Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and hey, Happy Halloween.
Speaker 1: That's right, we have a special treat for you. We
Speaker 1: normally have a Vault episode for you on Saturday, but
Speaker 1: since this Saturday is also Halloween itself, we thought we
Speaker 1: would feature a two parter from last year. Right, So
Speaker 1: this was parts one and two of our episode on
Speaker 1: psychic photography. This belief some people have that you could
Speaker 1: project images from the brain onto photographs. And so that
Speaker 1: we get into the ring. We talked about some real
Speaker 1: strange para psychology research. We talked about vision and I
Speaker 1: remember this being a lot of fun. All right, let's
Speaker 1: dive right in. Welcome Stuff to Blow your Mind, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey you,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Alow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's October. So
Speaker 1: we're continuing with our Halloween spooky, ghostly kind of theme,
Speaker 1: and today we wanted to explore a somewhat ghostly topic
Speaker 1: that ties into neuroscience to stuff we've talked about recently
Speaker 1: on the Invention Podcast with the history of photography. But
Speaker 1: before we get into that, I wanted to start with
Speaker 1: a question to kind of orient us here, And that
Speaker 1: question is, what is it that makes somebody skilled at
Speaker 1: an art like realistic drawing or realistic sculpture. I should say,
Speaker 1: by the way, I am not skilled at this at all.
Speaker 1: I cannot draw realistically for the life of me. In fact,
Speaker 1: when I try to draw pictures of people, it's the
Speaker 1: it's a source of great amusement to Rachel. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm the same way. I can. I can draw a
Speaker 1: pretty mean goblin, but um, I can't really draw a human.
Speaker 1: My my son whose seven, is already a better better
Speaker 1: artist when it comes to depicting actual human beings than I.
Speaker 1: But obviously so a huge part of what's going on
Speaker 1: here is is practice, right, you gotta learn techniques. But
Speaker 1: another part of this I think could just be thought
Speaker 1: of as some kind of motor power of translation, Like
Speaker 1: how do you take an image represented in your brain
Speaker 1: and it's in your brain either way, whether you're currently
Speaker 1: looking at it or calling up out of a memory
Speaker 1: or an imagination. Either way, the images coming from your brain,
Speaker 1: and then it's being translated somehow through a series of
Speaker 1: hand motions into a physical object in the world, whether
Speaker 1: that's a sculpture, painting, or drawing. Like, there's some kind
Speaker 1: of skill there that I think remains ineffable to us.
Speaker 1: It's mysterious. Sometimes it's even kind of spooky because we
Speaker 1: don't understand what's happening with that translation process. But what
Speaker 1: if there were no translation process? What if there were
Speaker 1: no way for clumsy arms and hands and failures of
Speaker 1: technique to impede the physical manifestation and of what you've
Speaker 1: got in your mind's I what if we could just
Speaker 1: project the objects of the mind's eye directly onto the
Speaker 1: physical world. Would such a thing be possible? And if so,
Speaker 1: would such a power be in a way terrifying, sort
Speaker 1: of godlike in the worst and most ancient sense. Ah,
Speaker 1: And here you're getting into the uh, the Halloween aspects
Speaker 1: of this topic. This is the reason that we have
Speaker 1: decided to approach this during the month of October, exactly
Speaker 1: because this power does show up in horror fiction. One
Speaker 1: place that you might have encountered it is in the
Speaker 1: books or the movies. Uh. There have been several different
Speaker 1: series at this point, but The Ring, the story of
Speaker 1: The Ring, the the scary ghost girl who can print
Speaker 1: media with her brain. She can psychically print images onto
Speaker 1: photographs or onto o the wall of a barn, or
Speaker 1: onto a videotape. She can just make a videotape without
Speaker 1: filming it, just straight out of her mind's eye. Of course,
Speaker 1: this played up for horror in the film, and I
Speaker 1: I sort of stand by taking it in that direction.
Speaker 1: I think if anybody actually had this power, it would
Speaker 1: be horrifying, and it would be it would be a
Speaker 1: little irritating to everyone who's has put a lot of
Speaker 1: time and effort into honing their craft. Right, Um, so
Speaker 1: it's possible you're you're familiar with The Ring via Gore
Speaker 1: Rabinski's two thousand and two remake The Ring. This is
Speaker 1: where I saw it for the first time. But you
Speaker 1: also may have seen it by watching the original Japanese
Speaker 1: horror film directed by Hideo Nakata. This came out in
Speaker 1: and I severely hope that if you, if you did
Speaker 1: see the original Japanese version back in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: you watched it on a crumb a dubbed VHS, because
Speaker 1: that would be most appropriate, right, because either way, if
Speaker 1: you haven't seen the movies or read the see. The
Speaker 1: original Japanese movie was also based on a book by
Speaker 1: by Koji Suzuki, but in any case, the story is
Speaker 1: about a cursed videotape that is made by this ghost girl.
Speaker 1: She uses the psychic power of projecting her thoughts directly
Speaker 1: onto media to make a videotape that kills the people
Speaker 1: who watch it. Yeah, a curse videotape containing disturbing it's
Speaker 1: basically a disturbing surrealistic art video kills you in seven days.
Speaker 1: So there's kind of a uh what do you call
Speaker 1: in the medicinal terms, uh, delayed react effects effects. Uh.
Speaker 1: It takes that alone to work through your system, you know,
Speaker 1: time to release. Sometimes artists like that it's time released.
Speaker 1: You know, you go, you want to see it at
Speaker 1: the museum, and you're like, I don't really know what
Speaker 1: what I how I feel about this or or you know,
Speaker 1: how I think about this piece and how it relates
Speaker 1: to me, and then seven days later it kicks in
Speaker 1: and you die. Uh weird, look at it, fist. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this is basically an update of a very old notion,
Speaker 1: right of a haunted object, or of haunted media, only
Speaker 1: instead of a dark and magical book instead of something
Speaker 1: like you know, the Necronomicon or you know the Book
Speaker 1: of Sand or any of these other treatments. We have
Speaker 1: a dark and magical video recording and it unleashes a
Speaker 1: world of terror and death. It's an inherently compelling idea
Speaker 1: in horror. I think actually some piece of media, whether
Speaker 1: it's a book or now a movie, I think there
Speaker 1: there's some There's Stephen King's story with like a painting
Speaker 1: that kills you or something. There's the representage Herror, and
Speaker 1: it's one of one of King's best short stories. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend. I agree. Maybe that is what I was
Speaker 1: thinking of. That is a fantastic story. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean obviously the idea of like a a work
Speaker 1: of art or something that cannot be experienced without cursing
Speaker 1: or killing you. Yeah, that's scary. It's also fertile ground
Speaker 1: for any kind of metaphor that the artist wants to
Speaker 1: sew about, you know, about art itself, and art does
Speaker 1: have an effect on us. I mean, there's an old
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind where Julie and
Speaker 1: I discussed Stendahl syndrome and some of its related alleged syndromes.
Speaker 1: You know, it deals with the reality that, yes, sometimes
Speaker 1: times great works of art, Uh. You know, with great
Speaker 1: works of art with appropriate priming, UH can overwhelm us,
Speaker 1: can have a physical reaction on us. So uh you
Speaker 1: know it's it's not unrealistic. Um. Yeah, you know. I
Speaker 1: want to say about the gor Verbinsky remake of The Ring, well,
Speaker 1: I don't inherently love the idea of just like American
Speaker 1: remakes of foreign films just to sort of americanize it,
Speaker 1: because it had only been like a few years since
Speaker 1: the original film had been made at that point, and
Speaker 1: they americanized the heck out of it exactly. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, one thing I will defend about it
Speaker 1: is it is a very um visually imaginative film. Like
Speaker 1: it's got great creepy abstract imagery in it. Oh yeah, great,
Speaker 1: great visuals, great performances, uh, and wonderful special effects. Uh.
Speaker 1: That remake I remember really had an effect on it.
Speaker 1: Was so the last time a horror film like made
Speaker 1: me sleep with the lights on. Uh. So I look
Speaker 1: back fondly on it for that reason. However, I have
Speaker 1: to say certain aspects of the film stuck with me
Speaker 1: and others. I kind of forgot about. Like some of
Speaker 1: you might be like, oh, yeah, I guess that girl
Speaker 1: did write video tapes with her mind like that I
Speaker 1: kind of forgot about. I also kind of forgot that
Speaker 1: it had this that it's essentially adoption sploitation horror, not
Speaker 1: the only yeah, basically, yeah, basically, because the whole idea
Speaker 1: is that this this couple that adopts this child, and
Speaker 1: the child is troubled, and I forgot that she was adopted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, I have a very queasy attitude towards
Speaker 1: that kind of horror at this point in my life.
