Speaker 1: My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with part
Speaker 1: two of our discussion of psychic photography, the press of
Speaker 1: the Mind's Eye. That's right. We kicked off last episode
Speaker 1: talking about the ring in which a psychically gifted, disturbed
Speaker 1: little girl is able to use her the power of
Speaker 1: her mind to burn images into things, including into the
Speaker 1: the film of a VHS tape, sure, but also into
Speaker 1: all kinds of surfaces. Right. Yeah, But but she's most
Speaker 1: famous for her her video work is the video artist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's a video artist, true artist and true artistrington. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's where we started off. But we used then
Speaker 1: to get into this idea of photography of uh, this
Speaker 1: this alleged psychic power by which certain individuals were able
Speaker 1: to use the powers of their mind, uh to either
Speaker 1: you know, focused mental images into say, undeveloped camera film,
Speaker 1: or make it so they could like point a camera
Speaker 1: at their own forehead and take a picture of the
Speaker 1: interior imaging of their mind. Things of that nature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The idea was that somehow mental imagery, you know, things
Speaker 1: that you are picturing in your brain could be projected
Speaker 1: out onto the world without being translated through you know,
Speaker 1: you putting them into language or you sketching with a hand. Um.
Speaker 1: And so I was wondering if you try to take
Speaker 1: this idea seriously and say, okay, if this really did work,
Speaker 1: how would it work. I was having trouble coming across
Speaker 1: anything that seemed all that plausible to me. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I found one article with somebody's talking about how, well,
Speaker 1: maybe consciousness is like an electromagnetic field. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if I buy that. But even if you did buy
Speaker 1: the consciousness as an electromagnetic field, how exactly would that
Speaker 1: translate into you thinking about an image physically pressing the
Speaker 1: image onto a thing outside your brain, Because there's no
Speaker 1: reason to think that the electromagnetic field would be like
Speaker 1: a two dimensional image that's the same as the thing
Speaker 1: you're picturing. Yeah, and then, I mean there's so many
Speaker 1: problems with it's almost difficult to roll out individual problems,
Speaker 1: like what would be the evolved necessity of doing that?
Speaker 1: You know why, it would have to just be like
Speaker 1: an accidental byproduct or something, you know, random mutation. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then would there be a survival advantage to having
Speaker 1: that mutation? And it gets it gets really sticky, really fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think it highlights a kind of like shallow
Speaker 1: understanding of what mental image re is. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: then specifically what photography is concerning those examples of the
Speaker 1: thoughtography that we discussed in the last episode. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So I thought maybe we should start today by thinking
Speaker 1: about what is the physical reality of an image in
Speaker 1: the mind's eye when you okay, so stopping, you picture something,
Speaker 1: you picture Garfield Garfield in mind? What is happening in
Speaker 1: your brain when you picture Garfield? Like, is there some
Speaker 1: two dimensional grid of brain cells that's like a screen
Speaker 1: where colors fill in like pixels on a computer screen
Speaker 1: and they form Garfield. It seems kind of implausible, but
Speaker 1: you know, entertained that for a second, if there were
Speaker 1: a way for a mental image to be projected into
Speaker 1: a physical space, what would be the physical nature of
Speaker 1: the original signal in the brain, and how would it
Speaker 1: be transferred to the physical form without being interpreted through
Speaker 1: the body. So I was looking at a couple of
Speaker 1: papers on the subject of like research and thought about
Speaker 1: mental imagery, and one one of the ones I was
Speaker 1: looking at was called Unpicturing a Candle The Prehistory of
Speaker 1: Imagery Science, and this was published in Frontiers and Psychology
Speaker 1: by Matthew mckissics, Susan Aldworth, Fiona McPherson, John Onion's, Crawford Winlove,
Speaker 1: and Adam Zema, and this a lot of names. Uh
Speaker 1: In and the authors here focus on the history of
Speaker 1: scholarship and philosophy concerning visual imagination before modern neuroscience, but
Speaker 1: they also cover some modern neuroscience with a specific focus
Speaker 1: on the idea of imagining a concrete object, for example,
Speaker 1: picturing a candle. And so the authors explored the history
Speaker 1: and so for example, they start by looking at like
Speaker 1: Plato and Aristotle, and they point out that Plato actually
Speaker 1: did not hold a very high regard for the importance
Speaker 1: of mental imagination. Uh Like for Plato, mental imagery is
Speaker 1: a copy of a copy. It is a sort of
Speaker 1: imperfect fac simile of an object in the world, which
Speaker 1: is already merely an imperfect copy of a perfect divine form.
Speaker 1: That we're getting into the idea of the realm of forms.
Speaker 1: Uh the idea that a chair, that there's a perfect
Speaker 1: version of a chair that exists in the realm of forms.
Speaker 1: The chair we can build is an imperfect interpretation of that.
Speaker 1: But then the but then his view is because I'm
Speaker 1: more likely to think of it the other way, like
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, then, oh, well, the version of the chair
Speaker 1: in our mind, that's the realm of forms. But he's saying, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's even another level removed from the realm of forms.
Speaker 1: It's an imperfect version of the imperfect chair that is
Speaker 1: in itself an imperfect version of the ideal chair. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: your mental image of a pineapple is a flawed copy
Speaker 1: of some actual pineapple, which is an imperfect realization of
Speaker 1: eternal pineapple nous. Yeah, and I and I think I
Speaker 1: think he is correct here, because, as we stayed in
Speaker 1: the last episode, we often we often a tribute a
Speaker 1: lot of detail and accuracy to our total images when
Speaker 1: they're when it's really not there. It's it's often a
Speaker 1: lot more obscure and unfinished than we give it credit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I almost wouldn't think about it in terms
Speaker 1: of accuracy, but in terms and maybe this is more
Speaker 1: specific to the way my brain works, but I think
Speaker 1: about it even in terms of completeness, like that, when
Speaker 1: I have a mental image of something, it's not the
Speaker 1: same as looking at the thing, because I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: only vaguely grasping the totality of the image. When I'm
Speaker 1: mentally picture something, it's not like it's just not like
Speaker 1: looking at a fixed version of the image. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a hazy scanning of different little elements of
Speaker 1: the image that I can picture in a moment against
Speaker 1: a field of a general impression of the larger image.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah, I believe. An example
Speaker 1: that's often used here is that of a bicycle. If
Speaker 1: I say, hey, imagine a bicycle. Easy done. I'm imagining
Speaker 1: a bicycle right now. But if we go to the
Speaker 1: next step and say that bicycle you're imagining, describe for
Speaker 1: me the functionality of its, of the of the wheels
Speaker 1: and the gears and the pedals and everything explained to
Speaker 1: me how that works? Oh yeah. This goes back to
Speaker 1: our illusion of explanatory depth episodes where everybody can picture
Speaker 1: a bicycle, but can you draw a bicycle? And it
Speaker 1: turns out it's just try it. You might end up
Speaker 1: laughing really hard at yourself because you think you can
Speaker 1: draw a bicycle, but there's a decent chance you can't.
