Speaker 1: If you had to guess about the internal life, the
Speaker 1: conscious experience of the guy who co founded Pixar, the
Speaker 1: computer animation studio, what would you guess about what's happening
Speaker 1: inside his head? And how do any of us picture
Speaker 1: things internally? How do we visualize? These sound like simple questions,
Speaker 1: but strap in for some very wild surprises today about
Speaker 1: our internal experiences. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in
Speaker 1: these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe
Speaker 1: to uncover the most surprising secrets about our lives. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is about visual imagery. Now, I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: vision when something is in front of us and photons
Speaker 1: are bouncing off it and hitting our eyes and our
Speaker 1: brains are doing the analysis. Instead, I'm talking about when
Speaker 1: you're sitting there, let's say, listening to a podcast and
Speaker 1: the speaker says, hey, imagine watching a bluebird landing on
Speaker 1: a tree branch in the spring. Imagine the bird looks around,
Speaker 1: moving its head curiously, and then it flaps its wings
Speaker 1: for a moment, then it hops to a different spot,
Speaker 1: then it flies away. Now, there's no blue bird. Instead,
Speaker 1: your brain is taking everything it's ever learned about bluebirds
Speaker 1: in the past and generating internal visual imagery, all in
Speaker 1: the pitch blackness of your skull. How does that work?
Speaker 1: And how did recent discoveries here completely change the debate
Speaker 1: in psychology and neuroscience and the way we understand internal experience.
Speaker 1: So let's start in nineteen thirty eight, when an animator
Speaker 1: named Walt Disney was trying to reboot the popularity of
Speaker 1: his little rodent character named Mickey Mouse. So after years
Speaker 1: of work, he ended up making a feature length animated
Speaker 1: film set to classical music, and he called this Fantasia. Now,
Speaker 1: a project of this size combining visuals and music, this
Speaker 1: had never been attempted before, and it ended up becoming
Speaker 1: one of the most successful films in history. Now. Of
Speaker 1: the millions of young children who gaped it Fantasia over
Speaker 1: the next decades, one was especially taken by the magic
Speaker 1: of animation and the possibilities for how this could evolve.
Speaker 1: This was a boy named ed Catmol and he grew
Speaker 1: up into a world in which transistors were shrinking in
Speaker 1: the power of computer was growing, and all this was
Speaker 1: lighting up new pathways in his imagination. This young man
Speaker 1: would go on to create new methods to represent three
Speaker 1: dimensional objects mathematically, and after his PhD, he would co
Speaker 1: found a studio for making animated films with computers. This
Speaker 1: studio was called Pixar after twenty seven feature films. Ed
Speaker 1: had contributed more to our visual world than almost anyone
Speaker 1: in his generation, but there were certain things that he
Speaker 1: couldn't do. For example, his friend asked him to visualize
Speaker 1: a sphere in front of him, and Ed just couldn't
Speaker 1: do that. Now, was this some sort of rare brain
Speaker 1: disease or what was going on here? So to understand this,
Speaker 1: I'm going to zoom out to the question, the critical
Speaker 1: question for today, which is how do any of us
Speaker 1: picture a sphere in our heads? What does it mean
Speaker 1: to visualize something? So I'd like you to imagine an
Speaker 1: ant crawling on a red and white tablecloth towards a
Speaker 1: jar of purple jelly. Now, what exactly is happening in
Speaker 1: your brain? What is your experience? Are you seeing this
Speaker 1: like a movie or is it just a concept about
Speaker 1: ants and tablecloths and jelly? But it's not really like
Speaker 1: seeing Well, this is one of those questions that might
Speaker 1: seem simple, but it led to decades of debate and
Speaker 1: experiment among researchers, and this debate came to a head
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies in the psychology literature. People were
Speaker 1: asking what is visual imagery? How is visual information stored?
Speaker 1: Do we actually see the ant like the way you
Speaker 1: would experience vision, like watching a movie, or is something
Speaker 1: else going on? One side of the debate argued that
Speaker 1: information about visual objects was stored in a symbolic language
Speaker 1: like format, the way you would store data on a computer,
Speaker 1: and on the other side of the debate, the idea
Speaker 1: was that you're actually running your visual cortex and seeing
Speaker 1: the thing. Essentially, it's the same experience as seeing something real.
Speaker 1: This debate was really spearheaded by two luminarias in the field.
Speaker 1: One was Xenon Folician, who said, you're just manipulating symbols
Speaker 1: in your head, you're not actually seeing the thing, and
Speaker 1: the other was Stephen Coslin, who said, no, it's actually
Speaker 1: like a vision. You're running the same machinery. You're having
Speaker 1: a visual experience. And they both did experiments back and forth.
Speaker 1: Felician said, look, you're insane. It's not stored like a picture,
Speaker 1: and Costlin said, no, you're insane. It's not stored like
Speaker 1: a proposition, You're actually seeing it. And it was very
Speaker 1: difficult to come to a conclusion. Each argued for what
Speaker 1: he felt was true, and both were smart, so why
Speaker 1: couldn't they come to an agreement? So who was right? Well,
Speaker 1: you can answer this yourself. Think about how people actually visualize.
Speaker 1: I'm going to walk you through an exercise and then
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the answer of how humans actually visualize,
Speaker 1: and I guarantee that you will not get the right answer.
Speaker 1: So imagine this picture in your head, the rising sun.
Speaker 1: Think about the picture that comes before your mind's eye.
Speaker 1: Imagine the sun rising above the horizon into a hazy sky.
Speaker 1: And now picture that the sky clears and surrounds the
Speaker 1: sun with blueness. Now picture clouds, A storm comes, there
Speaker 1: are flashes of lightning, and now a rainbow appears. Now
Speaker 1: what I want you to consider is how vividly you
Speaker 1: pictured that. How vivid is your mental picture on a
Speaker 1: scale from one to five, where one is pictureless and
Speaker 1: five is akin to a photo or a video. So
Speaker 1: really think about this. The sun rising into the hazy sky,
Speaker 1: the sky clears to blue, clouds move in lightning flashes,
Speaker 1: finally a rainbow appears. How would you rate the vividness
Speaker 1: of your imagery from one no picture at all to
Speaker 1: five as clear as a movie. So whatever score you
Speaker 1: came up with there, it's not the right answer about
Speaker 1: how humans visualize the rising sun. The score you came
Speaker 1: up with is your answer, but it's not the right
Speaker 1: one for everyone. So returning to this question of why
Speaker 1: Fylition and Coslin, two brilliant researchers, couldn't come to agreement,
Speaker 1: the answer was this, they were each having a different
Speaker 1: experience on the inside. So with Felician's introspection, he didn't
Speaker 1: experience a picture and Coslin did. And here's the key.
Speaker 1: They both operated under the assumption that everyone else was
Speaker 1: having the same experience they were. It's a natural assumption.
Speaker 1: And you've heard me talk on other episodes about about
Speaker 1: how we each live on our own planet, the details
Speaker 1: of our inner cosmos determined by the three pounds of
Speaker 1: electrically screaming cells locked in our skull and constructing our reality.
Speaker 1: We each have our own slightly different version of reality,
Speaker 1: but we generally assume that everyone else is having the
Speaker 1: same thing, and so when Felician considered how do I imagine
Speaker 1: the ant on the tablecloth or the rising sun? He
Speaker 1: realized that he had no real picture in his head,
Speaker 1: and he assumed everyone else had the same experience, and
Speaker 1: he argued for that truth in the literature. And when
Speaker 1: Coslin saw a little movie in his head, he assumed
Speaker 1: everyone else did too, and he argued for what he
Speaker 1: believed was true for everyone. Like all of us, they
Speaker 1: were each operating under the assumption that everyone else's internal
Speaker 1: life was just like their own. And that's why the
Speaker 1: scientific literature was confused for years, because we all make
Speaker 1: these assumption that everyone experiences their internal life as we do. So,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, there are major differences between people
Speaker 1: when it comes to the vividness of their visual imagery.
Speaker 1: Now this has been known for a while, but my
Speaker 1: colleague Adam Zeeman put a name to this in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: He thought, look, let's call your internal imagery fantasia, which
Speaker 1: is the term that Aristotle used for the mind's I
Speaker 1: think of this word like Walt Disney's fantasia, but now
Speaker 1: with a pH instead of an F. And the important
Speaker 1: part is Zeeman said, if a person really visualizes nothing
Speaker 1: at all. We'll call that a fantasia. A is just
Speaker 1: a prefix that means not so. In other words, no fantasia,
Speaker 1: no mind's I thinking without images. And on the other
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum, if a person sees like an
Speaker 1: internal movie, he called that hyperfantasia. They're having imagery so
Speaker 1: so vivid that it rivals real seeing. So that's the
Speaker 1: spectrum from a fantasia to hyperfantasia. Now how do you
Speaker 1: measure that? Well, there's this standardized test created by the
Speaker 1: British psychologist David Marx. It's called the Vividness of Visual
Speaker 1: Imagery Questionnaire, and I've linked to this on the show notes.
Speaker 1: This questionnaire walks you through visualizing a bunch of scenarios.
Speaker 1: For example, think of some relative or friend who you
Speaker 1: frequently see but who is not with you at present,
Speaker 1: and consider carefully the picture that comes before your mind's eye.
Speaker 1: Imagine the exact contours of the face, the head, the shoulders,
Speaker 1: the body. Then think about how they walk, the precise carriage,
Speaker 1: the length of the step, think about the different colors
Speaker 1: of some of their familiar clothes. For each scenario, you
Speaker 1: try to form a mental picture, and then you rate
Speaker 1: how vivid it is using that at five point scale,
Speaker 1: if you don't have any visual image, you rate vividness
Speaker 1: as one, which means no image at all. I only
Speaker 1: know that I'm thinking of the object. You would score
Speaker 1: a two to mean dim and vague image. You'd use
Speaker 1: three to indicate moderately realistic and vivid. Four means realistic
Speaker 1: and reasonably vivid, and you use a five to mean
Speaker 1: perfectly realistic, as vivid as real seeing. So think about this.
Speaker 1: What is it like for you on the spectrum from
Speaker 1: no image to as vivid as real seeing? So try
Speaker 1: with some of these questions. Think of the front of
Speaker 1: a shop that you often go to. Consider the picture
Speaker 1: that comes before your mind's eye, the appearance of the
Speaker 1: shop from the opposite side of the road, a window
Speaker 1: display including colors and shapes and details of individual items
Speaker 1: for sale. Now imagine you enter the shop and go
Speaker 1: to the counter or the counter assistant serves you money
Speaker 1: changes hands. How vivid is your imagery? Or try this one.
Speaker 1: Think of a country scene which involves trees, mountains, a lake.
Speaker 1: Consider the picture that comes before your mind's eye the
Speaker 1: contours of the landscape, the color and shape of the lake,
Speaker 1: the color and shape of the trees. So think about
Speaker 1: what your level of clarity is. Now, my lab showed
Speaker 1: that we can actually measure this in people objectively, not
Speaker 1: just asking them subjective questions about their experience, but measuring
Speaker 1: them in the brain scanner. So we had people take
Speaker 1: the vividness of visual Imagery questionnaire, and then we put
Speaker 1: them in brain imaging fMRI and we had them do
Speaker 1: some visual imagery tasks, and then we looked at the
Speaker 1: activity in their visual cortex relative to the activity and
Speaker 1: the rest of their brains. And the key is that
Speaker 1: instead of averaging all the participants together like you usually
Speaker 1: do in fMRI experiments, we analyzed each person individually and
Speaker 1: we found that some people when they're imaging, have less
Speaker 1: activity in the visual cortex, and some people have more
Speaker 1: and everywhere in between. And when we correlate each participant
Speaker 1: with their vividness of visual imagery score, we found that
Speaker 1: the more clear your imagery, the more activity in your
Speaker 1: visual cortex. In other words, your vividness of visual imagery
Speaker 1: is measurable objectively. If you're someone who has rich visual imagery,
Speaker 1: you have more activity running in your visual cortex. And
Speaker 1: we were Jazz defined that we could objectively verify subjective report.
Speaker 1: So let's return to the young man that I mentioned
Speaker 1: at the beginning who watched and loved Walt Disney's Fantasia.
Speaker 1: This was Ed Catmoll. He loved animated films as a
Speaker 1: child and wanted at some point more than anything to
Speaker 1: go into the world of animated filmmaking, but there was
Speaker 1: no clear path for that. So he ended up getting
Speaker 1: his doctorate in computer science and in nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: he developed new three D computer graphics techniques involving how
Speaker 1: to describe any arbitrary surface as little patches. This is
Speaker 1: called the Catmull Clark surface subdivision, and later he would
Speaker 1: win an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for this, and
Speaker 1: Ed was involved in all the stuff that followed from that,
Speaker 1: including particle effects and ray tracing and everything about how
Speaker 1: light bounces off objects and where you get reflections and shadows.
Speaker 1: And he and his colleagues made the computer program render Man,
Speaker 1: which allowed them making a very complex scenes, and collectively
Speaker 1: this is what made computer graphics realistic. So in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies he got together with his friends and colleagues
Speaker 1: and they collectively had the ambition to make the world's
Speaker 1: first computer animated film, and things took a while, but
Speaker 1: then George Lucas got interested and took on the team,
Speaker 1: and then in nineteen eighty six, Pixar spun off as
Speaker 1: an independent company with Ed as the president. They got
Speaker 1: their investment money from Steve Jobs, who joined the board
Speaker 1: of directors as chairman, and they made this stunning two
Speaker 1: minute short film called Luxo Junior, which starred two desk lamps,
Speaker 1: one large and one small. You may have seen the
Speaker 1: short film, and if you haven't, you should. The large
Speaker 1: lamp looks on while the smaller, younger lamp has a
Speaker 1: great time playing with a ball until it accidentally deflates it.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this film is from Whence Pixar
Speaker 1: got its mascot. So Pixar went on to great acclaim
Speaker 1: and success, starting with Toy Story in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: which was the first fully computer animated feature film, and
Speaker 1: Ed eventually became president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. So
Speaker 1: here's a guy who led the world in the realm
Speaker 1: of gorgeous computer animated film. So imagine his surprise when
Speaker 1: he learned about a fantasia, because he immediately understood that
Speaker 1: his mind's eye was blind ed. Is a fantasic. He
Speaker 1: doesn't visualize anything, and this makes no sense, right, How
Speaker 1: could the guy who runs Pixar and produced the visuals
Speaker 1: for our generation? How could he be a fantasic? So
Speaker 1: Ed and I have been in touch for a while
Speaker 1: on this topic. So I called him up to talk
Speaker 1: with him today about a fantasia and Art ed, when
Speaker 1: did you first realize that your brain was different from
Speaker 1: other people's.
Speaker 2: Well, not that I ever thought it was like anybody else's,
Speaker 2: but there was a curious thing that took place when
Speaker 2: I was having dinner with a friend of mine who
Speaker 2: was involved in visual meditation, and since I meditate, I
Speaker 2: wanted to have him teach me how to do that.
Speaker 2: So he said, well, it's simple. Just sit down and
Speaker 2: then close your eyes and visualize a ball in front
Speaker 2: of you. Really simple.
Speaker 3: So went home. I tried it.
Speaker 2: I couldn't visualize a ball in front of me. So well,
Speaker 2: I was weird for a week. I kept trying. Now,
Speaker 2: when I went back to him, he said, oh, that's okay,
Speaker 2: some people can't do it, But now my curiosity is peaked.
Speaker 2: So I went to the person who was the production
Speaker 2: designer Ralph Eggleston for Toy Story and several of the
Speaker 2: Pixar movies. And I said, if you close your eyes,
Speaker 2: can you see things? He said, of course I can.
Speaker 2: And there's some people here who can do it so well.
Speaker 2: They can open their eyes and trace what they see. Okay,
Speaker 2: now it's interesting to me. Now, what's interesting about it
Speaker 2: was that the surfaces that are used in the movies today.
Speaker 2: We're from Jurassic Park, Toy Story movies, but almost everything
Speaker 2: you see in the movies was based on a patch,
Speaker 2: a way of making a surface that I conceived back
Speaker 2: when I was at the University of Utah.
Speaker 3: It's like forty five years ago.
Speaker 2: And I remember very well the process in which I
Speaker 2: did it, and that was I knew what the problem was.
Speaker 2: I would write things on the whiteboard that's trying to
Speaker 2: solve a problem about how to make a new kind
Speaker 2: of surface, and then I would feel the problem go
Speaker 2: down into my brain or subconscious It felt like it
Speaker 2: was going down, and I stood in front of the
Speaker 2: whiteboard and I rocked back and forth for twenty to
Speaker 2: thirty minutes, this several times, and I knew something was
Speaker 2: going on.
Speaker 3: I had no conscious access to it.
Speaker 2: And then something would bubble to the surface and I
Speaker 2: would draw on the whiteboard and interact with it. And
Speaker 2: when I would run into a problem, which I usually did,
Speaker 2: back down, I would go this was a very real feeling,
Speaker 2: but for all I knew, that's what other people did too.
Speaker 2: So now I'm surprised because I came up with this
Speaker 2: new way of making surfaces, but I didn't do it
Speaker 2: with math, and I didn't do it with visualization. So
Speaker 2: then I started to ask people that pixar, because I
Speaker 2: would have weekly lunches with random people, can.
Speaker 1: You just flesh out what the problem was.
Speaker 2: At the time when I was starting, there were two
Speaker 2: ways of making surfaces, one of them which was with polygons,
Speaker 2: and the other one was with patches.
Speaker 3: These were called beast blind patches.
Speaker 2: They had a lot of flexibility and you could bend
Speaker 2: them in certain ways and then you would stitch a
Speaker 2: surface together with these four sided patches and they would
Speaker 2: come together with four.
Speaker 3: Corners from the different patches.
Speaker 2: Now, because I had made an image of my hand
Speaker 2: it was one of the first things I did with polygons,
Speaker 2: I knew there was an inherent problem, and that is
Speaker 2: stitching together four sided things where they come together at
Speaker 2: the corner with each one has problems if you do
Speaker 2: a hand or something simple like if you take a cube.