Speaker 1: For sure, totally. But but still those are the things
Speaker 1: I tend to forget about it. I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: those scenes with Samara Um climbing out of the television
Speaker 1: with the creepy walk where they think they filmed her
Speaker 1: backwards and then made it go forwards. I remember, I
Speaker 1: think Hans Zimmer did the music, and it's very effective
Speaker 1: horror music. Um. And then on and then on the
Speaker 1: on top of that, you have some performances. Uh, did
Speaker 1: you ever see the sequel? I did spoil it all
Speaker 1: as I saw it in the theater even um and
Speaker 1: I don't recommend it, but but no, it's a it
Speaker 1: is a film that is still both films are considered
Speaker 1: classics in their own way, and I think they earned
Speaker 1: that that reputation just if nothing else, by just scaring
Speaker 1: us so terribly and really connecting with our relationship with media.
Speaker 1: And at that time it was it was dealing with
Speaker 1: the VHS and UH and and and how we were
Speaker 1: connecting with with this kind of you know, physical media.
Speaker 1: And I should say also, you know, getting into that
Speaker 1: idea of finding weird things, finding weird footage. And at
Speaker 1: that point it was most of us through like tape
Speaker 1: trading or I guess as to a certain extent, downloads,
Speaker 1: but I definitely remember ordering up like weird dubs of
Speaker 1: the Japanese laser disc of say um El Topo or
Speaker 1: Holy Mountain, and there was this weird you know, well,
Speaker 1: you know, you have you're not really sure exactly how
Speaker 1: this got to you. You know, what are the hands
Speaker 1: that dubbed it from this format to this format and
Speaker 1: then re dubbed it here and then finally it's in
Speaker 1: my hands. I think that is actually one of my
Speaker 1: favorite types of story forms for horror is the the
Speaker 1: creepy found piece of media. I can remember One of
Speaker 1: my favorite horror short stories I've read in a long
Speaker 1: time was won by Laird Baron. I think it's called
Speaker 1: Mysterium Tremendum, where the narrator of the story you just
Speaker 1: finds this travel guide and I think some weird use
Speaker 1: bookstore or something, but it turns out to be a
Speaker 1: nefarious sort of magic travel guide that leads to very
Speaker 1: dark places. So yeah, I love that nowadays though, and
Speaker 1: maybe they do this, and I think maybe they did
Speaker 1: this one of the recent Ring movies. It's like, essentially,
Speaker 1: it's gotta be on YouTube, which takes the punch out
Speaker 1: of it because it's like, you have the dark media,
Speaker 1: but then the dark media is on an even more
Speaker 1: deplorable social media you know, bum or format. But it
Speaker 1: also takes away the ironic distance that makes the horror
Speaker 1: fun because YouTube just will melt your brain and kill you.
Speaker 1: It doesn't it doesn't need any like horror upgrades. The
Speaker 1: real actual YouTube is just waiting to destroy you at
Speaker 1: the moment. Yeah, though it is. I it is kind
Speaker 1: of comforting to think that that all the commentators at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the Ring video then YouTube died seven
Speaker 1: days later. So like the guy says that WTF is disreal? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: as long as we're just talking about the Ring, though
Speaker 1: the American remake, we should point out again that that
Speaker 1: cast is tremendous. Um talking about Samara. Her mom is
Speaker 1: played by Shannon cochrane who plays who played Pam's mother
Speaker 1: on the Office, and then her father is played by
Speaker 1: Brian Cox, the legendary Brian Cox. Brian Cox one of
Speaker 1: my favorite actors of all time. He he kind of
Speaker 1: makes the movie and in the the the the young
Speaker 1: actor playing Samara herself. I don't know if we said
Speaker 1: Samara is the ghost Girl and the Ghost Girl, she's
Speaker 1: Samara and the American version, and she's a Sedaco in
Speaker 1: the Japanese version, so that the name changes. But anyway,
Speaker 1: in the in the even the remake, Devey case Chase,
Speaker 1: I hope I'm saying her name right. Uh. This actor
Speaker 1: played Samara, and she also voiced Lilo in Lilo in
Speaker 1: and Stitching Disney film about the you know, the the
Speaker 1: alien visiting Hawaii. Going to her IMDb page is hilarious
Speaker 1: because I found out she also is the girl in
Speaker 1: the Sparkle Dance Troupe in Donnie Dark and she's the
Speaker 1: voice of the main character in the in the English
Speaker 1: dub of Spirited Away. Ah, yeah, the Manzaki film great. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: first of all, the idea that Samara can create a
Speaker 1: surrealistic film that she can pour like all the the
Speaker 1: nihilistic misanthropic visions in her head into a videotape and
Speaker 1: make it so potent that it can kill people, either
Speaker 1: just through the sheer power of the art or you know,
Speaker 1: probably through some sort of supernatural um you know whatever. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's a really cool trick and one that I would
Speaker 1: think could have been put to much more profitable use, right, Um, Like,
Speaker 1: why isn't there a sequel where like the U. S
Speaker 1: Military ends up acquiring Samara Like it, that would be
Speaker 1: great because since she ends up killing all the like
Speaker 1: the evil mk Ultra gate dudes, it basically rights itself, right,
Speaker 1: but sort of a crossover with The Ring and Stranger
Speaker 1: Things would have been. Yeah. Now to to go a
Speaker 1: little deeper though, I think in a way this concept
Speaker 1: really really works though, Like you can think of any
Speaker 1: creative endeavor, especially filmmaking, as an attempt to bring that
Speaker 1: ideal image that mentally imagine your head into the world,
Speaker 1: and of course for a number of reasons we generally
Speaker 1: don't succeed in pulling that off. And part of the reason,
Speaker 1: of course, is that is that the idea in our
Speaker 1: mind is rarely as fully formed as we think it is.
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. I mean an experience I
Speaker 1: definitely have when writing, and I think you've said you
Speaker 1: have this before, is I don't necessarily know what I'm
Speaker 1: going to write until I start writing, Like if I'm
Speaker 1: writing a scene in fiction, you know like that it's
Speaker 1: the process of writing that helps bring out the content. Yeah, exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know in other issues coming to play as well,
Speaker 1: in the final version perhaps feels a bit lacking. So
Speaker 1: you know, you can forgive a lot of us we
Speaker 1: we wonder, you know, imagine how perfect it would it
Speaker 1: would have been if you've been able to simply beam
Speaker 1: your vision directly onto a video tape. You don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about casting it where you're gonna film all
Speaker 1: your weird art, film your artifacts. How are you going
Speaker 1: to get that that chair to go upside down? No,
Speaker 1: you can just beam it directly onto the onto the
Speaker 1: tape um. And so maybe the power then of your
Speaker 1: vision would be so pure and uncut that it would
Speaker 1: just literally slay table. Well, I like that, But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, I mean, I think it's sort of
Speaker 1: trying to imagine. This highlights the unreality of what it
Speaker 1: is you're trying to imagine. I mean, I feel like
Speaker 1: our image of the thing we want to create is
Speaker 1: never really fully formed, even when it seems like it is.
Speaker 1: I wonder if even people who have extremely vivid mental
Speaker 1: imagery can actually see a full completed painting that they
Speaker 1: haven't finished painting yet. Uh and and and not just
Speaker 1: sort of like see glimpses of little bits of color
Speaker 1: and shape that that ultimately add up to something concrete
Speaker 1: and finalized once you've you know, translated through your hand
Speaker 1: movements into that painting. I kind of doubt that people
Speaker 1: can actually see a full painting that they haven't painted yet, right.
Speaker 1: And maybe we may be part of his linguistic you know,
Speaker 1: like we we tend to say. A sculptor might say,
Speaker 1: I see the horse trapped in this block, and I
Speaker 1: wish to free it. I'm just going to remove all
Speaker 1: the pieces around the finished piece that I envisioned within
Speaker 1: it with In reality, it's more like I see the
Speaker 1: inspiration for the thing that I am going to create, yeah,
Speaker 1: a kind of fuzzy, low resolution suggestion of the thing
Speaker 1: that you will create maybe, Yeah, And then comes the
Speaker 1: hard work. Then comes the talent, uh, and the skill.
Speaker 1: One more one more thing about the Ring, and then
Speaker 1: I'll I'll mostly let it go. But ultimately, what is
Speaker 1: the message of this film? It's seen because basically the
Speaker 1: whole plot is, oh, this these tanks are killing people?
Speaker 1: Why is it killing people? Always? Because of this little
Speaker 1: girl that died? And then they go on this question like, oh,
Speaker 1: we can set her spirit free, should be happy, and
Speaker 1: everyone will be saved, and then you realize, oh, no,
Speaker 1: that doesn't work because she can't be saved. She's just
Speaker 1: evil to the core, and everybody's gonna keep on dying. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: but they do figure out a way to get around
Speaker 1: the curse, which is just keep passing it, keep spreading it.
Speaker 1: So right, if you spread the curse to more people,
Speaker 1: she won't kill you. Yeah, basically the plot of of
Speaker 1: it follows as well, right, but yeah, but ultimately in
Speaker 1: the Ring, well, you only get temporarily spared, and it follows, right,
Speaker 1: But then I think in the Ring they acknowledge what
Speaker 1: happens when like you know that didn't mind come back
Speaker 1: to them as well. But maybe that's in the sequels. No, No,
Speaker 1: I think that was it was kind of at least
Speaker 1: hinted at in the first Yeah. I don't really trying
Speaker 1: to think about the sequels. But but ultimately, like the messages,
Speaker 1: don't try to help people, don't try and fix the world,
Speaker 1: like everybody's gonna that's so just so bleak and nihilistic. Uh,
Speaker 1: maybe it's just too bleak and nihilistic for me now.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing I would have loved when
Speaker 1: I was younger. But but yeah, that's such a harsh
Speaker 1: way to land it, isn't it. Yeah, Um, it's not
Speaker 1: an inspiring story on close examination. But but I do
Speaker 1: still stand by a lot of the visual imagery in
Speaker 1: the film, which I think holds up really well. And
Speaker 1: Brian Cox is just an absolute treat absolutely. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break when we come back.
Speaker 1: We're going to move on from just discussing the Ring
Speaker 1: in general, and we're going to discuss this this thing
Speaker 1: that she is supposed to do, this idea that a
Speaker 1: mind could somehow imprint an image on something or in
Speaker 1: something or in like on Cape on Film. Uh, and
Speaker 1: it's gonna be one of these topics that I think,
Speaker 1: you know, draws in from a number of past episodes
Speaker 1: of both stuff to blow your mind and invention. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we're exploring the topic of kick photography,
Speaker 1: or just generally being able to print the mind's eye
Speaker 1: into some manifestation in the physical world without going through
Speaker 1: any kind of normal motor translation process like drawing with
Speaker 1: your hand or explaining a mental image with your mouth,
Speaker 1: just printing the mind's eye directly onto film or onto
Speaker 1: a piece of paper. Yes, and this is a topic
Speaker 1: that if you're if you're already thinking, well that just
Speaker 1: sounds silly. Um, well, hang with us, because you know, ultimately,
Speaker 1: I I think it's pretty safe to say this is
Speaker 1: not actually occurring. This is not a power that human
Speaker 1: beings actually have. But but by looking at it and considering,
Speaker 1: like how we get to this point of thinking that
Speaker 1: it's possible in some cases, Uh, you know what it
Speaker 1: reveals about our relationship with our own mind and considerations
Speaker 1: of our own mind and mental states, as well as
Speaker 1: our understanding of photography itself. Yeah, this episode made me
Speaker 1: keep thinking back to the series on photography that we
Speaker 1: did on our other podcast, Invention, which if you're not
Speaker 1: subscribed yet, go subscribe to Invention. That's right, it's a
Speaker 1: journey through human techno history. And yeah, we did a
Speaker 1: whole series on photography, also stuff before photography, like the
Speaker 1: camera obscura, and then also on motion picture technology afterwards.
Speaker 1: And really, you know, we can't, uh you know, overstate
Speaker 1: the degree to which photography changed the world. It changed
Speaker 1: the way we thought about the world, how we thought
Speaker 1: about ourselves. It gave us new metaphors for uh, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about our own minds and how we're perceiving the world.
Speaker 1: And uh also arguably made the modern celebrity possible. Uh
Speaker 1: so we can lay that crime at its feet as well,
Speaker 1: but it also lent itself well to a number of
Speaker 1: pseudo scientific ideas and ultimately downright occult notions about what
Speaker 1: photography was and what it might capture. Well. Sure, because
Speaker 1: if you are, say, somebody who is adamant that there
Speaker 1: is a type of reality that we can't normally see,
Speaker 1: a very commonplace to go to try to find bits
Speaker 1: of evidence of that reality that we can't normally see
Speaker 1: is some kind of objective recorded media. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think about the people who do e VP ghost recordings
Speaker 1: electronic voice phenomena. Again, this is not something that I
Speaker 1: think is real evidence of ghosts, but a lot of
Speaker 1: people think, Okay, you know, I take my tape recorder
Speaker 1: to a haunted graveyard and I just leave it going,
Speaker 1: and then I play it back and in through the
Speaker 1: static and the rustling in the wind, I hear voices
Speaker 1: saying things. If I can be psychological for a minute,
Speaker 1: I think what's mostly going on is that drawing from
Speaker 1: objective recording media like that allows people to generate the
Speaker 1: noise into which they can read a signal yes. And
Speaker 1: of course photography when it was new, provided a whole
Speaker 1: new way of doing something like this, right, And then
Speaker 1: other technologies that were coming out around, you know, in
Speaker 1: the same era we all said the X ray, which
Speaker 1: we also have an episode of Invention about which deals
Speaker 1: with invisible um, you know, processes, you know, invisible rays,
Speaker 1: an invisible world, and and also was a big game
Speaker 1: changer and how we we thought about reality. Sure, So
Speaker 1: I was reading a little more about this, and I
Speaker 1: ran across a two thousand five book titled The Perfect
Speaker 1: Medium by Shiro at All, and it it gets into
Speaker 1: the intersections between the occult and photography, which are numerous, numerous,
Speaker 1: but the author's point out that they generally generally fall
Speaker 1: into three categories. First of all, photographs of spirits, in
Speaker 1: which a spirit entity shows up in the photograph. I
Speaker 1: think we're mover with examples of this, uh uh. And
Speaker 1: then another is photographs of mediums in which the spirit medium,
Speaker 1: which is a you know, human like us who is
Speaker 1: leading a seance or something, is doing something supernatural. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it might be like a photograph that shows that
Speaker 1: during a seance this medium was levitating, or that this medium,
Speaker 1: during some kind of session was generating ectoplasm, right, And
Speaker 1: that's the next one. Photographs of fluids and and this
Speaker 1: one is interesting because the obvious subject matter here is exoplasm,
Speaker 1: some weird substance emerging from the individual, and in reality
Speaker 1: it's generally wet sheep's cloth or or something like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's easy to just think of this as ghost
Speaker 1: slime and a ghostbuster's fashion. Maybe we should explain ectoplasm
Speaker 1: just a little bit more so. It was this phenomenon
Speaker 1: where a medium would claim that they can generate some
Speaker 1: kind of physical manifestation of the spirit world that shows
Speaker 1: up when you take a picture of them in the dark.
Speaker 1: Maybe uh, and it would yeah, so it would look
Speaker 1: like some kind of weird cloth or slime beside their
Speaker 1: head or on their body, like like a big like
Speaker 1: mucus something like. No, it doesn't even generally it just
Speaker 1: looks like some sort of weird mucasy cloth they got
Speaker 1: slimed or slimber exactly. I mean, that's where that comes from.
Speaker 1: But it's also a bit more more complex in this
Speaker 1: society and the fluids in these photographs, as Sharrow and
Speaker 1: I'll point out, you know, it's dealing with this the
Speaker 1: idea that you're capturing a sense of the vital force,
Speaker 1: the soul, the thoughts, feelings, dreams, etcetera. All this directly
Speaker 1: captured on a photographic plate without the use of a
Speaker 1: camera in some cases. So it has a strong connection
Speaker 1: to what was going on at the time and observation
Speaker 1: of X rays and radioactivity. They point out that in France,
Speaker 1: so Luis darg and others quote sought to photograph their
Speaker 1: own vital energy or thoughts simply by placing their fingers
Speaker 1: or foreheads on the census eze plate. Despite numerous refutations
Speaker 1: by scientists who demonstrated that the traces thus obtained were
Speaker 1: no more than photographic artifacts arising out of the experimental
Speaker 1: conditions themselves. Attempts to record human fluids continued throughout the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. And so this these fluids would not just
Speaker 1: be like blood or something, that would be these these
Speaker 1: spiritual fluids. Yeah, and it gets beyond just like mere
Speaker 1: fluids and into also things like horrors. Um so in
Speaker 1: other words, and then people still do photographing as absolutely
Speaker 1: that's like big business. Yeah, so, you know, in other words,
Speaker 1: in the midst of all this what was essentially future shock,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, at this emerging technology and the hidden
Speaker 1: world's exposed through X rays. This idea of capturing thoughts
Speaker 1: through photography carried a fair amount of weight, no matter
Speaker 1: what the science said and is still saying about it.