Speaker 1: You don't know where the bars go, which wheel connects
Speaker 1: to what? You just don't know, even though you think
Speaker 1: you can picture it right now. So again, Plato, I
Speaker 1: think was definitely onto something here. I think Plato hit
Speaker 1: this one out of the park. Yeah. But Aristotle, to
Speaker 1: the contrary, he thought that not only was mental image
Speaker 1: rey important, he thought that you literally could not think
Speaker 1: without it. They quote him saying, the soul never thinks
Speaker 1: without a phantasma, and the phantasma is like some kind
Speaker 1: of mental image, which I'm sure this would come as
Speaker 1: news to our many listeners who tell us about their
Speaker 1: experiences with a fantasia, meaning that they say they don't
Speaker 1: have the ability to form mental images, they can't picture
Speaker 1: something in their heads. And yet you know, we've got
Speaker 1: no reason to disbelieve them on that. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, they seem perfectly capable of thinking. So it
Speaker 1: seems perfectly clear to me that mental imagery is not
Speaker 1: necessary for thought, right, it is necessary for choosing the
Speaker 1: form of the destroyer should gozer Uh, the traveler appear
Speaker 1: to you. I have been think back at that scene
Speaker 1: and Ghostbusters. Uh, that's how they choose the stay puff
Speaker 1: marshmallow man form. But you have all of the Ghostbusters
Speaker 1: had had a fantasia, then the the Destroyer would not
Speaker 1: have been able to manifest. I think you said that
Speaker 1: in the original episode. Probably did. I haven't thought about
Speaker 1: it since then. But that's great unless goes Are the
Speaker 1: Destroyer is even more nefarious than we imagine, and he
Speaker 1: can also manifest in the shape of something that you
Speaker 1: put together through say words or whatever. Maybe, but I
Speaker 1: kind of like the idea that it's being an interdimensional entity.
Speaker 1: It's it's limited, and it really like it. It cannot
Speaker 1: venture into this form unless there is a clear visual
Speaker 1: image that it can draw from. Like that has to
Speaker 1: be the uh, the the foothold for it to climb
Speaker 1: back in and begin destroying. Well, to tie it back
Speaker 1: to psychic photography, actually this is what the case of
Speaker 1: goes Are taking the form you imagine would be exactly
Speaker 1: like thoughtography. It would be the case of mental imagery
Speaker 1: being manifested as a physical object in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but it would also it would make more sense
Speaker 1: that a god can read your mind, then your mind
Speaker 1: can blast a photo, blast an image onto some undeveloped film,
Speaker 1: I agree. Uh. So picking up again with the history
Speaker 1: of mental imagery, Uh, Descartes had thoughts about visual imagination,
Speaker 1: apparently placed it on par with the senses as manifestations
Speaker 1: of the body would. Of course, in descartess view, that
Speaker 1: makes them fallible, because of course they can always be mistaken,
Speaker 1: unlike in his view pure logical deduction. If you were
Speaker 1: call like the fight between Descartes and the the empiricists.
Speaker 1: You know, the empiricists thought that the senses should be primary,
Speaker 1: but deckart thought, no, you can't ever fully trust the senses.
Speaker 1: You've got to go on just like pure logical proofs.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure why, for some reason that that
Speaker 1: seems like a funny belief looking back on it now.
Speaker 1: Of course, later mental imagery became the domain of psychology. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course you know that that would be treated
Speaker 1: in different ways depending on the different schools of psychology.
Speaker 1: One thing that I think is interesting in the history
Speaker 1: of psychology is the behaviorist school, of course, not being
Speaker 1: interested in mental imagery because it's not an outwardly measurable behavior.
Speaker 1: So J. B. Watson apparently referred to mental imagery as
Speaker 1: quote motor habits in the larynx, which I think is
Speaker 1: a behaviorist way of saying something you only know about
Speaker 1: because people talk about it. I am continually fascinated by
Speaker 1: thinking about behaviorism because we occasionally hear from people. Uh,
Speaker 1: We've gotten a couple of listener emails over the years,
Speaker 1: people responding to topics from a behaviorist point of view,
Speaker 1: essentially not crediting anything that's about the inner experiences or
Speaker 1: consciousness of people. It's only you know, the psychology can
Speaker 1: only be about outwardly measured behaviors. Yeah, it's a statement
Speaker 1: like that. Then it makes me wonder if J. V.
Speaker 1: Watson was perhaps perhaps had a fantasia. You know, I
Speaker 1: mean this idea because we this lines up with what
Speaker 1: we've heard from a lot of people who's claimed to
Speaker 1: have a fantasia. And they'll say, oh, yeah, I heard
Speaker 1: people talking about picturing something in their mind when they
Speaker 1: read a book, and I thought they were just being
Speaker 1: you know, it was just figurative, you know, they weren't
Speaker 1: saying that they actually saw something in their head. Like
Speaker 1: it's it seems like it is difficult to imagine the
Speaker 1: mental image if you have no frame of reference for it,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, yeah, except I would say that for Watson,
Speaker 1: it's not just mental imagery. It's all internal mental phenomena.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's everything that's not outward behavior. So it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be just I think he would probably think that
Speaker 1: mental imagery is not the only thing. That's just a
Speaker 1: motor habit in the larynx. That uh that I don't know, imagination, that,
Speaker 1: like anything inside your head, is a motor habit in
Speaker 1: the larynx. Do you think Ether would have changed his
Speaker 1: mind at all? I don't know. Then again, maybe I'm
Speaker 1: not being fair. I don't want to put words in
Speaker 1: Watson's mouth, but uh, yeah, So I think we don't
Speaker 1: need to feel bound by the behaviorist view of this thing,
Speaker 1: and we can entertain the idea of mental imagery. You
Speaker 1: experience it, other people say they experience it. You've got
Speaker 1: no reason to disbelieve them. So I think humans probably
Speaker 1: have mental imagery. But but long in history, it has
Speaker 1: clearly been assumed that there is some kind of physical representation,
Speaker 1: space and perceiver within the brain for mental imagery. Uh.
Speaker 1: And one thing I'm thinking about that I came across
Speaker 1: while preparing for this episode is an illustration by the
Speaker 1: sixteenth seventeenth century English physician and occultist Robert Flood spelled
Speaker 1: f l U d D kind of like Elmer Flood
Speaker 1: Flood with an L flood, also like Randall Flag. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Maybe this is one of the incarnations of
Speaker 1: the Man from the Desert. But anyway, and one of
Speaker 1: Robert Flood's tracks he illustrated the eye of imagination or
Speaker 1: the oculus imagination onus, which was this third eye inside
Speaker 1: the brain which getting it wrong and backwards in multiple ways,
Speaker 1: projected mental images onto some kind of screen or representation
Speaker 1: space in the back or like in the back of
Speaker 1: the head or behind the head, where mental images would
Speaker 1: take form after being projected by this third eye. And now,
Speaker 1: of course we know that the eye does not project
Speaker 1: a beam of seeing, but receives incoming light. So even yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we're we're confused in more ways than one here. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: if there really were a tiny viewing screen inside the
Speaker 1: brain and an eye to see it, it would be
Speaker 1: too dark to watch the movie, right right, So that
Speaker 1: would be a problem. But but yeah, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: I think third eye views are are popular throughout history.
Speaker 1: People kind of think there's an observer in the observer right,
Speaker 1: and and granted, we do have a pennial gland, which
Speaker 1: is essentially an atrophied photo receptor with some connections to
Speaker 1: the parietal eye of reptiles. But but it produces uh, melotonin,
Speaker 1: a serotonin derived hormone, and is not involved in the
Speaker 1: generation of mental images, or at least I don't think
Speaker 1: there's any evidence, and not that I've ever seen. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is funny because I was reading that deck Hart
Speaker 1: believed that the penneal gland was the point of interaction
Speaker 1: between the body and the immaterial soul. Did you know this, um?
