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Aphantasia Initially used by psychologist Francis Galton in 1880, aphantasia is the inability to create mental images of people, places, or things, real or fictional. Neurology professor Adam Zeman and his team published a paper in 2015 that renewed interest in aphantasia, referring to it as “congenital” aphantasia. In 2017, cognitive neuroscience post-doctoral fellow Rebecca Keogh published a study at the University of New South Wales in Australia to uncover why people cannot conjure mental images. Autogenic training Autogenic training is a self-relaxation technique created by German neurologist Johannes Schultz in 1932, made up of six exercises involving phrase repetition, designed to evoke feelings of warmth and heaviness. In the 1970s, Harvard’s Mind/Body Medical Institute founder Dr. Herbert Benson included autogenic training in the institute’s list of relaxation treatments. The British Autogenic Society was established in the 1980s, and similar such training cente