Speaker 2: Just think about a cube. It's got six sides, and
Speaker 2: it's got these four sided squares, but they come together
Speaker 2: with three edges at a point, not four. Even if
Speaker 2: for something as simple as a cube, four sided things
Speaker 2: coming together with four at a corner doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Since we were now in the early.
Speaker 2: Stages, I wanted a patch where you didn't need to
Speaker 2: have three come together at a corner. You had more flexibility,
Speaker 2: very important. So I came up with a way of
Speaker 2: doing that, and I proved that it worked once I
Speaker 2: figured out how to do it. Mentally, I proved that
Speaker 2: it worked using high school geometry. So I then went
Speaker 2: to a professor with this idea, and I.
Speaker 3: Showed it to him.
Speaker 2: Was eighteen page lung proof, and I looked at it
Speaker 2: briefly and he said, ed, what is this and he
Speaker 2: tossed it back of me. Wasn't critical to my thesis,
Speaker 2: so I set it to the side. And then after
Speaker 2: I graduated, then Jim Clark we came up with paper
Speaker 2: which then described it.
Speaker 1: Let me just get it straight from the audience. So
Speaker 1: it is how do you represent surfaces on a computer
Speaker 1: and then you can do things like bounce light off
Speaker 1: that and take care of color and stuff like that. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is basically the underlying patches that you piece together.
Speaker 2: And when you've got those pieces together, then there's a
Speaker 2: separate question of how you put texture on them and
Speaker 2: lighting and so forth. This is really the definition of
Speaker 2: the surface. It's a geometric problem.
Speaker 1: And this is what all animated films came to use
Speaker 1: in the future. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, and so I and a couple of others received
Speaker 2: an Academy award because of this way of making services.
Speaker 1: Now tie this back to your inability to picture the
Speaker 1: sphere while meditating.
Speaker 2: So, knowing that this took place, I went to these
Speaker 2: lunches and I just talked about it with people and
Speaker 2: I would say, Okay, if you close your eyes, can
Speaker 2: you visualize something? How good are you at it? And
Speaker 2: what I was finding was that their ability to visualize
Speaker 2: among this random group of eight people at the table
Speaker 2: was all over the place. In fact, in one of them,
Speaker 2: the only person who couldn't or would report of they
Speaker 2: couldn't visualize was an artist and everybody else who is
Speaker 2: not an artist could visualize. So at this point it's
Speaker 2: like this is getting stranger and stranger, and I was
Speaker 2: wondering if there was if there wasn't even a strong
Speaker 2: correlation or any correlation between what they did and their
Speaker 2: ability to visualize.
Speaker 3: Now, at this point, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know about authentation, never heard of it. It's purely
Speaker 2: this curious phenomenon about the way people think.
Speaker 1: The way they visualize, the visualize.
Speaker 2: Yes, the next big step in terms of making it
Speaker 2: a very strange phenomenon was that I had a dinner
Speaker 2: with Glenn Keene. Glenn Keen is one of the best
Speaker 2: hand drawn animators of all time.
Speaker 1: He did The Little Mermaid and what else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so basically he was the primary animator on those
Speaker 2: course of films. So his Little Mermaid, Beauting, the Beast, Aladdin,
Speaker 2: so the main characters they and they were done by Klan.
Speaker 2: I mean, they were rather great animators too, but like,
Speaker 2: this was the guy that was the best, and if
Speaker 2: you watch him draw, it's pretty stunning. So I had
Speaker 2: dinner with him and I explained the topic to him
Speaker 2: and he just said, oh, I can't visualize either.
Speaker 3: I've never been able to visualize.
Speaker 2: In fact, I got into an argument with my mentor
Speaker 2: at Disney, and his mentor was one of these the
Speaker 2: famous nine Old Men of Disney who did the fields
Speaker 2: from a long time ago.
Speaker 3: Glenn really could draw, and the mentor knew this.
Speaker 2: The mentor at one point said visualize it, and Glenn said, well,
Speaker 2: I can't, and the mentor said, well, of course you can.
Speaker 3: You're an anime.
Speaker 2: So they had this argument about whether or not he
Speaker 2: could visualize it is no, he really couldn't, so and
Speaker 2: at this point is this.
Speaker 3: Is really weird.
Speaker 2: And then the next step was that, as my daughter
Speaker 2: pointed out, this article in the New York Times about
Speaker 2: Adam Zieman's work at Exeter in London.
Speaker 3: The article.
Speaker 2: Actually had a mistake in what it said, because it
Speaker 2: wasn't what Adam had said. But what it reported in
Speaker 2: the New York Times article was that there was somebody
Speaker 2: who had a brain tumor and then they removed it.
Speaker 2: But after this process he was no longer able to visualize,
Speaker 2: and therefore they have found the center of visualization in
Speaker 2: the brain. It turns out this isn't what happened at all,
Speaker 2: but because that was what was reported, then I wrote
Speaker 2: to Adam and said I can't visualize, Glenn Keith can't visualize,
Speaker 2: and neither one of us have ever had a brain tumor.
Speaker 2: So he then wrote back and he explained that the
Speaker 2: article was wrong. But that's when I learned about the test,
Speaker 2: the VIVIQUE.
Speaker 1: Which stands for the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.
Speaker 2: Yes, I had that test, and I thought, oh, well,
Speaker 2: this is cool because I have two studios, because I
Speaker 2: was over both Pixar and Disney Animation, and we kept
Speaker 2: the two studios fairly separate so they would have different
Speaker 2: ways of thinking about things. And I thought, well, what
Speaker 2: I will do is is I will give the test
Speaker 2: to the people at the studios, but I also asked
Speaker 2: them to answer some other questions, and in particular is
Speaker 2: what was their job?
Speaker 3: But what did they do?
Speaker 2: And then with my daughter, who also can visualize, we
Speaker 2: gathered the data from I think six hundred people filled
Speaker 2: it out to look for a correlation between the ability
Speaker 2: to visualize on what their job was, what they actually.
Speaker 1: Did, and what was it you learned.
Speaker 2: The people who had, I would say statistically better ability
Speaker 2: to visualize were the storyboard artists who are conceiving of
Speaker 2: the story and making drawings all the time of what
Speaker 2: the story might be. But they weren't a lot higher.
Speaker 2: They were just like statistically higher. But in that group
Speaker 2: where people who had the hyper fantasia, and one of them,
Speaker 2: for instance, would conceive of a film while driving home
Speaker 2: because he had a forty five minutes an hour commute
Speaker 2: every day, and he would play appropriate music for the
Speaker 2: thing he was working on, and while he was driving,
Speaker 2: he would basically build this scene in his head, and
Speaker 2: when he was done with it, he could play it
Speaker 2: backwards and forwards in his head and stop on a
Speaker 2: frame and drop. It's hard to know about the quality
Speaker 2: of the images because storyboard artists only need to make
Speaker 2: the images good enough to convey the story part point
Speaker 2: and then they move on to the next one.
Speaker 3: So he was at the hyperfantasia.
Speaker 2: But every one of them said that when they did
Speaker 2: this process, whether it's driving or walking, but they typically
Speaker 2: did move around, and they always did it with their
Speaker 2: eyes open while they're building up this visualization of what
Speaker 2: they're doing. There were also these storyboard artists who were
Speaker 2: extremely good who had a fantasia, and they actually worked
Speaker 2: a little bit slower, but their drawings looked better, probably
Speaker 2: because they were trying to convey something through the quality
Speaker 2: of drawings. It wasn't until I brought this up to
Speaker 2: them that they then talked about it with each other.
Speaker 2: So there were people that are working together for fifteen
Speaker 2: years and had no idea about this difference. The people
Speaker 2: with a Fantasia were a little more likely to think, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm not as fast as they are, I'm not as good,
Speaker 2: but they never said anything. But the drawings actually looked
Speaker 2: better and the quality of the stories was just as good.
Speaker 3: But they knew there was a difference.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's zoom in on the artisan animators with
Speaker 1: a Fantasia. So you mentioned earlier that the way Glenn
Speaker 1: Keene draws is extraordinary. We've both seen him draw. How
Speaker 1: would you describe that?
Speaker 2: What we could see, and he would describe it this way,
Speaker 2: is that he had something in him but he could
Speaker 2: only get it out by sketching. His hand would just move,
Speaker 2: and what you see are these rough drawings. Sometimes the
Speaker 2: rough drawings were so rough at the early stages that
Speaker 2: you didn't know where it was going until he worked
Speaker 2: it out. But then after a few sketches, his drawings
Speaker 2: would turn into rather remarkable pieces of artwork.
Speaker 1: So he's having a dialogue with the page. But what
Speaker 1: else when you watch him draw, If you're watching him
Speaker 1: while he's drawing, let's say, on a computer screen, what
Speaker 1: do you observe?
Speaker 2: Well, the thing which actually he didn't know at the
Speaker 2: time because people didn't normally point a camera at him.
Speaker 2: He was advising the other animators, but he never really
Speaker 2: was interested or tried to use a computer animation. But
Speaker 2: they all knew that he was had this incredible skill.
Speaker 2: So he would dravo on the screen. His preference was
Speaker 2: paper with a certain kind of pencil. It was actually remarkable.
Speaker 2: He was completely obsessive about the kind of pencil and
Speaker 2: the paper that he had. But he could draw on
Speaker 2: the screen, and he did with his way of doing it.
Speaker 2: And at this point somebody had an iPhone and they
Speaker 2: just pointed at him while he was doing it, and
Speaker 2: his body was acting out the emotions that he was doing,
Speaker 2: so he was, you know, making those kind of faces,
Speaker 2: and he wasn't aware of. What he was aware of
Speaker 2: is that after a day of drawing, he was exhausted.
Speaker 4: So for the audio audience, let me explain so, so, right,
Speaker 4: if he is drawing a character that's surprised, his whole
Speaker 4: body takes on an air of surprise, and his facial
Speaker 4: expression is one of great surprise as he's drawing.
Speaker 1: Or if he's drawing a character that's angry or laughing
Speaker 1: or something, his whole body and face take that on
Speaker 1: that character as he's drawing. And this is what we
Speaker 1: call embodied cognition. Somehow he's understanding the character by adopting
Speaker 1: that character's emotions in the moment, as opposed to simply
Speaker 1: visualizing in his head and then jotting down what he
Speaker 1: is visualizing.
Speaker 2: Yes, whatever is in his head is coming out in
Speaker 2: his body and in his drawings. It's amazing to watch,
Speaker 2: and it was amazing people to watch how I would
Speaker 2: do this. And the reason I related to this was
Speaker 2: that when I was doing the surface work that I
Speaker 2: was very aware that it was somewhere else in my
Speaker 2: body that this was taking place, and I could only
Speaker 2: get it out by drawing it on the whiteboard. And
Speaker 2: then I was interacting at a level with it on
Speaker 2: the whiteboard, seeing if it worked, and if it didn't,
Speaker 2: I'd make modifications, and if if the modifications didn't work,
Speaker 2: then it would go back into this place where I
Speaker 2: no longer had conscious access to it, but I knew
Speaker 2: I was working on so I would not disturb it.
Speaker 2: That's why I rocked back and forth, because if I
Speaker 2: went and did something else, then I would actually disturb
Speaker 2: a process that I was aware of, but I couldn't
Speaker 2: control other than protecting it. When we were at Lucasfilm,
Speaker 2: we were trying to solve a whole number of problems
Speaker 2: based on the fact that we knew that technology was
Speaker 2: increasing at an exponential rate. So the fact that we
Speaker 2: had such an incredible group of talent at Lucasfilm and
Speaker 2: then a Pixar is what enabled us to convince other
Speaker 2: people like Disney that we had the ability to make
Speaker 2: really high quality images. Incidentally, I should note that for
Speaker 2: the three people that started with the underpinnings of Rennerman,
Speaker 2: Lauren Carpenter and Rob Cook being the other two, they
Speaker 2: both had a fantasia also right.
Speaker 1: I just ran into Rob Cook last week and I
Speaker 1: asked him about this, and he was so surprised and
Speaker 1: interested that anyone cared and was talking about this issue.
