Why some people relive horror in vivid flashbacks while others carry pain in silence — and what Rwanda’s survivors teach us about the invisible spectrum of the human mind.
By Edouard A Cyuzuzo
Two people sit across from each other. Both survived something unthinkable. One stares at the wall, unable to speak, tears sliding silently — her body somewhere else entirely, somewhere in 1994. The other speaks calmly, almost gently, reconstructing events the way one might describe a film they watched long ago. Neither is broken. Neither is fine. They are simply wired differently — and that difference runs deeper than willpower, upbringing, or strength of character. It runs all the way into how the brain makes pictures.
We are only beginning to understand the role of mental imagery — our capacity to see, hear, and feel in the theatre of the mind — in shaping how trauma is stored, replayed, and eventually processed. This understanding has profound implications for anyone trying to make sense of themselves, or someone they love, in the aftermath of devastating events.
Part I: The Invisible Spectrum — How Vividly We See Inside
Close your eyes and picture an apple. For most people, something appears — a shape, a colour, a sense of redness. But for roughly 2–3% of the population, nothing appears at all. The mental screen is simply blank. This is called aphantasia: the inability or difficulty forming voluntary visual mental images. At the opposite end sits hyperphantasia — where inner images are so vivid they can rival or even compete with actual perception.
Most of us live somewhere between these two poles, without ever knowing it. The spectrum looks roughly like this:
• Aphantasia — No voluntary mental images. Memory is conceptual, not visual. Trauma may still be felt deeply, but it is rarely replayed as pictures.
• Typical range — Moderate imagery ability. Painful memories may intrude with varying intensity depending on context and stress levels.
• Hyperphantasia — Unusually vivid internal visualisation. Traumatic memories can feel as real as the event itself — making this a significant risk factor for PTSD.
Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience confirms that mental imagery involves brain networks remarkably similar to those activated during actual perception — overlapping with the default mode network and operating like a weaker version of seeing with your eyes. This is not metaphor. It is neurobiology.
The crucial insight: where you fall on this spectrum shapes everything about how trauma lives inside you.
Part II: When the Mind Replays What the Body Survived
Post-traumatic stress disorder is, at its core, a disorder of memory — specifically, of intrusive visual memory. When a person with strong mental imagery experiences trauma, the brain does not file that event away cleanly. Instead, it stores fragments of it in vivid, sensory-laden form. Later, triggered by a smell, a sound, a time of year, those fragments burst back into consciousness as flashbacks: fully formed, emotionally charged, with the sickening quality of happening right now.
Research by Hackmann, Ehlers, Speckens and Clark has shown that intrusive memories of traumatic events mainly consist of sensory, mostly visual impressions — associated with the sense of reliving the event as though it were occurring in the present. This is why mental imagery is not peripheral to trauma. It is central.
Studies confirm that people with more vivid imagery are significantly more likely to experience distressing, recurring intrusive memories following exposure to traumatic events. For those with hyperphantasia, the risk is even more pronounced. Their inner cinema is high-definition, surround-sound, always ready to replay.
On the other side of the spectrum, something fascinating happens. Research comparing individuals with aphantasia to those with typical imagery found that after exposure to stressful scenarios, those without visual imagery showed a noticeably reduced ongoing stress response — not because they felt less, but because they lacked the internal screen on which to amplify those emotions. Their intrusions, when they occurred, were more symbolic, more auditory, and crucially — less emotionally overwhelming.
This does not mean aphantasia is protective in any simple or complete sense. A 2020 UNSW study found that individuals with aphantasia are not fully shielded from trauma symptomatology — only that their suffering tends to take a different form.
Part III: Rwanda, 1994 — When the Unimaginable Happened
In April 1994, Rwanda descended into one of the most concentrated episodes of mass violence the world has ever seen. In approximately 100 days, an estimated 800,000 to one million people — primarily Tutsi — were murdered by their neighbours, colleagues, sometimes their own family members. People were killed in churches where they had sought sanctuary, in schools, in fields. Women were systematically raped. Children witnessed things no human being should witness.
The genocide did not end at the bodies. It continued inside every person who survived it.
The statistics are staggering even decades later. Research has found that around 26% of adult Rwandans carry PTSD — rising to 41% among women survivors. More than 30% of genocide survivors have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder. These are not abstract figures. Each percentage point is a life, a family, a community still navigating the weight of what happened.
In the aftermath, researchers observed something that defied simple explanation: the same event, witnessed by the same community, produced drastically different psychological outcomes. Some survivors became acutely symptomatic — unable to eat certain foods, vomiting at ordinary smells, experiencing the present as violently contaminated by the past. Reports from clinicians in Kigali described a young woman who, three years after the genocide, still smelled feces, felt insects crawling on her face, and saw people trying to kill her — vivid, sensory, inescapable. Others seemed to carry their grief more quietly, accessing the events more like stored knowledge than lived sensation.
This variation was not a measure of love, of loyalty, or of the depth of loss. It was, at least in part, a function of how the mind was built to process and replay experience.
Part IV: The People Who Weren’t There — Inherited Wounds
Perhaps the most haunting dimension of Rwanda’s trauma is this: young people born after 1994 have been found to exhibit symptoms of PTSD. They were not in the hills. They did not run. And yet — something was transmitted to them.