Speaker 1: May We did. We did episode on the pineal gland
Speaker 1: way back in the day, so it's possible I came
Speaker 1: across this. Yeah, But I'm thinking back to this idea
Speaker 1: of having, yeah, a viewer inside the viewer like an
Speaker 1: in internal I inside the brain for mental imagery. And
Speaker 1: there are reasons I think that there are problems with
Speaker 1: this because if in order to see mental images we
Speaker 1: have to project them physically somewhere inside the brain, what
Speaker 1: is the part of the brain that is looking at
Speaker 1: the image? Is it another brain with eyes inside the brain? Uh?
Speaker 1: Incognitive philosophy, this is sometimes called the homunculous theory. That's
Speaker 1: a you know, a name of ridicule for it, like
Speaker 1: the idea that there has to be somebody inside your
Speaker 1: brain to see what your brain is seeing or thinking. Right,
Speaker 1: as with like the homunculous ideas and human reproduction where
Speaker 1: there's a tiny little version of you inside of a
Speaker 1: sperm cell. Yes, and like the homunculous idea of of reproduction,
Speaker 1: it's an infinite regress, right, because if there's a little
Speaker 1: eyes and a brain inside your head in order to
Speaker 1: see what you're thinking, then that brain must have little
Speaker 1: eyes and a brain inside that brain to see what
Speaker 1: that brain is thinking about. And it goes on forever.
Speaker 1: And another version of this extended to total brain function
Speaker 1: is what Daniel Dennett calls the Cartesian theater. Again, this
Speaker 1: is something he's he's ridiculing. Basically, it's uh imagining or
Speaker 1: implicitly assuming that the brain has some sort of little
Speaker 1: pilot inside who witnesses all of our sense data and
Speaker 1: controls our reactions um. And again it's basically a reductive
Speaker 1: ad absurdam because it leads to this infinite regress. Who's
Speaker 1: seeing the images inside the brain and the homunculus or
Speaker 1: the pilot or the Cartesian theater must be another smaller one.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it can be that inside the brain,
Speaker 1: mental images are seen the same way our eyes see
Speaker 1: things in the world. So what actually is happening in
Speaker 1: the brain when you're asked to imagine a concrete image.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should take a break and then explore that
Speaker 1: when we come back. Yes, everyone think of a bicycle
Speaker 1: during this commercial break. Than alright, we're back, and hopefully
Speaker 1: you stall that bicycle floating around inside your mind. We
Speaker 1: should give them something more interesting to picture concretely, something
Speaker 1: with details. Picture a demogorgan. The demogorgan is good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just interesting how many like fabled unreal entities are
Speaker 1: good things to focus your mind on. And I think
Speaker 1: it perhaps it's because there are there are combinations, they're
Speaker 1: they're hybrids with different elements. So you you're you're, you
Speaker 1: know what, You're kind of thinking of a list and
Speaker 1: compiling that list into this single mental image and ultimately
Speaker 1: gives you something to focus on, right, But the details
Speaker 1: are provided to you. Whereas the bicycle, you're just saying bicycle,
Speaker 1: we're not saying, imagine a contraption with two wheels, and
Speaker 1: there's etcetera. Two wheels and nine tentacles and three baboon heads. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and in one hand the sun and in the other
Speaker 1: hand the moon. Okay, Now, when you do picture the demogorgan,
Speaker 1: what is actually happening in your brain? Has modern neuroscience
Speaker 1: discovered any answers to this question? Actually the answer is yes,
Speaker 1: we do know a decent amount. We don't know everything.
Speaker 1: We know a decent amount about what happens in the brain.
Speaker 1: When you picture mental imagery. Um, So, brain cells in
Speaker 1: the temporal lobe, and this is the temporal lobes are
Speaker 1: at the bottom and sides of the brain, sort of
Speaker 1: around the ears. They become activated. And previous research has
Speaker 1: shown that the temporal lobes are involved in attributing and
Speaker 1: storing information about the visual characteristics of objects. So normally,
Speaker 1: like when you see something, uh, information might there might
Speaker 1: be activity in the temporal lobes that seems to be
Speaker 1: creating associations with the thing you're looking at. Right, like
Speaker 1: the foam on the walls in our studio. They look
Speaker 1: like tiny pyramids. So I can look at one of those,
Speaker 1: and then I can I can't help but imagine a
Speaker 1: great pyramid. Yes, and So what's happening there when you're
Speaker 1: using your eyes is probably that lights coming through the eyes,
Speaker 1: signals are asking from your optic nerve, from your retina's
Speaker 1: tear optic nerve, and uh, they're ending up in the
Speaker 1: visual processing areas in the back of your head, and
Speaker 1: that's known as the occipital cortex, the back of the head,
Speaker 1: and then that start signals that cascade out to other
Speaker 1: brain regions. Where you form those associations probably has a
Speaker 1: lot to do with your temporal lobes. But when you're
Speaker 1: asked to picture something concrete, like I say, picture the
Speaker 1: Great Pyramids of Giza, uh, we seem to be starting
Speaker 1: with activity that involves visual memory. So there's stuff going
Speaker 1: on in the temporal lobes, and the excitation of these
Speaker 1: cells then triggers activity in the visual cortices of the
Speaker 1: occipital lobe. Again that's the very back of the head.
Speaker 1: And of course this is the same part of the
Speaker 1: brain that receives and begins to process visual information received
Speaker 1: by the retina transmitted by the optic nerve when you
Speaker 1: normally see something. And the authors of this paper I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, they they point out that when you conjure
Speaker 1: mental imagery. It's not exactly, but it's sort of roughly
Speaker 1: an invert of the process of seeing with the eyes. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's similar cascades going in opposite directions. And it also,
Speaker 1: i would say, seems to suggest that if it were
Speaker 1: possible to project an image from ted serious head onto film,
Speaker 1: if anything, he should have been holding the gizmo and
Speaker 1: the camera on the back of his head rather than
Speaker 1: the forehead. Because it seems like the activity is going
Speaker 1: from a sort of beginning with uh, with executive function.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's uh, you know, intentionally causing the memories.
Speaker 1: Then there's memory stuff in the temporal lobes, and then
Speaker 1: it's going to the occipital lobe in the back of
Speaker 1: the head. I'll see, if you'd only known that, it
Speaker 1: would have worked every time. Now, why do you need
Speaker 1: executive function in the front of the brain as well? Well?
Speaker 1: Apparently that's involved in intentionally trying to call up and
Speaker 1: hold mental images. So like conscious management of what's happening
Speaker 1: in the brain tends to be thought that that's executive function.
Speaker 1: It's deliberate thinking and maintenance of attention, and that entails
Speaker 1: activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain,
Speaker 1: so stuff up front and to the front and sides. UH.
Speaker 1: And mental imagery may also involve executive function because it
Speaker 1: requires the suppression of incoming imagery from the eyes or
Speaker 1: at least the diversion of visual processing resources from quote
Speaker 1: signals based on light entering the eyes right now too,
Speaker 1: images generated from memory. It's crazy to think about the
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking about it in this terms because we're
Speaker 1: also researching an episode that has to do with driving
Speaker 1: and the what's going on in your mind when you
Speaker 1: drive an automobile? And isn't it crazy that we can
Speaker 1: engage in the cognitively demanding job of say, driving a
Speaker 1: speeding automobile down an interstate, watching what all the cars
Speaker 1: are doing, and you know, reading an occasional sign, looking
Speaker 1: out for speed traps, all of these things that we're doing,
Speaker 1: and at the same time, we might have an audio
Speaker 1: book playing that is filling our head with like with
Speaker 1: a you know, a rich visual world, and we're entertaining
Speaker 1: both of these at the same time. I would say
Speaker 1: that that is while I accept that we can handle
Speaker 1: those things both, at the same time, I would say
Speaker 1: it is not without costs to UH. To either one,
Speaker 1: Like I would say that you probably have a more
Speaker 1: rich experience of the book and mental image reassociated with
Speaker 1: the book if you were not driving, and you'd probably
Speaker 1: be better at driving if you were not listening to
Speaker 1: the book, because there is actually a competition for resources
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I mean, of course
Speaker 1: that I think a lot of us tend to to
Speaker 1: read in environments where there are other distractions. Maybe not
Speaker 1: as cognitively demanding as piloting an automobile, but but still,
Speaker 1: this would be an interesting one to get some feedback
Speaker 1: from listeners, because I know that we have a number
Speaker 1: of listeners who who are on the road a lot
Speaker 1: and listen listen to us on the road and listen
Speaker 1: to to other bits of audio as well. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a good point. Please only listen to our podcast if
Speaker 1: if it is safe to do so. It's don't devote
Speaker 1: too much mental resources to us if if you're piloting
Speaker 1: a dangerous vehicle. But then again, even if you're not
Speaker 1: listening to a podcast or an audio book, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: your mind's want, your mind's gonna wander, And then I
Speaker 1: mean it's not even going to necessarily be a situation
Speaker 1: where you're consciously choosing things to imagine. You know, you're
Speaker 1: gonna you're gonna be subject to the visual summonings of
Speaker 1: the default mode network, where uh, you know, mental images
Speaker 1: from the past or the physy future are going to
Speaker 1: you know, venture into your mind like Victorian ghosts. But
Speaker 1: speaking of ghosts, I mean, I do think it's a
Speaker 1: little bit spooky that once I read this, this does
Speaker 1: in fact seem true to me. I just had never
Speaker 1: really thought of it this way, that when you mentally
Speaker 1: picture something, you're you are intentionally using your brain. You're
Speaker 1: performing some kind of internal brain resources management with the
Speaker 1: executive function mostly in your frontal lobe. I think to say,
Speaker 1: turn down resolution on incoming mental visual imagery and devote
Speaker 1: some of those resources to mental imagery. And if you
Speaker 1: if you practice it right now, I think you'll probably
Speaker 1: notice the same thing. Just like, look at something and
Speaker 1: then try to picture something mentally, and you'll notice that
Speaker 1: you're looking kind of gets downgraded in like quality and
Speaker 1: and arrested. Are Are you feeling this? Yeah? I mean,
Speaker 1: but this is also kind of the uh it kind
Speaker 1: of goes both ways, right, Like both cannot have have
Speaker 1: complete dominance at the same time, so you might be
Speaker 1: able to to dim the thermis that you're staring at
Speaker 1: by allowing mental images to you know, to to to
Speaker 1: be summoned into your mind. But on the same level,
Speaker 1: if you feel um haunted by various visual imagery ghosts,
Speaker 1: you know, the visualizations that are in some way troubling
Speaker 1: or traumatic, uh, you know, one of the exercises is
Speaker 1: to focus your awareness on something, uh that that is
Speaker 1: a physically doesn't be at the ambient environment or a
Speaker 1: specific object. I think that that would probably absolutely work,
Speaker 1: at least based on what I've read, that you can
Speaker 1: that you can greatly lessen the power of mental imagery
Speaker 1: just by using your senses. Yeah, Like it reminds me
Speaker 1: of meditation practices. Like, certainly they are closed eye meditation practices,
Speaker 1: which in that environment, you're really opening it up to
Speaker 1: the visual way of seeing, you know, uh, to the
Speaker 1: mental image alone. But there are plenty of open eye
Speaker 1: practices where you know, the instructor will say, you know,
Speaker 1: pick something in the room, doesn't matter what it is.
Speaker 1: It can be an electrical socket, but stare at that
Speaker 1: electrical socket. Stare long and hard at that electrical socket,
Speaker 1: and that becomes kind of the you know, the visual
Speaker 1: mantra that will force out the other the other ghosts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like this metaphor for thinking about it, that there's
Speaker 1: this war in your brain, this war for control of
Speaker 1: the resources in your brain, and one of them is
Speaker 1: things in your immediate surroundings, your sense, perceptions, and the
Speaker 1: other things conjured by the void, which could be good,
Speaker 1: things could be bad, things could be useful, things could
Speaker 1: be debilitating things. I mean, it's just what comes up
Speaker 1: out out of you know, either the intentional use of
Speaker 1: mental imagery by the executive part of your brain or
Speaker 1: just you know, things that are subconsciously arising from the depths.
Speaker 1: And your brain has to have some kind of partitioning
Speaker 1: system for this, this sort of visual processing, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: It uses regions in the occipital lobe to process image
Speaker 1: data coming from your eyes, But you also use some
Speaker 1: of the same regions to process images generated based on
Speaker 1: your memories or based on your imagination, which I think
Speaker 1: involves the memories. And these two processes are just constantly
Speaker 1: going on simultaneously and competing for the same neural resources.
Speaker 1: Yet most of the time most people, uh, this is
Speaker 1: an interesting thing. Most of the time, most people manage
Speaker 1: not to get confused. Isn't that interesting too, Like what
Speaker 1: kind of partitioning must be going on in the brain,
Speaker 1: because you can picture a pineapple on the desk in
Speaker 1: front of you right now, and you can picture that,
Speaker 1: but most of the time you don't become confused and
Speaker 1: think you're actually seeing a pineapple there. Yeah, not even
Speaker 1: awareness is focused, you know, certainly, certainly we all have
Speaker 1: those those situations where you walk into a room and
Speaker 1: out of the corner of your eye you think, for
Speaker 1: a second, there's a there's a goblin standing in the corner,
Speaker 1: or there's a cat, or or something's out of place,
Speaker 1: and then you know a second glance, you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just the way that the shadow is falling, or
Speaker 1: it's the way that the drape is positioned, etcetera. Like
Speaker 1: we come back to it again, Like our awareness doesn't
Speaker 1: just do a single take. It as a double take,
Speaker 1: and it, you know, you confirms or denies the presence
Speaker 1: of the thing you thought was there initially, right. I
Speaker 1: think the persistence of the stimulus is one key there
Speaker 1: that like you can keep looking at something and you're
Speaker 1: you know, your imagination will fluctuate, but the light coming
Speaker 1: into your eyes is going to stay about the same. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: and some beautiful derics there that could be an eagles.
Speaker 1: I just tried to sing some eagles, but we don't
Speaker 1: want to get night cheese, so we're not gonna leave
Speaker 1: it in. Uh Now, Now, it does appear that there's
Speaker 1: a possibility for some bleed over in the visual processing
Speaker 1: between mental imagery and actual uh uh seeing with the eyes.
Speaker 1: For example, this thing called the Perky effect. This is
Speaker 1: named after the American psychologist C. W. Perky. So how
Speaker 1: does this work? Well, uh, Perky She she would have
Speaker 1: somebody try to visualize something like a leaf or a
Speaker 1: banana while looking at a blank screen, and then meanwhile
Speaker 1: she would project a very faint, soft focus image of
Speaker 1: something like a leaf or a banana onto the screen
Speaker 1: just about the threshold brightness of visual perception. And in
Speaker 1: these experiments, Perky found that subjects would incorporate visual features
Speaker 1: of the actual image that was faint projected, thinking that
Speaker 1: these were features of their imagined image, for example, the
Speaker 1: type of leaf or the orientation of the banana. And
Speaker 1: there have been various attempts to replicate this finding, some
Speaker 1: successful and some unsuccessful. So I think we're not totally
Speaker 1: sure how robust this effect is, but I think now
Speaker 1: a common assessment of what of this effect is that
Speaker 1: what's really being detected here is the fact that using
Speaker 1: visual imagination steals processing resources from normal visual perception, like
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, So if you're trying to
Speaker 1: imagine something, you're less likely to notice consciously that an
Speaker 1: image is being faintly projected in front of you, even
Speaker 1: though you might pick up some visual cues such as
Speaker 1: color or shape from that image and just hold them
Speaker 1: in mind to think they're part of your imagination, which
Speaker 1: again is creepy. I mean, this isn't the only finding
Speaker 1: like this that that you can like give people cues
Speaker 1: from the outside that people come to believe or just
Speaker 1: part of their own imagination. But I guess maybe it's
Speaker 1: needless to say that after looking through all this, I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any evidence at all that representation of
Speaker 1: an image in the mind involves the brain building a
Speaker 1: physical two dimensional picture of the image which could be
Speaker 1: projected onto an external substrate like film. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like imagining that you could save a jpeg of Garfield,
Speaker 1: Say got Garfield and a jpeg and that's on an
Speaker 1: old computer floppy disk, and then you could somehow you're
Speaker 1: trying to project the image of Garfield physically from the
Speaker 1: floppy disk onto a photograph or a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: The two D pixel layout of Garfield is not found
Speaker 1: anywhere on the disc. You know, it's broken down and
Speaker 1: encoded as information which can later be read by a
Speaker 1: program to create a copy of the same original image
Speaker 1: on a computer screen. But the image of Garfield can't
Speaker 1: be seen anywhere on the disc. You can't pull it
Speaker 1: out by projecting something through it, even with the strongest microscope.
Speaker 1: It's encoded as information that only yields the image when
Speaker 1: decoded correctly, and as best I can tell, Imagery's works
Speaker 1: a similar way. In the brain. It's somehow coded through
Speaker 1: neuronal activity. It's it's not an image that you could
Speaker 1: find anywhere in the brain. You've touched on one of
Speaker 1: my big problems with David Cronenberg Scanners, which is a
Speaker 1: movie I love. Otherwise, Uh, there's a lot to love
Speaker 1: about crona about about scanners and not just you know,
Speaker 1: people's heads exploding and Michael ironsides of you know, fabulous,
Speaker 1: you know, psychic facial strains. But but there is this
Speaker 1: this one section of the film where the character Cameron
Speaker 1: Veil can cyber pathetically scan a computer hide hard drive
Speaker 1: with his brain. Uh. And that always bugged me because
Speaker 1: I'm like, Okay, it's one thing to imagine one brain
Speaker 1: speaking to another brain, you know, even though there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's no defined way that that would actually occur. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, at least in terms of like the human
Speaker 1: mind talking to another human mind. But but it's even
Speaker 1: a greater stretch than to imagine that he is scanning
Speaker 1: a computer hard drive. Yeah, because his brain does not
Speaker 1: it can't execute the code right. Like, in order for
Speaker 1: the data on the hard drive to be read correctly
Speaker 1: has to be executed somehow. There's like a decoding procedure
Speaker 1: that yields the text or the sound files or whatever
Speaker 1: it is he's trying to discover, and presumably his brain
Speaker 1: doesn't have that decoding function within it. Yeah. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: and it's the same problem with this idea of photography,
Speaker 1: that that somehow you could you could put the mental
Speaker 1: image in your mind onto the film. That's why I
Speaker 1: fire prefer one a great example of a far more
Speaker 1: believable system of telepathic communication would be that used by
Speaker 1: the Gelflings in the Dark Crystal and also in the
Speaker 1: the new so far really fabulous uh Netflix of prequel series.
Speaker 1: Oh I also started to haven't finished loving it so far.
Speaker 1: But the the Gelflings are able to to dream fast
Speaker 1: where they're able to uh to to like touch grasp hands,
Speaker 1: and in doing so, they share their mental images mental
Speaker 1: images of you know, their memories with each other so
Speaker 1: that they can share an inexperience and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: that's a version of mental image sharing that you know.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure exactly what the you know, the biological
Speaker 1: explanation would be for it, but it's conceivable. It's conceivable
Speaker 1: that these two um you know, you know, neural systems
Speaker 1: in the same species could link up to share information
Speaker 1: and that would also have a that would have a
Speaker 1: survival that would be a survival adaptation as well. Like
Speaker 1: that's something that would be uh, you know, supported through
Speaker 1: natural selection. Well, you can think about it as another
Speaker 1: form of language, and we've got language to code experiences
Speaker 1: and share them between each other. So you could imagine
Speaker 1: teachers could I don't know, project electromagnetic symbols or something
Speaker 1: to each other. You know, pulses of stuff that would
Speaker 1: incode and decode information across brains the same way. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any good evidence that humans can do that,
Speaker 1: but you could imagine a species that did do that.
Speaker 1: Right likewise, it's and perhaps there's a science fiction surely
Speaker 1: there's a science fiction or fantasy treatment of this out
Speaker 1: there somewhere. You can imagine something with the chromatophores along
Speaker 1: the lines of cuttlefish, or you know, an octopus being
Speaker 1: able to take a mental image in its head and
Speaker 1: recreated on its body. Oh, I love that that. Somebody
Speaker 1: has surely done that before, and that would be that
Speaker 1: would be an interesting way to do it. And of
Speaker 1: course humans have a similar ability through language and uh
Speaker 1: and and an artistic skill. We can take a mental
Speaker 1: image and we can recreate some version of it outside
Speaker 1: of our body in a way that that stays stationary.
Speaker 1: But it is not uh, it is not the you know,
Speaker 1: the art of of of telepathy or or or the
Speaker 1: thoughtography or whatever. It is. It is the the the
Speaker 1: it is the arts themselves. It is that it is
Speaker 1: the use of language. I think that's dead on. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're used to it, so it seems less astounding to us.
Speaker 1: But I try to make people remember all the time
Speaker 1: that language is like magic. I mean, the language is
Speaker 1: the most is the most astounding, strangest thing you can.
Speaker 1: You can use words, you make sounds with your mouth
Speaker 1: to change what's in somebody else's brain. And it works.
Speaker 1: It works almost all the time. Now, quickly, before we
Speaker 1: go to another break, I just wanted to mention I
Speaker 1: was looking at another paper about recent research in mental imagery,
Speaker 1: and this is called Mental Imagery, Functional Mechanisms and Clinical Applications.
Speaker 1: This is in Trends and Cognitive Sciences from Joel Pearson,
Speaker 1: Thomas Nasloris, Emily Holmes, and Stephen Kostlin Um. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that they said in the paper it
Speaker 1: echoes a lot of the off we were talking about already.
Speaker 1: But um. One thing they say that stuck with me
Speaker 1: is that the authors conclude that the existing research suggests
Speaker 1: mental imagery should be considered quote, a weak form of perception.
Speaker 1: And that's interesting because you don't normally think about mental
Speaker 1: imagery as perception. Normally, perception is what you know your
Speaker 1: five senses or maybe the other senses, if you know
Speaker 1: about the weirder ones. Um. But here they're saying, no,
Speaker 1: it is like a form of perception. It's almost like
Speaker 1: a lower resolution form of seeing. Now, why is it
Speaker 1: a weak form of perception? Well, visual regions in the
Speaker 1: brain show less blood flow and less excitation of neurons
Speaker 1: during the generation of mental imagery than they do in
Speaker 1: the actual viewing of images with the eyes, even though
Speaker 1: you use some of the same regions for both. And
Speaker 1: I also just wanted to mention some interesting questions that
Speaker 1: the authors bring up as sort of unresolved in this review. Again,
Speaker 1: this was from so there maybe development since then, but um,
Speaker 1: one of the things they ask is, we know that
Speaker 1: there are strong similarities between normal visual perception seeing with
Speaker 1: the eyes and mental imagery. What are the major differences?
Speaker 1: Another thing that I was really interested in is they
Speaker 1: asked the question of can mental imagery be unconscious? And
Speaker 1: if you try to understand that for a second, is
Speaker 1: it possible to picture something without being aware that you're
Speaker 1: picturing it? Or is mental imagery something that only occurs consciously?
Speaker 1: Can you only picture something if you're aware that you're
Speaker 1: picturing it? So? Well, what would be what would be
Speaker 1: an example then, based on that logic of someone picturing
Speaker 1: something without realizing they're picturing something. Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean that that's sort of the tough question, like
Speaker 1: is because it would be difficult to measure that. I
Speaker 1: think it would it be like an hallucination. Well, no,
Speaker 1: because you'd be presumably you'd be conscious of an hallucination.
Speaker 1: So the idea would have to be that, you know,
Speaker 1: you can show unconscious things going on in the brain
Speaker 1: just by like asking people if they're aware of things,
Speaker 1: but tracking their behaviors that realize, you know, the show
Speaker 1: they are aware of this thing or that thing. But
Speaker 1: it's difficult to say, can people imagine a picture of
Speaker 1: something without knowing that they're picturing it? I would think,
Speaker 1: you know, I would say the default answer would probably
Speaker 1: be no, because it's hard to imagine what that would be.
Speaker 1: Like you tend to think, Okay, the only times I
Speaker 1: know that I'm picturing something or when I'm conscious of it. Well,
Speaker 1: for that matter, is it possible to unconsciously look at
Speaker 1: something with your visual perception? Like? I think maybe that
Speaker 1: is possible, Like because if I'm but I'm looking at something,
Speaker 1: I am looking at something, right, I mean, it seems
Speaker 1: like it follows the same process. Well, I don't know
Speaker 1: what about, Like, there could be some stuff along the
Speaker 1: lines of like the Invisible Guerillas experiment that indicate that
Speaker 1: sometimes you can see things without being aware that you're
Speaker 1: seeing them, right or certainly we've already touched on what
Speaker 1: happens if you are looking at something in the physical
Speaker 1: world but focus focusing far more intently on something that
Speaker 1: is just a mental image. But yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: can see why it's an unanswered question, but it is
Speaker 1: kind of it's a tricky question too. Yeah. Now, I
Speaker 1: think what does seem pretty clear is that there can
Speaker 1: be unconscious reasons for the generation of mental imagery. I
Speaker 1: mean that this is a huge thing in mental imagery research,
Speaker 1: is like the origins of mental imagery, for example, intrusive,
Speaker 1: unwanted mental images. Yeah, I think that's that's that's an
Speaker 1: example that I imagine a lot of us can relate to.
Speaker 1: But also in terms of say meditative states, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of encountering an image that isn't at least
Speaker 1: consciously summoned, you know, not to say that it comes
Speaker 1: from the outside. It's still coming from sort of the
Speaker 1: the internal contents of your your psychic library, but but
Speaker 1: not in a way that feels um that you assembled
Speaker 1: it hands on. And then likewise there's a domain of
Speaker 1: hallucination and a dream. Yeah, I've got another maybe weird
Speaker 1: question about mental imagery. See if this makes any sense.
Speaker 1: Um So, the authors in these studies find strong links
Speaker 1: between visual imagery and things like working memory. But I
Speaker 1: wonder does the ability to recall visually recognized features of
Speaker 1: a thing always or even usually rely on mental imagery?
Speaker 1: And uh so? For example, if I ask you to
Speaker 1: picture a character from a movie, you've seen a picture
Speaker 1: the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal. Uh or let's see actually,
Speaker 1: uh I think I screwed that up. Okay, No, actually, don't,
Speaker 1: don't picture him yet. It's too late. I've done it
Speaker 1: like twice. Okay, Well, I just want you to list
Speaker 1: physical characteristics of the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: bird like, um, sneaky, serpentine, um, splendid, decayed. I guess
Speaker 1: I bring this up because my question is, when you
Speaker 1: recall visual characteristics of a thing you've seen, do you
Speaker 1: recall them exclusively by calling up a mental image of
Speaker 1: the thing and examining it like you would a thing
Speaker 1: you're looking at currently or do you have other ways
Speaker 1: of remembering the visual characteristics of something other than by
Speaker 1: picturing it and then examining what you're looking at in
Speaker 1: your mind's eye. Well, with the Chamberlain, I think I
Speaker 1: draw specifically on just visuals. Now, it would be different
Speaker 1: if I was described, if it was asked to describe
Speaker 1: a literary character in which the character is is like
Speaker 1: initially build out of language, but that the Chamberlain is
Speaker 1: all is all visual and does not, at least in
Speaker 1: anything I remember, describe itself. So you know, because there
Speaker 1: are characters that one encounters visually where that the character
Speaker 1: is going to describe itself or there's gonna be some
Speaker 1: voice to describe it, but no language attached to it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I would say almost purely visual. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: noticed most of the time when I'm trying to recall
Speaker 1: visual characteristics of something, I picture it first. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it gets especially complicated when you're thinking about characteristics of
Speaker 1: something that you've imagined from writing but not from seeing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like when you asked me to think of the Chamberlain, too,
Speaker 1: I found myself doing it in two ways, Like basically
Speaker 1: a mental image of a scene from the film, like
Speaker 1: where I'm seeing in my mind not only the character,
Speaker 1: but the backdrop, the lighting, everything, and then there's kind
Speaker 1: of a mental image of, say, the head of the creature,
Speaker 1: as if it were in the room with me, you know.
Speaker 1: So that makes me wonder too, Yeah, do we have
Speaker 1: different different sorts of mental imagery? Mental imagery that's more
Speaker 1: based on thinking. Maybe in a way, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like thinking about the way we uh we think about
Speaker 1: the past and the future, a way of thinking about
Speaker 1: the way something was and then imagining the way something
Speaker 1: would be, what it would be like if it were
Speaker 1: here or if I were encountering it in the near future.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that plays into it at all. All Right,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, but
Speaker 1: we'll be right back. Than alright, we're back. Okay. So
Speaker 1: we've been talking about psychic photography or thoughtography, this alleged
Speaker 1: ability that some people have to project the contents of
Speaker 1: their mental imagery onto film or onto objects in the
Speaker 1: external world. And I think we're probably in agreement that
Speaker 1: even though a lot of people have claimed to have
Speaker 1: this power or claim to have demonstrated this power, this
Speaker 1: probably is not really going on in in some ways,
Speaker 1: the mechanism of it seems incoherent, right, and that's what
Speaker 1: it basically, the mechanism is incoherent. So it's again like
Speaker 1: imagining the psychics and scanners being able to read hard drives,
Speaker 1: like like, this just doesn't make sense. But there are
Speaker 1: a number of experiments that sort of would find a
Speaker 1: way around the sincoherence we're talking about through another layer
Speaker 1: of encoding and decoding of brain activity that that could
Speaker 1: be learned through brain computer interfaces and machine learning. And
Speaker 1: this we're getting into into the creation of a of
Speaker 1: a technological translator. Yes exactly. It kind of the same
Speaker 1: way that you would use language to translate the contents
Speaker 1: of your mind's eye into something in the outside world.
Speaker 1: A computer could potentially translate the brain activity that it
Speaker 1: reads off of your scalp or in blood flow in
Speaker 1: your brain through fm R I into something in the
Speaker 1: outside world that could be trained to correlate with your
Speaker 1: mental imagery. Now, I think I've got lots of questions
Speaker 1: about how accurate and how realistic this project actually is,
Speaker 1: but there are at least these experiments that that have
Speaker 1: purported to get part of the way there, and they're
Speaker 1: they're kind of freaky. I I won't lie. I want
Speaker 1: to say this starts to get me a little bit worried.
Speaker 1: I want to start with a newspiece in Science from January.
Speaker 1: The newspiece was by Matthew Hudson and it covers the
Speaker 1: brain computer interface work of a group of researchers including
Speaker 1: uh Yukiyasu Kamitani, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University in Japan,
Speaker 1: and a computer scientist named Zone ming Lieu at Purdue
Speaker 1: University in the United States. And this work is focused
Speaker 1: on it's using brain computer interfaces to directly read and
Speaker 1: record mental imagery, which is the imagining of a picture.
Speaker 1: So you try to imagine, like, why would anybody be
Speaker 1: doing this? You know, what would be the supposed benefits
Speaker 1: of a technology to read people's mental imagery. Well, we're
Speaker 1: asked to imagine in this article, maybe being able to
Speaker 1: search through a collection of digital images simply by mentally
Speaker 1: picturing the image we want. Okay, that might be a
Speaker 1: thing like I bet you've tried before to Google an
Speaker 1: image that you've seen before, but you didn't know what
Speaker 1: search terms to use and couldn't find it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's I could see where that could have an application. Well,
Speaker 1: granted it's not something that is really life or death.
Speaker 1: It would be more like, Oh, I vaguely remember a
Speaker 1: really cool advertisement for a community college on television in
Speaker 1: the summer in my childhood, and they played a song
Speaker 1: on it that kind of sounded like Boards of Canada.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it was actually Boards of Canada. Like
Speaker 1: that is a legit thing that I think about from
Speaker 1: time to time, and there's no way for me to
Speaker 1: look it up. But true enough, if a machine could
Speaker 1: look at my mental imagery of that memory of watching
Speaker 1: that TV spot, then it's conceivable that it could then
Speaker 1: look into some vast database and find that footage for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that will necessarily ever get there, but
Speaker 1: that that is the kind of thing they're asking you
Speaker 1: to imagine. Another one, this is probably more straightforward drawing
Speaker 1: without the hands, straight from imagination too, recorded two D
Speaker 1: media that might be interesting. I mean, I wonder if
Speaker 1: I could open up whole other realms of visual art
Speaker 1: for people who are not good at drawing with their hands, right,
Speaker 1: or or for people who are disabled to some degree, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I coun see that being advantageous as well, and it
Speaker 1: can go further than that. I mean, technically you could
Speaker 1: imagine something like this allowing people without the power of
Speaker 1: speech you're writing to share their thoughts. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: you can't. Maybe if you can't speak, you can't describe
Speaker 1: your visual imagery, maybe you could share it with something
Speaker 1: like this. But I want to say, Okay, those are
Speaker 1: the positive versions of what we're imagining. We could explore
Speaker 1: negative versions later on. And so the researchers here have
Speaker 1: been working on computer algorithms that are trained through machine
Speaker 1: learning to match patterns of brain activity recorded through things
Speaker 1: like fMRI I with imagery that a subject is looking at,
Speaker 1: and because actually looking at an image and then mentally
Speaker 1: imagining the same image are sort of similar in the brain,
Speaker 1: They're not exactly the same, but there's some similar stuff
Speaker 1: going on. Researchers have experimented with measuring activity in the
Speaker 1: visual processing areas of the brain with f m r
Speaker 1: I while person looking at different images, and then using
Speaker 1: that data about blood flow in the brain to later
Speaker 1: guess what a person is looking at without knowing now
Speaker 1: ideally what you would have at the end of this
Speaker 1: kind of research. Multi stage process is an algorithm that
Speaker 1: could read the activity of a person's visual processing center
Speaker 1: and materialize an image directly on the screen that corresponds
Speaker 1: to what the person is either looking at or imagining. UH.
Speaker 1: And again, to whatever extent the technology will ever fully
Speaker 1: be realized, it's still in the very early stages. Um.
Speaker 1: But in the example sided in this article, I should
Speaker 1: say that the image generation portion was not carried out
Speaker 1: on real brains. The data acquired from human subjects was
Speaker 1: instead used to train a deep neural network that stood
Speaker 1: in for an actual brain while they tested their image
Speaker 1: generating program. And to quote from Hudson's article here quote
Speaker 1: the system starts with something random similar to TV static,
Speaker 1: and slowly refines its painting over the core of two
Speaker 1: hundred rounds. To get closer to the ideal image. The
Speaker 1: system calculates the difference between the deep neural network activity
Speaker 1: and the templated deep neural network activity. Those calculations cause
Speaker 1: it to nudge one pixel this way and another pixel
Speaker 1: that way until it gets closer to the ideal image. Now,
Speaker 1: Apparently at the stage, the algorithms are not very good
Speaker 1: at all at guessing what imagery people have in mind
Speaker 1: when they're imagining realistic photos, but they are pretty good
Speaker 1: at picking out when people imagine abstract shapes. And that
Speaker 1: makes sense because I think those would be like clearer
Speaker 1: signals in the brain probably. But yeah, there's some images
Speaker 1: along with this article that are the paintings generated by
Speaker 1: this algorithm. Uh, and then they're they're compared with the
Speaker 1: images that originally gave rise to them, and the comparisons
Speaker 1: are wonderfully creepy. Yeah. They look like like psychedelic entities
Speaker 1: that have come to convey some sort of occult knowledge
Speaker 1: under the listener. Like there's a there's one that's originally
Speaker 1: a picture of an owl, and then the approximation of
Speaker 1: it is some kind of like like primordial worm walrus
Speaker 1: from the center of the earth. Yeah. Yeah, a red
Speaker 1: mailbox becomes this kind of alien burning crimson pillar. So
Speaker 1: there are some patterns it seems like they're picking up
Speaker 1: in in this version, where like some basic shapes emerge,
Speaker 1: some color patterns seem like detectable. It seems like you
Speaker 1: can detect when something is basically a face. But I
Speaker 1: have questions about the ultimate potential of this technology, Like
Speaker 1: the versions that exist today have limitations such as relying
Speaker 1: on training and feedback, and also I wonder about the
Speaker 1: rules for reading mental imagery, like how transferable are they
Speaker 1: from one person to another? How idiosyncratic is your brain
Speaker 1: looking at an image versus somebody else's brain looking at
Speaker 1: the same image. It makes me think of the holophoner
Speaker 1: from Futurama. Do you remember this sent in? It's a
Speaker 1: mu zsical instrument that Fry attempts to learn at one point,
Speaker 1: and at one point masters thanks to the the parasitic
Speaker 1: worms living inside his gut that have made him super intelligent. Uh,
Speaker 1: but then he pleases that ability. But anyway, it's it's this.