Speaker 2: It was one of those things like there was no
Speaker 2: reason for us to ever talk to each other about
Speaker 2: it or ask, So we had no idea whatsoever route
Speaker 2: and there was only after my daughter and I we
Speaker 2: made the presentation and we talked about it that we realized, Oh,
Speaker 2: none of us can visualize, but what we have is
Speaker 2: the underlying technology which is used to make images.
Speaker 1: What is your hypothesis about why many artists and animators
Speaker 1: and why you and Cook and Carpenter were able to
Speaker 1: come up with these stunning visual technologies without being able
Speaker 1: to visually image in your heads.
Speaker 2: Our brains work in really interesting in different ways, and
Speaker 2: we have different methods of getting it out and which
Speaker 2: you know, this is like, it's appreciating that some people's
Speaker 2: brain can work in a very different way and still
Speaker 2: do something productive. And it's to value the fact that
Speaker 2: other people do things that we can't do in different ways.
Speaker 3: And that's actually, that's very cool.
Speaker 2: I can't be like anybody else, and if I can't
Speaker 2: be anybody like other people, and I can't be another gender,
Speaker 2: I can't be another ethnicity, I can't be raised in
Speaker 2: another culture. My brain doesn't work like other people's brains,
Speaker 2: so it would be folly for me to pretend or
Speaker 2: think that I should have those experiences instead of what
Speaker 2: I have is like a faith that other people bring
Speaker 2: something of great value, even if I can't experience experience it,
Speaker 2: and even.
Speaker 3: If I don't know what it is. And for me,
Speaker 3: this is an important thing.
Speaker 2: It's really to have faith that what other people bring
Speaker 2: is of value and I shouldn't be expected to fully
Speaker 2: understand why, just that. No, that's actually cool, and I
Speaker 2: want to have those kind of people around me.
Speaker 1: I love that. Hey, I'm curious about your thoughts on
Speaker 1: my hypothesis about this. Here's the way I started thinking
Speaker 1: about this issue of artists. You know, between the two
Speaker 1: of us, we know lots of artist and animators who
Speaker 1: are a fantasic. And it's so counterintuitive at first, but
Speaker 1: what struck me is that if you are a young
Speaker 1: child and you have let's say, hyperfantasia, and the teacher says, okay,
Speaker 1: draw a horse, you're just drawing the horse that's in
Speaker 1: your head. But if you're the kid with a fantasia,
Speaker 1: you really have to stare at the model and really
Speaker 1: look at it and figure out where the lines are.
Speaker 1: You have a dialogue with the page and with what's
Speaker 1: in front of you. That way, and that's why I
Speaker 1: think children with a fantasia can under some circumstances, become
Speaker 1: better artists because they're having to put the work in
Speaker 1: instead of imagining that they already know exactly what's out there,
Speaker 1: which may or may not be such a great drawing,
Speaker 1: it might not be accurate. What do you think of that?
Speaker 3: There are a couple of things.
Speaker 2: One of them is that I do remember when I
Speaker 2: was in elementary school that we had another kid in
Speaker 2: the class is you're like maybe fifth grade or something
Speaker 2: like them, But when he drew, he was driving horses
Speaker 2: and so forth. I was blown away as a kid
Speaker 2: because they were at the professional level.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I knew that I never knew what happened to this guy.
Speaker 2: All I knew was that his abilities at that age
Speaker 2: were remarkable. For me personally, I liked art, and I
Speaker 2: drew a lot, you know, because I'd want to be
Speaker 2: an animat But the thing I appreciate was I did
Speaker 2: have to spend a lot of time observing and trying
Speaker 2: to think about proportions.
Speaker 3: And ratios and how the backgrounds came together.
Speaker 2: I am very upset and irritated that when the money
Speaker 2: gets tight in the schools, one of the first things
Speaker 2: to go or the art programs, Well, what is art?
Speaker 2: Art has a fundamental skill of observing. It's looking, it's
Speaker 2: trying to see and understand. Which fields do we have
Speaker 2: where it's not important to be observant. You like your
Speaker 2: doctor to be observant, you know, and if you're an engineer,
Speaker 2: you want to be observant. It's like in every one
Speaker 2: of these fields. It's an important skill because people have
Speaker 2: the misconception that art is about drawing, when really art
Speaker 2: is about seeing, and we have different ways of seeing.
Speaker 2: But developing those skills, however our brain works is actually
Speaker 2: very important.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else that you want to mention?
Speaker 2: Well, there was one thing I was surprised at when
Speaker 2: I went to the conference. Some of the people with
Speaker 2: hyperfantasia said they wish they didn't have it because there
Speaker 2: were things they would like to forget. So so, well,
Speaker 2: that's really interesting. Actually, I've always had a crappy memory,
Speaker 2: you know, I wish it were better, and trying to
Speaker 2: make it better. I would read these techniques about the
Speaker 2: memory palace, and it was only in retrospect that I
Speaker 2: realized the memory palace never worked for me because they
Speaker 2: couldn't see the damn rooms. But the fact that some
Speaker 2: people didn't like it because they were remembering things they
Speaker 2: didn't want.
Speaker 3: It was just very interesting.
Speaker 2: The other interesting thing was one of the I don't
Speaker 2: know what through neurologists or psychologists there asked the question
Speaker 2: of the general audience that if they were given a
Speaker 2: pill that would reverse their abilities from hyperpantasia to aphantasia,
Speaker 2: but the pill was irreversible, how many would take the pill?
Speaker 3: And about half the audience raised their hands.
Speaker 2: Now, in my case, I wish that I could see
Speaker 2: images from the past. I think part of it is
Speaker 2: because you don't know what it's like to experience that.
Speaker 2: Then you could say, oh, I would like to have
Speaker 2: that ability. You wouldn't know whether or not it would
Speaker 2: have negative consequences that would.
Speaker 3: Come with it, or for that matter.
Speaker 2: It's one of the things I look at was that
Speaker 2: when I took my courses, because when I went to college,
Speaker 2: I majored in physics, I judged a teacher whether or
Speaker 2: not they gave me an intuitive understanding.
