Adam Zeman

Adam Zbynek James Zeman (born September 1957 ) is a British neurologist, who coined the term "aphantasia" for an inability to create mental images.

Biography Zeman is the son of Czech-born historian Zbyněk Zeman.

He was educated at Westminster School, then at Magdalen College and Merton College, Oxford, where he took a first degree in philosophy and psychology then trained in medicine. He trained in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, London, and Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He completed a doctorate at Oxford in 1994.

He was appointed a lecturer at University College London in 1990, He was Chairman of the British Neuropsychiatry Association from 2007 to 2010. or 2005. After several people (responding to an article on the MX case by Carl Zimmer) reported that they had never been able to visualise, Zeman and his team (including Sergio Della Sala) conducted a survey of 21 people with a self-reported lifelong lack of visual imagery, using the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire developed by David Marks.

Zeman leads the research project The Eye's Mind, launched in 2015, in collaboration with art historian John Onians. The project, funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Innovation Award, explores visualisation from scientific and artistic perspectives. One of the project's three strands studies individuals with visual imagery at the extremes of the vividness spectrum—both aphantasia and hyperphantasia (unusually vivid mental imagery). In 2019, the project organised the exhibition Extreme Imagination: Inside the Mind’s Eye, hosted at Tramway in Glasgow and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, which showcased works of art created by aphantasics and hyperphantasics.

He appeared on the BBC Radio 4 science programme The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry in 2023, to discuss aphantasia.

Published works Zeman has authored or co-authored books including: