# Cognitive shuffling if you can’t picture things > If you have aphantasia — little or no voluntary mental imagery — the usual instruction to “picture each word” will not work for you, but cognitive shuffling may still help. There are two explanations for why the technique works, and only one of them needs you to see anything. Source: https://dreamsheeps.space/cognitive-shuffling/aphantasia Published: 2026-09-28 · Updated: 2026-10-14 ## What is aphantasia? Aphantasia is the absence, or near-absence, of voluntary mental imagery: asked to picture an apple, a person with aphantasia may know perfectly well what an apple looks like and still see nothing. The term was coined in 2015 by the neurologist Adam Zeman and colleagues, describing people who had lived their whole lives without a mind’s eye (Zeman, Dewar and Della Sala, 2015). It is not rare. Screening more than a thousand people with a standard imagery questionnaire, a 2022 study found that 3.9% had aphantasia — 4.2% of the university students and 3.6% of an online sample (Dance, Ipser and Simner, 2022). That is roughly one person in twenty-five. ## Does cognitive shuffling work if you can’t visualise? Nobody has tested it specifically, so the honest answer comes from how it is thought to work. There are two accounts, and they diverge exactly here. ### The account that needs pictures Luc Beaudoin, who developed [cognitive shuffling](https://dreamsheeps.space/cognitive-shuffling), describes it as imagining a run of unrelated, concrete things, and the structured form asks you to hold an image of each word for about eight seconds. In his account the images matter because they give your thinking the scattered, perceptual shape it has just before sleep. Without the images, that version of the technique has less to work with. ### The account that doesn’t The other explanation is about attention, not pictures. Studying people with insomnia in 2002, Harvey and Payne attributed the benefit of an imagery task to it taking up enough “cognitive space” to stop people returning to their worries. On that account, what matters is that something fills the room the worry would use. A picture is one way to fill it. It is not the only way. > Two accounts of why this works, and only one of them needs you to see anything. ## How can you shuffle without pictures? These follow the attention account. None has been tested in people with aphantasia; they are what the mechanism suggests, and what people who cannot picture things can try without losing anything. - *Think about the thing rather than seeing it.* For each word, call up what you know about the object — a pear: soft, grainy, sits on a windowsill, smells faintly of honey — then let it go and move to something unrelated. The facts are concrete and disconnected in the same way the images would be. - *Use the other senses, if you have them.* Aphantasia is usually measured for sight. If you can recall a sound, a texture or a smell, those work the same way: rain on a roof, wool, toast. - *Let something supply the words.* Generating word after word is a task, and a task is effort. Audio that plays one word at a time, with a pause, removes that job entirely. - *Listen rather than imagine.* Narration fills attention whether or not it produces a picture, which is one reason a spoken story can work for people a visualisation exercise leaves out. - *Don’t grade it.* Noticing that nothing appeared is not a failure. The point was never the picture; it was giving the mind somewhere harmless to be. If none of this helps and sleep has been difficult for months, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia does not depend on imagery at all, and it is the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia recommended by the American College of Physicians (Qaseem and colleagues, 2016). ## Why Sheeps never asks you to picture anything Guided meditations tell you to picture a beach. Sheeps never tells you to picture anything: the stories describe, in a calm voice, and what you do with the description is your business. Part of the reason is effort — an instruction creates something to comply with — and part is exactly this: for about one listener in twenty-five, “picture” is an instruction that cannot be followed. [Why we never tell you to picture anything](https://dreamsheeps.space/learn/never-picture-this) is the short version. ## Questions people ask ### How do I know if I have aphantasia? Research uses questionnaires such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, which asks how clearly you can picture a series of scenes. If “picture it” has always been a figure of speech to you, it is worth a look. ### Is there a version of cognitive shuffling without images? Not an official one. The approaches above keep the parts that do not depend on pictures — disconnected, neutral, concrete, nothing to solve — and drop the one that does. ### Will a sleep story work better than shuffling for me? Possibly, because listening does not ask you to produce anything. But nothing has compared them in people with aphantasia, and the only way to know is to try both. ## Sources 1. [Zeman, Dewar & Della Sala (2015) — Lives without imagery: congenital aphantasia. Cortex](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019) 2. [Dance, Ipser & Simner (2022) — The prevalence of aphantasia (imagery weakness) in the general population. Consciousness and Cognition](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2021.103243) 3. [Harvey & Payne (2002) — The management of unwanted pre-sleep thoughts in insomnia: distraction with imagery versus general distraction. Behaviour Research and Therapy 40(3), 267–277](https://doi.org/10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00012-2) 4. [Beaudoin (2014) — A design-based approach to sleep-onset and insomnia: super-somnolent mentation, the cognitive shuffle and serial diverse imagining](https://summit.sfu.ca/item/17237) 5. [Qaseem et al. (2016) — Management of chronic insomnia disorder in adults: a clinical practice guideline from the American College of Physicians. Annals of Internal Medicine](https://doi.org/10.7326/M15-2175) --- Sheeps describes and never instructs: a new plotless sleep story, written for you, read by a calm narrator, that fills attention without asking you to picture a thing — and ends in silence. Sheeps on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6749510901