Speaker 3: And there were some teachers who.
Speaker 2: Basically were the philosophy you just follow the math, and
Speaker 2: I would just say to myself, Oh, they're a crappy teacher.
Speaker 2: I used to think they were crappy teachers, and there
Speaker 2: were some that would give you an intuitive feeling, and
Speaker 2: when I got the intuitive feeling, I would do very well.
Speaker 2: So then I wonder, Okay, was it the fact that
Speaker 2: I had a fantasia which made me push harder to
Speaker 2: get an intuitive feeling which was not a visual one,
Speaker 2: and that having a fantasia may have been a great advantage.
Speaker 1: For I'm so interested in how these things cash out
Speaker 1: in terms of advantages, like for an artist or someone
Speaker 1: trying to understand physics and having to work the extra
Speaker 1: mile for it.
Speaker 2: So I can't go back, I said, well, and I
Speaker 2: would like to have had all the things I had,
Speaker 2: plus I want this other stuff because you know, it
Speaker 2: may be the lack of certain things was actually in
Speaker 2: create advantage for him.
Speaker 1: That was Ed Catmull, co founder of Pixar and one
Speaker 1: of the many a fantasics there. As Ed mentioned, he
Speaker 1: had posted a survey of his whole company and he
Speaker 1: found that many of his colleagues, like Carpenter and Cook
Speaker 1: were also a fantasiaic. And he found this was true
Speaker 1: of many of his best artists. For example, you heard
Speaker 1: us mention Glenn Keen Glenn is one of the godfathers
Speaker 1: of animation. So a while ago I talked with Glenn
Speaker 1: about this and here's what he told me. Quote, as
Speaker 1: I draw, I feel like my drawing is a conversation
Speaker 1: and it's talking to me and I'm responding to it.
Speaker 1: So it's actually not a one way thing at all.
Speaker 1: It's something that exists and I'm responding to it and
Speaker 1: pulling it out. End quote. And when you watch Glenn,
Speaker 1: he uses a lot of lines. He's feeling things out
Speaker 1: as he draws. He describes it as a quest. We
Speaker 1: were talking about a particular film and I asked him
Speaker 1: about what he might visualize if he needed to draw
Speaker 1: a scene where a girl has to jump off a
Speaker 1: cliff into the water so she can get on to
Speaker 1: another shore. And in his words, he said, quote, I
Speaker 1: don't have a visual on it, but I know exactly
Speaker 1: the whole experience of it, and I can feel it
Speaker 1: very clearly. And when Glenn sets to work on the
Speaker 1: page sketch and feeling with the lines, the animation comes
Speaker 1: to life. I'm going to put some videos of him
Speaker 1: working on these show notes at eagleman dot com slash podcast,
Speaker 1: so check those out. It's really amazing to watch him
Speaker 1: work now again. A fantasie is not just for artists.
Speaker 1: There's a million examples. I'll just take one. There's a
Speaker 1: famous software engineer named Blake Ross. He's the guy who
Speaker 1: founded Mozilla, and he posted on facebooks and years ago
Speaker 1: that he had just stumbled on a fantasia. On his
Speaker 1: Facebook post, he wrote that this was quote as close
Speaker 1: and honest to goodness revelation as I will ever live
Speaker 1: in the flesh. He went on to write, quote, I
Speaker 1: just learned something about you, and it is blowing my mind.
Speaker 1: Here it is, you can visualize things in your mind.
Speaker 1: I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I
Speaker 1: can't see my father's face, or a bouncing blue ball,
Speaker 1: my childhood bedroom, or the run I went ten minutes ago.
Speaker 1: I thought counting sheep was a metaphor. I'm thirty years
Speaker 1: old and I never knew a human could do any
Speaker 1: of this, and it is blowing my mind. End quote.
Speaker 1: When he had accidentally heard about a fantasia, he right
Speaker 1: away began asking his friends what their internal experience was like,
Speaker 1: and his friends told him they could see things like
Speaker 1: if he asked them to imagine standing on a beach,
Speaker 1: but the idea of a mental picture like that made
Speaker 1: no sense to him. Now what's interesting is that after
Speaker 1: his post, I saw one of his colleagues right on
Speaker 1: Twitter quote, I'm amazed and humbled that Blake Ross got
Speaker 1: so good at user interface design at Mozilla, given that
Speaker 1: he has a fantasia. But this is the same thing
Speaker 1: with Ed Catmull. No one would have expected that the
Speaker 1: computer scientists who pioneered new methods for making three dimensional
Speaker 1: surfaces that allow you to capture the proper light reflection
Speaker 1: and so on, no one would have guessed that he
Speaker 1: had a fantasia. But the thing I want to point
Speaker 1: out about Blake's post was his absolute amazement in discovering
Speaker 1: that other people were having a very different internal life
Speaker 1: than he was. It is hard to believe this when
Speaker 1: you first learn about it, And calling back to the
Speaker 1: beginning of this episode, this is why it took so
Speaker 1: long for the debate of how we visualize to get
Speaker 1: resolved in the psychology literature, because we all assume that
Speaker 1: everyone's experience is exactly like ours on the inside. Now,
Speaker 1: speaking of people's internal worlds being different, one of the
Speaker 1: classes I teach at Stanford is called literature and the brain.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that's been fascinating to me
Speaker 1: for years is understanding the fundamental differences between individual authors.
Speaker 1: So I want to give you two very concrete examples. First,
Speaker 1: I want you to think about the level of visual
Speaker 1: description here in this passage from Thomas Hardy from his
Speaker 1: novel Return of the Native Quote. The next morning, when
Speaker 1: Thomason withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood
Speaker 1: the may pole in the middle of the green, its
Speaker 1: top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in
Speaker 1: the night, or rather early morning, like Jack's beanstalk. She
Speaker 1: opened the casement to get a better view of the
Speaker 1: garlands and posies that adorned it. At the top of
Speaker 1: the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers. Beneath
Speaker 1: these came a milk white zone of may bloom, then
Speaker 1: a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs,
Speaker 1: then of ragged robins, daffodils, and so on till the
Speaker 1: lowest stage was reached. That's how Thomas Hardy writes. Now
Speaker 1: I want you to contrast that with Ernest Hemingway, who's
Speaker 1: much less individual descriptions. Here's a passage from his novel
Speaker 1: A Farewell to Arms quote. If people bring so much
Speaker 1: courage to this world, the world has to kill them
Speaker 1: to break them. So of course it kills them. The
Speaker 1: world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the
Speaker 1: broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
Speaker 1: It kills the very good and the very gentle and
Speaker 1: the very brave, impartially. If you are none of these,
Speaker 1: you can be sure it will kill you too, but
Speaker 1: there will be no special hurry. Okay, so here's my hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Ernest Hemingway is the felicition of literature, and Thomas Hardy
Speaker 1: is the costlin. In other words, I speculate that Hemingway
Speaker 1: was a fantasic and Hardy was hyperfantasic. Now I have
Speaker 1: no way to prove this, because their brains are gone,
Speaker 1: but it seems a possibility to me that we might
Speaker 1: be able to make some crude retrospective neural guesses by
Speaker 1: looking at how an author writes and what kind of
Speaker 1: details the author assumes his reader would want. Presumably Hardy
Speaker 1: thinks that all readers are like him, and that everyone's
Speaker 1: going to love this description of all those flowers, and
Speaker 1: presumably Hemingway assumes that his readers are like him, and
Speaker 1: that they really care zero about the visual detail. In fact,
Speaker 1: in another spot, in a Farewell to Arms, Hemingway is
Speaker 1: writing about the use of words in wartime, and he
Speaker 1: writes abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow
Speaker 1: or obscene, beside the concrete names of villages, the number
Speaker 1: of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments,
Speaker 1: and the dates. So I assert they were both writing
Speaker 1: in the manner that made sense to them, and both
Speaker 1: of them put their workout into the world, and readers
Speaker 1: ended up buying their books, And presumably both authors think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know what readers want and I nailed it. They
Speaker 1: don't necessarily realize that they're attracting only a subset of
Speaker 1: readers to their work. They have set up bug lights
Speaker 1: at different ends of the fantasia spectrum. Okay, so we've
Speaker 1: covered a wide territory from Disney to Catmull to Hardy
Speaker 1: to Hemingway. So let's see where we are. One of
Speaker 1: the conclusions that has come out of the study of
Speaker 1: a fantasia and hyperfantasia is that there's no particular disadvantage
Speaker 1: to being at any part of the spectrum. There are
Speaker 1: many ways to experience reality, and although we traditionally concentrate
Speaker 1: on disorders and diseases, neuroscience is increasingly examining the variety
Speaker 1: of normal human experiences. And when we look at the
Speaker 1: great engineers and animators around us, perhaps it shouldn't be
Speaker 1: surprising that some of them are a fantasic and some
Speaker 1: are hyperfantasic and everywhere in between. The last several years
Speaker 1: have seen a lot of discussion about diversity, but traditionally
Speaker 1: that conversation is only skin deep. Really, there are many
Speaker 1: many axes of diversity that we could attend to, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to do a future episode on this about
Speaker 1: the heterogeneity of internal experience across the population. Today we
Speaker 1: talked about the spectrum of visual imagery, but there's increasing
Speaker 1: study now in other forms of imagery. For example, there
Speaker 1: are large individual differences in smell imagery. When you imagine
Speaker 1: the scent of cinnamon, you're smelling with the mind's nose.
Speaker 1: Some people can recreate the sensation of a smell like
Speaker 1: take lemon pie, as though the pie is present for
Speaker 1: other people on the other end of the spectrum. This
Speaker 1: the mele of lemon pie is only conceptual. It's nothing
Speaker 1: like an experience. We find the same thing with hearing.
Speaker 1: When you imagine the Happy Birthday song or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,
Speaker 1: you are hearing with the mind's ear. Some people are
Speaker 1: great at this. It's almost like they're listening to a radio,
Speaker 1: and other people don't hear anything on the inside. What
Speaker 1: is your capacity to imagine the feel of silk with
Speaker 1: your mind's fingers or imagine the taste of goat cheese
Speaker 1: with your mind's tongue. Whatever your answer is, your best
Speaker 1: friend's answer might be different. And these questions of imagery
Speaker 1: reach beyond the senses. I can ask you to imagine
Speaker 1: climbing up twenty flights of stairs. Now, some of you
Speaker 1: can feel the sensation and your muscle and the movement
Speaker 1: in the ache. This is called motor imagery, but for
Speaker 1: other people they're not feeling it very much at all.
Speaker 1: Or take something like the act of identifying your own
Speaker 1: emotions or describing the emotions of other people. Some people
Speaker 1: are really talented at this. Others have what's called alexithymia,
Speaker 1: which means they're really bad at identifying describing emotions in themselves.
Speaker 1: Or others, And it should be noted there are many
Speaker 1: aspects of the human experience which, to my knowledge, have
Speaker 1: not even yet been studied. As an example, consider the
Speaker 1: degree to which you hear your internal voice. I don't
Speaker 1: really hear much of anything. In contrast, some friends of
Speaker 1: mine have what they call an internal radio. They sometimes
Speaker 1: don't hear other people when those people talk, because, as
Speaker 1: they describe it, this speaker gets drowned out by the
Speaker 1: internal radio. We joke about this now, but it took
Speaker 1: us years to realize that there's this fundamental difference between
Speaker 1: our experience on the inside. So there's so much variety
Speaker 1: from head to head, and there's been so little study
Speaker 1: on this in any previous generation. Why it's because of
Speaker 1: our strong and natural intuition that everyone experiences the world
Speaker 1: exactly the way that we do. But we're finally at
Speaker 1: a point with science where we have the desire and
Speaker 1: capacity to understand the differences on the inside. So now
Speaker 1: we can finally undertake the endeavor to chart and explore
Speaker 1: the enormous variety of the eight billion planets of the
Speaker 1: inner Cosmos. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for
Speaker 1: more information and to find further reading and videos. Send
Speaker 1: me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with
Speaker 1: questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to
Speaker 1: leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and this
Speaker 1: is Inner Cosmos, The Stunt and