Speaker 1: So the author's point to to uh to a couple
Speaker 1: of examples, one of which is the work of Simon
Speaker 1: Kurlean in the nineteen forties. Uh. Kurlan, of course, is
Speaker 1: where we get Kurlean photography. He lived ninety eight, and
Speaker 1: it's the process in which an image is obtained by
Speaker 1: the application of a high frequency electric field to an
Speaker 1: object so that it radiates a characteristic pattern of luminescence
Speaker 1: that is recorded on photographic film. And it ultimately has
Speaker 1: to do with moisture and other factors. But but claims
Speaker 1: were made that it captured some aspect of an individual's health,
Speaker 1: their essence, or their vital bodily energy. So there's some
Speaker 1: kind of like invisible quality they have this showing up
Speaker 1: when you run this electric current and take a picture, right,
Speaker 1: And I think it's still factors into some sort of
Speaker 1: as to some like alternative like new age of systems.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's ultimately you're you're dealing with something that is perhaps
Speaker 1: a a what you know, supernatural interpretation of some visual
Speaker 1: data that you've created, which you know, as long as
Speaker 1: you're not not you know, claiming that it's scientific, I guess,
Speaker 1: you know, go for it. Um. It just falls under
Speaker 1: the domain of of of of of spiritualism and religion.
Speaker 1: They also point to a man by the name of
Speaker 1: ted Sirius, who we will come back to in a bit. Yes,
Speaker 1: because we before we get to Sirius, we have to
Speaker 1: explore the origins of this very act that Samara in
Speaker 1: the Ring is is engaging in. Uh, this idea that
Speaker 1: human beings are capable not only of photography, which photography
Speaker 1: in and of itself is an amazing accomplishment. This, this,
Speaker 1: this much have seemed magic when it was new, Oh, absolutely,
Speaker 1: because at least we discussed an invention. You know. It's
Speaker 1: it's this perfect convergence of of optical expertise and chemical
Speaker 1: expertise and artistic expertise, all of it coming together in
Speaker 1: this new way of of of of dealing with the
Speaker 1: visual world. Um. But then we have this added idea
Speaker 1: that people can also engage in thought ptography, right, thoughtography. Uh,
Speaker 1: it goes by several names, now, psychic photography maybe thoughtography,
Speaker 1: and it's modern origins are I think you could you
Speaker 1: could argue that they are in Japan. So I want
Speaker 1: to talk about a researcher named Fukuai Tomochichi, who is
Speaker 1: a Japanese psychologist who lived from eighteen sixty nine to
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two. He was educated at Tokyo Imperial University
Speaker 1: in the eighteen nineties. He studied in their philosophy department.
Speaker 1: Because this would have been when psychology was brand new
Speaker 1: there weren't like psychology departments, you know that there there
Speaker 1: would have been many of the were any at the time,
Speaker 1: and he received his PhD after doing a dissertation on hypnotism.
Speaker 1: And according to the History of Japanese Psychology by Brian J. McVeigh,
Speaker 1: which is my source on most of this about Fukurai,
Speaker 1: Fukarai played an important role in introducing the work of
Speaker 1: the pioneering American psychologist William James to Japanese scholars. Of course,
Speaker 1: William James would have been a contemporary of Fuguais. James
Speaker 1: Is The Principles of Psychology came out in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: and his lectures which became the Varieties of Religious Experience,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about a number of times on the show.
Speaker 1: That those happened around nineteen o one and nineteen o two,
Speaker 1: I think, But so this would have been around the
Speaker 1: same time that Fukurai was working and uh and doing
Speaker 1: his dissertation and doing his early research. Now, according to McVeigh,
Speaker 1: Fukarai also published work on the subject of education, and
Speaker 1: he became a lecturer and an associate professor in the
Speaker 1: field of abnormal psychology, which today we would just call
Speaker 1: the study of mental illnesses and he so he was
Speaker 1: a lecturer at Tokyo and Real University on these subjects.
Speaker 1: But from here his interests apparently took a turn for
Speaker 1: the paranormal. So, beginning sometime around nineteen ten, Farai became
Speaker 1: extremely interested in spiritualism, especially in the subject of clair voyance. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, we should note that he would not have
Speaker 1: been alone in this at the time. Interest in spiritualism, mediums,
Speaker 1: and the paranormal enjoyed extreme popularity and elite circles all
Speaker 1: around the world at this time. Now today, clair voyance
Speaker 1: is usually understood to be a special kind of psychic power.
Speaker 1: Common definition of it is quote the supposed faculty of
Speaker 1: perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal
Speaker 1: sensory contact. Now, like a lot of psychic concepts, I
Speaker 1: see claire voyance invoked to refer to a sort of
Speaker 1: a broad range of things. H So I think it
Speaker 1: can include all manner of cases of remote viewing. So
Speaker 1: like seeing things that are hind physical barriers. You know,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be able to see through the closed door
Speaker 1: into the next room, but you can seeing things that
Speaker 1: are far away, you know, maybe seeing things that are
Speaker 1: happening in another country, seeing things that are separated in
Speaker 1: time in the future or the past. Uh, And sometimes
Speaker 1: but less often, seeing things that can't normally be seen
Speaker 1: at all, such as spiritual essences or the contents of
Speaker 1: other people's thoughts, or otherwise having knowledge that you just
Speaker 1: couldn't acquire by normal means. Now, of course, it's worth
Speaker 1: noting that all of these things as psychic phenomenon, they
Speaker 1: are basically exaggerations of things that the human mind does
Speaker 1: through um, you know, through mental time travel, for instance,
Speaker 1: imagining what the future will be like, or remembering what
Speaker 1: the past was. The idea of not being able to
Speaker 1: see through a wall into the next room and see
Speaker 1: what's going on there, but perform but you know, conceiving
Speaker 1: a mental picture of what it might be like. Like
Speaker 1: for instance, there's another recording studio here or in the office.
Speaker 1: I cannot see in there with my mind, but with
Speaker 1: my mind I can imagine that the guys from stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know are in there right
Speaker 1: now recording something. But you cannot imagine what they are doing.
Speaker 1: But I can form a pretty basic idea that of
Speaker 1: setting around a table talking it will not fit in
Speaker 1: your brain. When they're doing it's it's it looks just
Speaker 1: like what we're doing. This the subject matter is slightly different.
Speaker 1: But but at any rate, what I'm saying is I
Speaker 1: can form a pretty good idea, but I know that
Speaker 1: that is just my brain creating a simulation of my environment, right.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I think a lot of this clairvoyant
Speaker 1: stuff hinges on the concept of generating accurate knowledge. It's
Speaker 1: like all the stuff we can do with our imagination,
Speaker 1: except they can do it to see reality. Um And
Speaker 1: the kind of clear voyants that Fukurai was most interested
Speaker 1: in I think would be covered by the first two
Speaker 1: categories of things I said, so mostly like seeing things
Speaker 1: that are far away and seeing across physical barriers. According
Speaker 1: to McVeigh, he was focused on something called toshi, which
Speaker 1: meant something like seeing through, as in seeing through barriers,
Speaker 1: and on syndrigan, which meant the far seeing eye. And
Speaker 1: in this parapsychology phase of his life, Fukurai was aided
Speaker 1: by another Japanese researcher named Imamura Shinkichi. Now Fukuai studied
Speaker 1: a reputed Japanese clairvoyant named Mfuni Chizuko and another named
Speaker 1: Nagao Ikuko, and McVeigh writes that in nineteen ten, Fukurai
Speaker 1: performed a series of experiments in front of a panel
Speaker 1: of scholars and experts that he believed would demonstrate Mfuna
Speaker 1: Chizuko's power to read out written messages even after they
Speaker 1: had been sealed inside envelopes and then placed inside lead containers,
Speaker 1: and apparently an attempt to replicate these experiments the following
Speaker 1: year in nineteen eleven was not as successful as Fukurai
Speaker 1: and Mfuni had hoped, and a lot of people considered
Speaker 1: that Fugarais research was clearly misguided After some failed demonstrations
Speaker 1: and he in his supposed clairvoyant subjects like Nigau and
Speaker 1: mfune were criticized in the press, and at least I
Speaker 1: think it's implied that partially as a result of these
Speaker 1: failures in subsequent criticism, McVeigh writes that both mufuney and
Speaker 1: Nigau Ikuko committed suicide in the year nineteen eleven, but
Speaker 1: before I've also seen another cause of death attributed to Nagaikuko,
Speaker 1: so I'm not sure about that, But McVeigh says that
Speaker 1: that she also died by suicide. But before she died
Speaker 1: in nineteen eleven, Nagaikuko appeared to demonstrate a novel form
Speaker 1: of psychic power that fascinated Fukurai, and this was apart
Speaker 1: from traditional clairvoyance. This was the power that Fukurai called ninsha,
Speaker 1: which would have roughly translated as thoughtography. The Japanese term
Speaker 1: ninha comes from the combination of nin meaning like sense
Speaker 1: or feeling, and shah meaning picture, and in concrete terms,
Speaker 1: this just means that Fukua I believe that Nigau had
Speaker 1: the power to use her mind's eye to expose a
Speaker 1: draw I played a photographic film, essentially burning her thoughts
Speaker 1: directly onto the physical substrate, the same way that light
Speaker 1: prints and image onto a piece of film. After Mifunei
Speaker 1: and Nagau died, Fukurai continued his research and he published
Speaker 1: a book about clairvoyance and photography in nineteen thirteen, which
Speaker 1: was widely criticized as credulous and unscientific, and fugura I
Speaker 1: eventually lost his university position moved on to other things
Speaker 1: that he apparently continued to be interested in paranormal research
Speaker 1: well into his retirement in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. Um.
Speaker 1: One weird thing is Before he was publicly ridiculed and
Speaker 1: ousted from his position at Tokyo University, Fugaray was considered
Speaker 1: an elite scholar at the head of Japanese psychology. He
Speaker 1: was not, you know, just some crank writing pamphlets in
Speaker 1: his basement. He was. He was a top scholar, and
Speaker 1: his his academic exile had consequences. I was reading in
Speaker 1: the Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology Global Perspectives
Speaker 1: by David B. Baker that, in action to the Fukarai affair,
Speaker 1: a new head of the psychology department at Tokyo Imperial
Speaker 1: University decided that the department could rehabilitate its reputation by
Speaker 1: only focusing on quote normal psychology, ignoring both of fucharais
Speaker 1: areas of study meaning parapsychology like the study of psychics
Speaker 1: and quote abnormal psychology, which again would amount to the
Speaker 1: study of mental illness. Uh. Now, of course, saying we're
Speaker 1: not going to study mental illnesses is a huge limitation
Speaker 1: on academic psychology, which the authors right in this book
Speaker 1: a quote stunted the rise of clinical psychology and pre
Speaker 1: war Japan. Yeah, absolutely though, because, yeah, studying an mental
Speaker 1: illness is a way not only of understanding how to
Speaker 1: trade mental illness, but also to understand, like what, you know,
Speaker 1: how the mind is functioning in individuals who are are
Speaker 1: not experiencing mental illness, right, I mean it. It provides
Speaker 1: a frame of reference. Yeah, A lot of the For example,
Speaker 1: a lot of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of
Speaker 1: psychology have come from studying patients who have brain injuries
Speaker 1: or legions some kind that like they show you how
Speaker 1: the brain changes when certain or how the mind changes
Speaker 1: and how behavior changes when certain physical changes are made
Speaker 1: to the brain. And of course, I I've seen it
Speaker 1: alleged by a number of writers that the stories of
Speaker 1: people like me Funi Chizuko and Nagai Kuko inspired the
Speaker 1: fictional ghost in the original Ring by Suzuki Koji. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's uh correct, but it's at least
Speaker 1: been alleged that there's some threat of inspiration there um.
Speaker 1: And you know, I want to be a little bit
Speaker 1: sympathetic to Fukurai and consider the historical context, Like in
Speaker 1: the year nineteen ten, it was only fifteen years previous
Speaker 1: that X rays and X ray photography had been discovered.
Speaker 1: We sort of alluded to this earlier right. The German
Speaker 1: physicist Wilhelm Runkin. He discovered X rays by accident in
Speaker 1: the year eighteen when he was performing experiments with a
Speaker 1: type of early cathode ray tube, which was an electrical
Speaker 1: device that shoots a beam of electrons across space inside
Speaker 1: an evacuated tube from one electrode to another. And Runkin
Speaker 1: noticed when he was running these experiments he'd put current
Speaker 1: through the cathode ray tube in the darkened room, it
Speaker 1: would make this particular screen in the room. It was
Speaker 1: a screen of barium platinum cyanide, which is like a
Speaker 1: type of photographic plate. It would make that glow. And
Speaker 1: this puzzled him, of course, so he tried to run
Speaker 1: some more experiments, and he discovered that he could use
Speaker 1: the cathode ray tube to expose photographic plates inside a
Speaker 1: completely dark room, except the photos were nothing like anybody
Speaker 1: on Earth had ever seen. A human hand placed in
Speaker 1: front of the tube between the tube and the plate
Speaker 1: would create an exposure almost completely ignoring the fleshy parts
Speaker 1: of the hand, but showing the bones hidden underneath the flesh.
Speaker 1: And when Runkin created an X ray exposure of his
Speaker 1: wife's hand. She reportedly looked at the images of her
Speaker 1: bones and said, I have seen my death. Uh yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you want more about this, we talked about
Speaker 1: this in our X ray episode of Invention. But the
Speaker 1: X ray photo was a radically completely new way of
Speaker 1: imaging the hidden reality inside the body. It had been
Speaker 1: discovered almost completely by accident, and it had been only
Speaker 1: like fifteen years before this. Of course, photography itself was
Speaker 1: maybe like eighty to ninety years old at the time,
Speaker 1: And so you add to that the fact that people
Speaker 1: were proposing all kinds of other hypothetical classes of raise
Speaker 1: at the time. You remember we talked about in rays.
Speaker 1: Those didn't exist, but people were just thinking that they
Speaker 1: were all kinds of rays we didn't detect or understand
Speaker 1: yet invisible forces beaming out from one object to another.
Speaker 1: Um Fukurai was wrong. I think he. I think he
Speaker 1: was misguided, But I don't think it was crazy at
Speaker 1: the time, or certainly not as crazy as it seems
Speaker 1: now to think that the hidden anatomy that governed the
Speaker 1: mind's eye and the brain might leave some kind of
Speaker 1: print on a piece of film Via raise projected out
Speaker 1: of the head. I don't know, does that make sense
Speaker 1: to you? Yeah? Yeah, I mean we have to put
Speaker 1: ourselves in the framework of the time and uh and
Speaker 1: and and really again in the sense of future shock
Speaker 1: that would have would have still been resonating and to
Speaker 1: a certain extence still resonates. Because I think one of
Speaker 1: the one of the things that we're going to keep
Speaker 1: seeing in these episodes is that and I think this
Speaker 1: was revealed again in our our photography series on Invention,
Speaker 1: is that photography is a complicated process that brings in uh,
Speaker 1: you know, at least two different fields the third if
Speaker 1: you count the artistic world as well, but certainly optics
Speaker 1: and chemistry and not everyone really has a firm grasp
Speaker 1: on that like it too. For a lot of us,
Speaker 1: it's still kind of feels like magic. A polaroid camera, uh,
Speaker 1: you know where you know, instantly gives you the images
Speaker 1: sort of magic. Uh. And when we when we don't
Speaker 1: understand something completely, it it allows us to engage in uh,
Speaker 1: unrealistic modes of thought about what is going on with
Speaker 1: the camera, What is going on with photography? All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna keep talking about all this, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: take one quick break first. Alright, we're back. So I
Speaker 1: want to talk just a little bit about this idea
Speaker 1: of remote viewing, which which Fukarai was definitely involved in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea that you know, you could just you could
Speaker 1: see what's going on in another place, either in another room,
Speaker 1: another part of the world, sealed envelope, sealed envelope, or
Speaker 1: another planet. And you know, another example of an accomplished
Speaker 1: individual in their field who is also a prominent UH
Speaker 1: proponent of remote viewing is Atlanta's own Courtney Brown, an
Speaker 1: associate professor in the Political Science department at Emory University.
Speaker 1: It also works in non linear mathematics. So we see
Speaker 1: in Fukarai an interest in hypnosis uh. And then Brown
Speaker 1: is versed in meditation shan UH. Meditation induced light experiences
Speaker 1: can occur and have been linked to similar experiences in
Speaker 1: sensory deprivation uh. And and I've seen things like that
Speaker 1: in yoga meditation as well, where you will be you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're seeing lights or shapes or or some
Speaker 1: sort of imagery that feels as if it is it
Speaker 1: is arising and it is not called forth. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying like, it doesn't feel like it's something
Speaker 1: that you are consciously imagining. It doesn't feel like something
Speaker 1: that is dictated by the default mode network, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like the sort of images um or
Speaker 1: thoughts that are normally bombarding our brain. Well, I think
Speaker 1: about how often in psychedelic experiences people talk about believing
Speaker 1: they have encountered an other where if you just I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's impossible to know for sure, but it
Speaker 1: seems like probably what's going on is they're having an
Speaker 1: internal experience with their own brain. But there are some
Speaker 1: types of experiences that we've just for whatever reason, feel
Speaker 1: our exogenous. It feels like it's coming from outside you, right,
Speaker 1: and so with with the right amount of of priming, expectation,
Speaker 1: and ultimately consolidation, Like any one of these experiences, be
Speaker 1: it something that is due to the use of psychedelics
Speaker 1: or something that is acquired through meditation, hypnosis, etcetera um,
Speaker 1: because as we've discussed before, like even normal, our normal
Speaker 1: sensory view of the world is inherently hallucinatory, you know,
Speaker 1: it is in its in its own way and illusion.
Speaker 1: It's not the way things are. It's just like a
Speaker 1: useful sort of movie that we can interact with the
Speaker 1: world through. Right. So if you're having an experience like
Speaker 1: that and it feels real, right, and then you can
Speaker 1: see how even like certainly very intelligent people, uh can
Speaker 1: can can come to believe that that they are actually
Speaker 1: perceiving the reality of a distant location and become very
Speaker 1: convinced of it. And then certainly if you have a
Speaker 1: name for this as well, you know, becomes kind of
Speaker 1: established in parapsychology. Than than that also helps that gives
Speaker 1: you even more like priming and conditioning, uh too, in
Speaker 1: which to frame this experience. And and also I mean
Speaker 1: just to go back to psychedelics too, and certainly our
Speaker 1: episode on psychedelics, like we see that trend uh in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, right, this this counterculture emerge, this idea
Speaker 1: taking shape that secular individuals can have a essentially a
Speaker 1: mystical experience that is not due to the imachinations of
Speaker 1: gods or angels, you know, um And and so you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not surprising that we see all, you know,
Speaker 1: cases like this arising. So I also say on top
Speaker 1: of that, there's just I think there's a very respectable
Speaker 1: humility impulse that says like, Okay, you know, we should
Speaker 1: always accept that there may be forces at work in
Speaker 1: our day to day surroundings that we don't fully understand.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't have a scientific theory that accounts
Speaker 1: for them yet. And I think that's a good thing
Speaker 1: to start from. But I think a lot of like
Speaker 1: parapsychology and paranormal type people jump from there too, because
Speaker 1: we we should acknowledge that there are lots of things
Speaker 1: about the world we don't understand yet. Therefore remote viewing
Speaker 1: is real, you know, or like therefore, you know, you
Speaker 1: can't discount thoughtography and finding the right balance there, I
Speaker 1: think is part of the difficulty of living the skeptical life.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't want to live a life of
Speaker 1: denialism where you just like, anytime something is strange, you're unexplained,
Speaker 1: you just say like, oh, that's nonsense. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, you want to maintain a high standard of evidence,
Speaker 1: and that's that's the tightrope walk I guess you've got
Speaker 1: to do if you want to be a scientific investigator,
Speaker 1: if you want to try to have the most accurate
Speaker 1: view you can of the world. And they're always going
Speaker 1: to be these edge cases where somebody's presenting you know,
Speaker 1: evidence that maybe maybe seems compelling for some kind of
Speaker 1: phenomenon that doesn't really seem like it like it fits
Speaker 1: with well tested theories that otherwise predict the physical world.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the case that some of these
Speaker 1: investigators have run into with psychic photography, especially in the
Speaker 1: cases we'll talk about with Ted serious. Absolutely. I should
Speaker 1: also point out that we always have to remember that
Speaker 1: the c i A sunk something like twenty million dollars
Speaker 1: into the Stargate project in the nine nineties and an
Speaker 1: attempt to ascertain the effectiveness and military potential of remote viewing,
Speaker 1: and this project was ultimately terminated in remote viewing was
Speaker 1: found unfruitful to their needs. But maybe it was a conspiracy, No, No,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I tend to think like if there.
Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, I've got major objections to
Speaker 1: remote viewing just on like a plausibility basis. Like you know, again,
Speaker 1: you can't rule things out just because you don't know
Speaker 1: the mechanism. But if you've got a pretty good picture
Speaker 1: of how physics works, and they just you know, their
Speaker 1: powers proposed that don't seem to fit in any way
Speaker 1: with any you know, any physical forces that you could identify.
Speaker 1: That's that should definitely be a red flag to start with.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, I think there are
Speaker 1: additional plausibility problems with remote viewing, which is like, if
Speaker 1: it is, if it does exist, why isn't it being
Speaker 1: taken better advantage of Yeah? Uh, and that thing said,
Speaker 1: I do come back to like what I said earlier, like,
Speaker 1: even though it's not scientifically feasible as far as we
Speaker 1: understand it, um, you know, that doesn't mean that you know,
Speaker 1: people shouldn't be interested in it and uh or even
Speaker 1: you know, practice it, but it needs to be more
Speaker 1: of I feel like it is more definitely in the
Speaker 1: line of like a spiritual or religious practice, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: But that's my just my two cents on it. And
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the problems that and we're
Speaker 1: going to see that with a lot of these these
Speaker 1: people that are they're claiming these abilities, is they are
Speaker 1: not presenting them as something that is uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately like the domain of the spiritual, something that can't
Speaker 1: really be proven or disproven. But they're but they're agreeing
Speaker 1: to test, they're agreeing to uh to uh performances of
Speaker 1: their ability and in fighting in some cases experts, to
Speaker 1: to see what they're doing and to to to try
Speaker 1: and find the problems in it. Uh. So Um, it's
Speaker 1: something to keep in mind as we've moved forward. All Right,
Speaker 1: So let's come back to a figure that we've We've
Speaker 1: mentioned the name already, uh ted Sirius. That's s c
Speaker 1: r iOS. Is it serious or Sirios Sirius? With Sirius,
Speaker 1: well you say that, I'll say Sirius just confusing like
Speaker 1: serious black Um. So. Sirius lived through two thousand six,
Speaker 1: and he claimed to be able to create thoutographs on
Speaker 1: polaroid film. So, um, this is an interesting figure, um
Speaker 1: to say the least. So um. I was reading a
Speaker 1: little bit about this in that in that book The
Speaker 1: Perfect Medium, paras psychologist Stephen E. Broad writes about him
Speaker 1: who brought is also a philosophy professor, uh, and he
Speaker 1: contends that Sirius is photograph fee is perhaps the best
Speaker 1: documented and perhaps the most impressive. Does he seem a
Speaker 1: little uh sympathetic to maybe he did have some psychic powers? Um?
Speaker 1: I mean I encourage everyone to read Broad's work for
Speaker 1: themselves because he um. He certainly is more inclined to
Speaker 1: to criticize some of the the individuals who have been
Speaker 1: attributed as being like solid debunkers. At the very least,
Speaker 1: he seems to be saying, look, whatever Ciris was doing,
Speaker 1: it's not nearly as debunked as you think it is.
Speaker 1: Um And I'm and he is a para psychologist. He
Speaker 1: is a para psychologist. So so I want to stress
Speaker 1: all of that, but it's still an interesting read. He
Speaker 1: does seem to be more inclined to um entertain the
Speaker 1: possibility though. So. Sirius was a Chicago bellhop who had
Speaker 1: experimented with with hypnosis and uh. He claims that during
Speaker 1: this time he found that he could use his trying
Speaker 1: to project images onto camera film in later instant polaroid film.
Speaker 1: And he apparently demonstrated this to various folks and was
Speaker 1: quite convincing. And this caught the attention of Denver psychiatrist
Speaker 1: and researcher Jewel Eisenbudd, who took a strong interest in
Speaker 1: his work and conducted numerous trials resulting in hundreds of images. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I've read that Eisenbudd is one of the main
Speaker 1: reasons that people really know about Ted Seriously, he sort
Speaker 1: of took up the cause like or at least from
Speaker 1: what I read, Eisenbudd claimed he was initially skeptical of
Speaker 1: Ted Serious his abilities, but then after spending time with
Speaker 1: him and seeing his photographs, he he came more and
Speaker 1: more to believe that these powers were real and that
Speaker 1: Serious really could project his mind's eye onto a piece
Speaker 1: of film. Yeah, Eisenbud at one point believed that Sirius
Speaker 1: was seeing the essentially remote viewing the surface of the
Speaker 1: Jovian moon Ghannamede, and then using photography to imply at
Speaker 1: that image on onto film. Right, And it gets more
Speaker 1: complex than that, actually, because I was reading that so
Speaker 1: Serious apparently made these images that Eisenbudd later said, oh,
Speaker 1: this is the surface of Ganymede, because he said that
Speaker 1: Serious was very interested in space exploration and had been
Speaker 1: thinking about the voyager to probe and that must have
Speaker 1: been what triggered his generation of this image of the
Speaker 1: surface of of Ganymede. But at the time he generated
Speaker 1: the image, the photographs from the voyager probe had not
Speaker 1: been taken yet. So I think Eisenbudd is suggesting that
Speaker 1: if these photos are real, serious actually not only projected
Speaker 1: his thoughts directly on the film, but also pre cognitively
Speaker 1: remote viewed the surface of of wait, precognitively. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess it wouldn't have mattered whether the voyager probe got
Speaker 1: there yet he was seeing the surface of the moon
Speaker 1: before the probe got there, right, And I've seen this
Speaker 1: in other uh you know, accounts of remote viewing, where
Speaker 1: they have they have essentially seen other worlds or have
Speaker 1: encountered historic figures, that sort of thing. Right now, Another
Speaker 1: thing worth noting about Cirios here is that is that
Speaker 1: even eisenbud like points out that that that ted it
Speaker 1: was definitely an alcoholic and that's sort of part of
Speaker 1: the thing, but also displayed like a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: at times kind of like irrational behavior and seemed to
Speaker 1: have you know, definite uh you know, psychological issues. So
Speaker 1: but but anyway, this was basically Sirius is process. So
Speaker 1: he generally he needed to be drunk, generally very drunk
Speaker 1: to perform this art, which I mean, I guess that's
Speaker 1: fair enough, right, I mean, I mean, really even podcasting,
Speaker 1: I remember when when when we first started podcasting, um,
Speaker 1: Jerry told us like, have a little to drink before
Speaker 1: you go into the podcast, but if it'll help. Jerry
Speaker 1: Ever told me that, well maybe maybe I just look
Speaker 1: like I needed to drink at the time. I don't know.