Speaker 1: It's basically like a small musical instrument, like a woodwind instrument,
Speaker 1: but it has the technologically capability to take a mental
Speaker 1: image in your mind and project it into the air
Speaker 1: for others to see. But it takes It's like, it's
Speaker 1: notably difficult to learn and takes a lot of intense
Speaker 1: training and concentration to even form a very vague image
Speaker 1: in the air. And so some of the like the
Speaker 1: initial images that Fry is able to summon using the
Speaker 1: holophone are basically as abstract as these examples we've discussed
Speaker 1: in this study. But I mean, so on one hand,
Speaker 1: you could say, well, maybe this kind of thing will
Speaker 1: just never get very accurate in any way that's applicable.
Speaker 1: That's possible. But also if this technology ever does get
Speaker 1: more accurate, can you imagine this would I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about the way it would be incorporated into machine
Speaker 1: learning user feedback mechanisms that serve us content on social media. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, imagine a Facebook news feed that could not
Speaker 1: only fine tune itself based on what you do with
Speaker 1: your mouse cursor and how you scroll and what you
Speaker 1: click on and how long you look at things, but
Speaker 1: based on neurofeedback that allows it to detect how you're
Speaker 1: using your visual imagination, you know, so they sell you
Speaker 1: on the good stuff, right, draw without your hands, and
Speaker 1: you get this kind of interface that that hooks up
Speaker 1: to your brain and then it can sense patterns and
Speaker 1: what users are picturing in their mind's eye and reaction
Speaker 1: to media stimuli at a massive scale. Even if this
Speaker 1: can't be used to pull images accurately directly from your brain,
Speaker 1: just imagine what it could do based on the brain
Speaker 1: activity correlations across populations alone. Uh. And also I'm imagining
Speaker 1: if it ever did get good enough at reading brain activity,
Speaker 1: the brain activity underlying mental imagery and turning that directly
Speaker 1: into physical images outside the brain. What kind of crazy
Speaker 1: cyber feedback processes could that lead to? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: anyway you shake it, it's a it's a nightmare. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I really don't like the idea of machines being able
Speaker 1: to look inside our head and do anything with our
Speaker 1: our mental images and draw them out. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's just pure dystopia juice right there. Anyway, anyway you
Speaker 1: shake it, I mean it seems like even the positives
Speaker 1: I have to like really construct an artificial scenario where
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, there's been a kidnapping and we have
Speaker 1: to draw the mental images out of the the only
Speaker 1: so you know, you get into ridiculous scenarios like that, which, okay, yes,
Speaker 1: given that very particular scenario, perhaps it would make sense.
Speaker 1: But then you get into just basic considerations of of
Speaker 1: privacy to like, would you ever have the right to
Speaker 1: look inside someone's head and draw out their mental images?
Speaker 1: It depends on who writes the laws, and I would
Speaker 1: think it is the big corporation with all the lawyers
Speaker 1: that will write the laws. And I guess looking at
Speaker 1: the like this sort of certainly the social media examples too.
Speaker 1: It's like, are you It depends too, are you born
Speaker 1: into a world in which it's normal for your machines
Speaker 1: to look inside your brain and draw from your mental images,
Speaker 1: probably with some sort of an agreement. Uh, In the
Speaker 1: same way that you know, our emails are read by machines,
Speaker 1: but they're not actually read by people. There would be
Speaker 1: this idea like, oh, yeah, nobody's actually watching your mental images.
Speaker 1: It's just our algorithms are keeping track on them so
Speaker 1: we can better serve you content. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that a lot of times we have overestimated our people's
Speaker 1: desire for privacy and uh, Like, I just think about
Speaker 1: how years ago if you had told people here's all
Speaker 1: the things people will be sharing on social media and
Speaker 1: all the kinds of uh privileges they will be allowing
Speaker 1: these companies to have and learning about their lives and
Speaker 1: learning about their data, people would be like, no way,
Speaker 1: nobody will ever surrender that amount of you know, privacy
Speaker 1: and autonomy about their lives and their data. But people
Speaker 1: just gave it up so willingly. Yeah, and so many
Speaker 1: are still seemingly fine with it. Yeah. So I wonder
Speaker 1: if I don't know. Maybe it has to do with
Speaker 1: something about the advertising, the marketing, how these things are
Speaker 1: are rolled out to the public that that breaks down
Speaker 1: our defenses and and has us ending up being like, ah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know whatever, I'll get the brain device. You know,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey's got one. He likes it, you know. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I I hold out hope that it would be a
Speaker 1: you know, the bridge too far, and that that humans
Speaker 1: would would rise up and reject it. I hope so
Speaker 1: as well. But but I also feel like we're already
Speaker 1: at that point where humans should rise up and reject
Speaker 1: what is being presented to them, you know, certainly by
Speaker 1: the large social media companies and um and uh. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Some people are rising up, but we're not
Speaker 1: quite rising up in the numbers so far. To limit
Speaker 1: their power, protect your mental imagery instead, if you want
Speaker 1: to have more power in sharing your mental imagery in
Speaker 1: the cases where you actually do want to share it,
Speaker 1: hone your powers of translation. That means practice becoming better
Speaker 1: at language, better at drawing, better at art of whatever kind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and indeed, I don't want to end this on a
Speaker 1: you know too you know, pessimistic note, dystopian and note is, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Because ultimately, like what all this reveals, it's just like
Speaker 1: just how incredible our brain's capacity for mental imagery really is.
Speaker 1: Because you know, certainly these technologies that attempt to understand
Speaker 1: and or even replicated these uh pseudoscientific or outright superstitious
Speaker 1: ideas about what a mental image is and how it
Speaker 1: might be you know, inflicted on the world. They all
Speaker 1: get that, they're all circle circling the mystery and the
Speaker 1: wonder uh that we all experience every day. It's yet
Speaker 1: another case where there's a purported magical ability that is
Speaker 1: actually maybe less fascinating than the reality that we're just
Speaker 1: so used to of the fact that we have something
Speaker 1: like language absolutely all right, Well, there you have it
Speaker 1: are two part look at the mental image and various
Speaker 1: ideas surrounding it. And I think we we crammed a
Speaker 1: fair number of of horror film and other uh you know,
Speaker 1: horror related ideas in there. So I think it's it's
Speaker 1: firmly implanted in our October offerings. But if you're new
Speaker 1: to the show, we do this every October. Every October
Speaker 1: is wall to wall Halloween related content. Uh So, if
Speaker 1: you want to you want more, you can go to
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and check out
Speaker 1: past October's. Likewise, if you want to check out some
Speaker 1: of our Invention episodes that are October theme, go check
Speaker 1: that out as well. That's our other show. It's a
Speaker 1: journey through human techno history, and indeed we are rolling
Speaker 1: out October episodes as well over there, so help both
Speaker 1: shows out. Make sure you have subscribed and rate and
Speaker 1: review huge things as always to our excellent audio producers
Speaker 1: set Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us with feedback on this episode or any
Speaker 1: other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,
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