Research published in BMC Psychology documented this intergenerational transmission of trauma among post-genocide Rwandan youth, exploring how the wounds of parents find passage into children who never directly experienced violence. Some transmission occurs through the silent language of parenting — the hypervigilance of a mother, the emotional unavailability of a father, the topics that are never spoken of at the dinner table and yet somehow fill every room.
A countrywide study found that 79.41% of Rwandan individuals aged over 16 had experienced one or more traumatic events. Women were exposed at higher rates than men. Over 25 years after the genocide, many survivors continue to suffer, and their children — raised in households shaped by unspoken horror — carry something of it too.
Some of this transmission may operate at a biological level. Researchers have explored epigenetic mechanisms — ways in which the experience of severe stress can alter how genes express themselves, and how those alterations may pass to the next generation. A child born to a mother who survived genocidal rape may carry, in her very cells, something of that event. Not as memory. As a physiological signature of threat.
Now consider how mental imagery intersects with all of this. A young Rwandan born in 1997, raised on fragments — a parent’s silences, overheard conversations, the annual commemoration, the visible grief of an entire nation — might construct vivid internal images of events they never witnessed. For someone with hyperphantasia, that mind fills the gaps with imagery that, while not memory, functions neurologically like memory. They grieve an event their body did not live through, but their mind has reconstructed with terrible clarity.
As Nature noted in its 2024 review marking 30 years since the genocide, intergenerational trauma remains one of the most persistent challenges for mental health services in Rwanda — and a legacy that all societies emerging from atrocity must be prepared to face.
Part V: The Many Shapes of Surviving
Understanding the mental imagery spectrum reshapes how we see healing — and how we see those who seem not to be healing in the ways we expect.
The person who weeps openly, who cannot attend the commemoration ceremonies without trembling, who flinches at a machete image even in a museum — this person is not weaker than the one who stands dry-eyed and speaks calmly. Their mind is wired to replay. Their internal screen is high-resolution. Their nervous system is faithfully doing what trauma-exposed nervous systems with strong imagery do: it keeps the danger alive so they might survive it again.
The person who seems distant, who recounts horror without visible emotion, who you might even suspect of not caring — they are not cold. They are not in denial. Their mind may simply process and store differently. This does not mean they are unaffected by trauma — only that their suffering takes a different form.
Rwanda’s healing journey has reflected this diversity. Narrative therapy — helping survivors reconstruct and retell their stories in structured, supported settings — has proven particularly powerful. A 2025 study published in PLOS Mental Health found that participants testified strongly to a reduction in anxiety, depression, and PTSD after engaging in this approach. The communal aspects — group support, shared story — were instrumental in fostering emotional recovery and a renewed sense of belonging.
Why does storytelling work? Because it externalises the internal. It takes what lives as a fragmented, uncontrolled image or sensation inside the mind and gives it form, sequence, and context. It helps the brain move a traumatic memory from the realm of present danger into the realm of past event.
Community, too, has proven to be its own kind of medicine. The Gacaca courts — Rwanda’s community-based truth and reconciliation process — offered something clinical treatment alone cannot: the restoration of shared meaning. When trauma is witnessed and named in community, it ceases to be a private haunting. It becomes part of a collective story. And collective stories, unlike individual flashbacks, have endings.
Part VI: Know Thy Mind — Self-Knowledge as Navigation
Here is what all of this means for you, wherever you are in your own story.
If you are a survivor, or the child of survivors, or someone who has simply inherited a world shaped by violence — your response to that inheritance is not a character flaw. It is not weakness, selfishness, or drama. It is your nervous system, shaped by your particular neurobiology, doing what it was designed to do in the presence of extreme threat.
If you find that you cannot stop seeing things — images returning unbidden, the past bleeding into the present — you may be someone with stronger visual imagery. Your healing may benefit most from approaches that interrupt and reprocess those images: Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), imagery rescripting, and narrative therapy have all shown effectiveness here.
If you find that you feel the pain but cannot quite picture it — if your grief seems abstract, if you feel disconnected from your own history — you are not broken either. Your mind may store experience differently. Talk therapy, somatic body-based approaches, and community belonging may reach you in ways that image-based therapies cannot.
If you were not there but still hurt — if you carry something you cannot fully name or locate — know that intergenerational trauma is real, documented, and not your fault. Your pain has lineage. Understanding that lineage is the first act of healing it.
And if you seem fine, but sometimes wonder — build support before you urgently need it. Know your mind. Knowing where you fall on the imagery spectrum, even approximately, is not a diagnosis. It is a kind of self-literacy. And self-literacy, when navigating the long aftermath of trauma, is everything.
Whatever you feel — it makes sense.
The way you are carrying what happened to you, or what happened before you, is not an accident. It is the logic of a mind doing its best with what it was given. Knowing your own mind does not erase pain — but it changes your relationship to it. And that, research shows, is where healing begins.
Sources: Pearson et al. (2013, 2015); Hackmann, Ehlers & Clark (2004); Murengera et al., PLOS Mental Health (2025); BMC Psychology (2023); Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2019); Psychiatric Times (2020); UNSW/PMC (2020); Nature (2024); Future Mind Labs (2025).
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