Speaker 1: But wait, are you serious? Serious? Yeah? I mean I
Speaker 1: think she's joking. But at any rate, like the idea
Speaker 1: that you would need a social lubricant to essentially to
Speaker 1: perform something, um either you know, a legitimate psychic ability,
Speaker 1: or to perform some sort of a trick, some sort
Speaker 1: of a um an illusion or even a confidence trick. Right, um,
Speaker 1: So that's one part of it. Also, he preferred to
Speaker 1: hold a quota he called a gizmo in his hand
Speaker 1: to help him focus his powers. And it was a short,
Speaker 1: open cylinder about an inch in diameter. And of course
Speaker 1: this is highly suspicious. You don't have to be Sherlock
Speaker 1: Holmes to suspect that the gizmo is either the heart
Speaker 1: of the trick that he is going to perform, or
Speaker 1: it's a decoy to distract onlookers from the actual trick.
Speaker 1: Because he'd often placed this in front of the camera lens,
Speaker 1: like he'd get up into the into the camera lens
Speaker 1: with the gizmo and then also like you know, mugging
Speaker 1: or the camera, placing his forehead in the way and
Speaker 1: somehow using the gizmo allegedly to focus his thoughts into
Speaker 1: the camera. Yeah, he said he needed to connect his
Speaker 1: body to the camera. Uh. Though there are allegations also
Speaker 1: that he was able to produce autographs and uh and
Speaker 1: and actually make images on a camera while being far
Speaker 1: away from the camera. That at least is alleged. But
Speaker 1: he most of the time, it has said, would like
Speaker 1: put his forehead right on this thing and stick it
Speaker 1: in the camera camera lyn So, Yeah, raises some red flags, right,
Speaker 1: But then the idea is that he's essentially taking a
Speaker 1: snapshot of the mental image that he is forming in
Speaker 1: his mind. The be it a mental image that is
Speaker 1: formed via memory or just sort of general mental imaging,
Speaker 1: or it's something that is that he has acquired through
Speaker 1: um uh you know, sending his consciousness to a to
Speaker 1: the moons of Jupiter. Yeah. And now I read some
Speaker 1: conflicting reports that sometimes it seems like the images he produced,
Speaker 1: he claimed, were like not what he was thinking about consciously,
Speaker 1: but just would be these unconscious kind of associative images.
Speaker 1: That's what's suggested by Eisenbud uh, the Galilean moon, right,
Speaker 1: is that he just had the Voyager two probe on
Speaker 1: his mind and happened to generate an image of the
Speaker 1: surface of Ganymede. And so if we're approaching it from
Speaker 1: the you know, the pro psychic side, we can say, well,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. The mind is difficult to control. Mental
Speaker 1: images may form in the mind that you're not trying
Speaker 1: to summon. Certainly we can all attest to that. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, from a purely skeptical point of view,
Speaker 1: if you're going to be drawn in and put to
Speaker 1: the test by asking, you know, being asked to think
Speaker 1: of a particular thing, how convenient would it be if
Speaker 1: you could say, well, I tried to think of that
Speaker 1: that that bird feeder that you wanted me to imagine,
Speaker 1: but I'm just so obsessed with space travel right now,
Speaker 1: I give you Ganymede instead, right. I mean that makes
Speaker 1: that suggests that maybe you've already got an image of
Speaker 1: something that looks like a moon's surface on hand with
Speaker 1: you or something, right, And I guess that gets to
Speaker 1: what the actual trick would be if there is a
Speaker 1: trick here, which I assume there probably is right now
Speaker 1: now in that article in the Perfect Medium, A broad
Speaker 1: certainly focuses on the aspects of Ted's art that kind
Speaker 1: of continue to mystify, as he mentions, for instance, that
Speaker 1: Eisenbudd offered a cash reward for anyone able to replicate
Speaker 1: Ted's results quote under conditions similar to those prevailing during
Speaker 1: the during the experiments. Now I've read that there was
Speaker 1: serious dispute about like them negotiating with skeptics about what
Speaker 1: would be acceptable for those uh conditions, Like I think
Speaker 1: I read that James Randy wanted to try to replicate it,
Speaker 1: but that Eisenbudd said, well, you have to be really drunk,
Speaker 1: because Ted is always really drunk when he does it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the famous debunker James Randy, who we had the privilege
Speaker 1: to meet, um but last year. Um. It definitely plays
Speaker 1: into some of this, And it's kind of if you
Speaker 1: if you read some of the more pro serious material,
Speaker 1: Randy's kind of portrayed as a villain. Oh all, Randy
Speaker 1: is always the villain of some thing written by pro
Speaker 1: psychic powers people. Uh so so Yeah, some of these
Speaker 1: account like brought accountants to highlight the things that were
Speaker 1: not you know, they're still a little mysterious or or
Speaker 1: or certainly accounts of replications that don't meet the same
Speaker 1: degree of replication, Like you weren't able to do exactly
Speaker 1: what Sirius is doing, therefore you didn't fully debunk him.
Speaker 1: I've I've read some of his defenders say, Okay, people
Speaker 1: have used tricks to replicate what serious was doing, but
Speaker 1: they couldn't do it without those tricks being evident to
Speaker 1: people who were watching, right. Um. I mean the other
Speaker 1: way to think about it is, can I can I
Speaker 1: paint the Mona Lisa? No? I cannot. Can I demonstrate
Speaker 1: some of the techniques personally that that that the artists
Speaker 1: used to create the Mona Lisa? Uh? Certainly, Uh. We
Speaker 1: have to take it into account that Sirius, assuming again
Speaker 1: that he's not a psychic, that he's not a not
Speaker 1: capable of photography, that he's just a performer, an illusionist, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a trickster, there is still an art to
Speaker 1: what he is doing. Uh. There is still a performance
Speaker 1: aspect of charismatic aspect to it, and their aspects of
Speaker 1: that that are going to depend in part on like
Speaker 1: innate charisma, but also in in practice, in in like
Speaker 1: sheer devotion to to the trick and I think you
Speaker 1: can't discount that and on likewise, you can't expect a
Speaker 1: debunker to rise to that level of performance. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess you can expect them to try. But I mean
Speaker 1: that's one thing that you know, as long as we're
Speaker 1: probing the depths of the unexplained, you could say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some kind of mystical power that this
Speaker 1: person has that we just don't have the power to
Speaker 1: explain it. Or you could say that there's an extreme
Speaker 1: talent this person has for performing a trick that hasn't
Speaker 1: been explained yet. Yeah, because certainly one of the things
Speaker 1: that would come into play is slight of hand, right,
Speaker 1: because the main charge is that is that Sirios had it.
Speaker 1: Kind of varies. Sometimes they talk of just using the
Speaker 1: microfilm um or using microfilm affixed to a marble or
Speaker 1: you know, a film affixed to the end of a
Speaker 1: tiny tube like inside the quote gizmo that her up
Speaker 1: against the camera, because that's the obvious, right, is that
Speaker 1: the gizmo contains something, And if it contains something, some
Speaker 1: film would be ideal because then you have that pre
Speaker 1: existing photograph that can be the thing that he imprints.
Speaker 1: Um skeptic Karen's Hines also charged that Ted used a
Speaker 1: secondary tube about one inch long with a tiny magnifying
Speaker 1: lens that could hold a small slide, and then he
Speaker 1: would conceal this within the gizmo, but also he could
Speaker 1: use it when the gizmo was taken away, again getting
Speaker 1: into that idea that the gizmos not merely useful as
Speaker 1: something to um to hide the trick, but also can
Speaker 1: be used as a distraction, can be the thing that, oh,
Speaker 1: when it's taken away, look I can still do it.
