warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/tradi...

#ArtHistory #Art #History #Culture

On imagining and its varieties, e.g. #2:

Individuals who hoard use objects as receptacles for memories; hoarding tendencies are associated with reduced visualising ability; so, 'visualisation difficulties may promote a reliance on objects to facilitate recall'

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Why does every film and TV series seem to have the same plot? | Aeon Essays The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?

no hugging, no learning

Seinfeld's rejection of the formula providing 'opioid reassurance in the form of redemption and the simultaneous restoration of normality: the hero always achieves self-optimisation within the acceptable confines of bourgeois respectability' aeon.co/essays/why-d...?

There's so much great work on imagining and its varieties at the moment.

E.g. ‪@eazanon.bsky.social‬, @kerblooee.bsky.social‬ and others' introduction of #prophantasia: the ability to project mental images into the external world osf.io/preprints/os...

Not much. I was being flippant. Maybe 'hard to conceptualise' would have been better.

An interesting and provocative find regarding aphantasia and reading - but still find non-conscious imagery hard to believe in

‘OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving’ | Jeanette Winterson I think of AI as alternative intelligence – and its capacity to be ‘other’ is just what the human race needs

Sounds just like a review AI would give 🧐 ... www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Ces artistes qui créent en l’absence d’images dans la tête - A translation of Hervé Morin's 2024 article in Le Monde

Here's a translation of @hnirom.bsky.social's article on aphantasic art-making - I sound so much more profound in French, but there you go artimescience.org/updates/f/ce...

The art of Aphantasia: how ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise The condition challenges the centuries-old idea that all great artists are able to envision what they’re drawing.

Great to read of aphantasic art-making here and in the replies. This is an intro to our research on the subject -
theconversation.com/the-art-of-a... - and my website has the peer-reviewed stuff artimescience.org. New research participants are very welcome!

Visualising genius Try this thought experiment. Michelangelo - Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Renaissance genius who created the statue of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling – claimed,

Here's a wee blog post, wondering if Michelangelo really did see angels in blocks of stone artimescience.org/updates/f/vi...

A drawing of 19th-century horse-drawn carriage, without the horses

On oldie but a goodie

Hello and thank you for reaching out - glad to hear these ideas make sense to you as a non-imager. More to follow!

ARTIMESCIENCE

Well this is nice. I've also gone and made a website with a blog (!) where I update on the book project and other things art, science, and imagining artimescience.org