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Why can’t we conjure up smell and touch in our heads, but we can “listen” to music when nothing is coming through our ears?

Tony Durham
Brighton, UK

I can imagine the smell of roses, ammonia or strawberry jam, and I can imagine how almost any object would feel to touch. I assumed that most other humans shared these abilities.

Psychologists have coined a term, aphantasia, for an inability to form visual images in the “mind’s eye”. I am unaware of any studies of the distribution of olfactory and haptic imagery in the population. But if no one has looked…