Speaker 1: I don't even have the gizmo on me, right, And
Speaker 1: it was alleged that sometimes he could, I mean usually
Speaker 1: he used the gizmo, but it's alleged that sometimes he
Speaker 1: did it without the gizmo. Now, there were a number
Speaker 1: of expose a s at the time that claimed to
Speaker 1: show that Ted Sirius was a fraud. The entry in
Speaker 1: the Skeptics Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll suggests that two
Speaker 1: amateur magicians and photographers named Charlie Reynolds and David Eisendraft
Speaker 1: exposed Serious as a fraud. Basically, they would and spend
Speaker 1: a weekend with him and jewel Iz and bud and
Speaker 1: they saw his stuff, and they came to the conclusion
Speaker 1: that he was a fraud and wrote this up in
Speaker 1: the article. Uh and Reynolds and Eisendraft claimed to have
Speaker 1: spotted Serious quote slipping something inside his little gizmo before demonstrations,
Speaker 1: and they think it was a picture of something that
Speaker 1: Sirius wanted to show up in the camera exposure. They
Speaker 1: also published an article explaining their findings in October nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven issue of Popular Photography. It was a photography magazine. Now,
Speaker 1: according to the skeptic investigator Joe Nichols account of Serious
Speaker 1: is confrontation with magicians and sleight of hand experts. Quote.
Speaker 1: At one point during the session, after an exposure was made,
Speaker 1: a magician asked to examine the paper tube to see
Speaker 1: if there was anything inside. This would be the gizmo, right,
Speaker 1: the gizmo. Uh. Serious backed away, putting his hand in
Speaker 1: his pocket. Now that's suspicious behavior. But then, weirdly, during
Speaker 1: this session, Serious was unable to produce the autographs, so
Speaker 1: apparently he had been using the gizmo. They said, let
Speaker 1: me see the gizmo, he wouldn't show it to them,
Speaker 1: And then none of the pictures came out anyway, there
Speaker 1: were no autographs. Uh, And he and Eisenbudd blamed the
Speaker 1: quote hostile atmosphere for interfering with Serious his powers. This
Speaker 1: is always a red flag also, I think. But there's
Speaker 1: still plenty of people, I think, who hold out for
Speaker 1: psychic photography, claiming that Ted Serious's powers were real and
Speaker 1: could not be explained. And he's got defenders who say
Speaker 1: that some of his feats are just impossible to explain.
Speaker 1: For example, I was reading claims in an article in
Speaker 1: the Chronicle of Higher Education which about a gallery exhibit
Speaker 1: of Serious as thoutographs which I would like to see that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean they're interesting images, certainly when you
Speaker 1: know the background for them, especially if you just think
Speaker 1: about him as works of art, not as like displays
Speaker 1: of real psychic powers. Um. But to quote from this
Speaker 1: article quote, on occasion, volunteers were asked to attend the
Speaker 1: experiment with a photograph sealed and a cardboard back to
Speaker 1: Manila envelope. Serious then managed to reproduce the image with
Speaker 1: no prior knowledge of it. So again, that's like double
Speaker 1: psychic powers. That's not just the photography, which would be
Speaker 1: a feat even if he was looking directly at what
Speaker 1: the photo should be. Um. But also I guess seeing
Speaker 1: into this envelope if I'm reading that right, I don't know.
Speaker 1: That might also be suggesting that they just arrived with
Speaker 1: it sealed and then showed it to him and he
Speaker 1: reproduced it. Either way, I mean, if you saw that,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that would prove it was real, but
Speaker 1: that would be impressive. You know, you'd be like, wow,
Speaker 1: that that's either real or some impressive trickery. I'd lean
Speaker 1: toward the ladder. Um. But in other cases, he apparently
Speaker 1: managed to produce what appeared to be images of land
Speaker 1: arcs from up above, like aerial views that his supporters
Speaker 1: claimed could not be explained through trickery. But it seems
Speaker 1: like he stopped doing his thing after the late nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: which seems a little weird, Yeah, especially consider he lived
Speaker 1: until two thousand and six. You know, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's a lot of time to not at least not
Speaker 1: be publicly doing this displaying this uh this ability. Uh.
Speaker 1: But then again, UM, you know, we do have to
Speaker 1: come back to you. The fact that Eisenbud himself wrote
Speaker 1: that serious was you know, psychologically disturbed. Alcoholic, So you know,
Speaker 1: you can come up with various, you know, reasons that
Speaker 1: somebody with that kind of with with those kind of
Speaker 1: demons would not engage in their art. Now, he wasn't
Speaker 1: the only one in the later twentieth century to get
Speaker 1: in on the psychic photography thing. Over the years, a
Speaker 1: lot of figures, including Uri Geller, got into psychic photography.
Speaker 1: One of one of Geller's many demonstrations was that he
Speaker 1: would leave the lens cap on a camera, placed the
Speaker 1: camera to his forehead, then take a picture, supposedly saying,
Speaker 1: you know the same kind of thing. I'm using my
Speaker 1: mind's eye to imprint upon the film, and then the
Speaker 1: photo would reveal whatever he had been imagining. Again, James
Speaker 1: Randy shows up, as he often does whenever Uri Geller
Speaker 1: claims something. James Randy criticized this and other psychic photography
Speaker 1: is having two main explanations, either using a handheld device
Speaker 1: to project the image into the camera lens as the
Speaker 1: photo was taken, or loading the camera with pre exposed
Speaker 1: film already bearing the desired image, and the latter seems
Speaker 1: to be the case with a later twentieth century alleged
Speaker 1: psychic named Matsuaki Kyota, who claimed to be able to
Speaker 1: produce photographs on film again, and skeptical critics such as
Speaker 1: Joe Nicole have pointed out that when Massaaki Kyoto was
Speaker 1: asked to perform his thoughtography under controlled conditions for a
Speaker 1: TV crew in London, he couldn't produce the images, and
Speaker 1: Nicol claims that it was only times when he was
Speaker 1: able uh to get the film and have it alone
Speaker 1: one with him, like basically to get hold of the
Speaker 1: film and have it in a private place before the test,
Speaker 1: that he could demonstrate his powers, which again makes you
Speaker 1: think he was doing something to the film before it
Speaker 1: was loaded in the camera. Alright, Well, on that note,
Speaker 1: we are going to have to call it for episode
Speaker 1: one of this exploration, but we are going to return
Speaker 1: in a second episode where we're going to continue to
Speaker 1: explore this idea, like how would it work if this
Speaker 1: were possible? Like what what what can we grasp onto
Speaker 1: in the labyrinth of the human mind and the complexity
Speaker 1: of our our our sensory perception, but also what can
Speaker 1: this question reveal about the reality of of mental imagery
Speaker 1: and how that happens in the brain, Which is fascinating
Speaker 1: mysterious and even spooky topic on its own, even though
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily credit the reality of psychic photography. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of spooky stuff going on when you picture
Speaker 1: something right. And we'll probably talk about the Ring a
Speaker 1: little bit more, and we'll probably bring up a few
Speaker 1: other film such as Scanners, so hey, be sure to
Speaker 1: tune in for that episode. Tune in for all of
Speaker 1: our episodes in October, which are going to be Halloween flavored.
Speaker 1: Uh and we encourage you again to check out Invention
Speaker 1: if you haven't already, can find it wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcast. You can find the website at inventioned pod
Speaker 1: dot com. If you want to support our show, the
Speaker 1: best thing you can do is rate and review it
Speaker 1: wherever you have the power to do so, and make
Speaker 1: sure you have subscribed. Huge thanks as always to our
Speaker 1: awesome audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows. Bla bla bla bla bla bl
Speaker 1: bl blah blah blah blad. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back
Speaker 1: with part two of our discussion of psychic photography the
Speaker 1: press of the Mind's eye. That's right. We kicked off
Speaker 1: last episode talking about the ring in which a psychically gifted,
Speaker 1: disturbed little girl is able to use her the power
Speaker 1: of her mind to burn images into things, including into
Speaker 1: the film of a VHS tape. Sure, but all so
Speaker 1: into all kinds of surfaces, right, Yeah, But but she's
Speaker 1: most famous for her her video work is the video artist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's a video artist, true artist and true artist Harrington. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's where we started out. But we use that
Speaker 1: then to get into this idea of photography of uh,
Speaker 1: this this alleged psychic power by which certain individuals were
Speaker 1: able to use the powers of their mind, uh to
Speaker 1: either 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 we 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? 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 rey is. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: then specifically what photography is concerning those examples of the
Speaker 1: photography we discussed in the last episode, Yes, exactly. So
Speaker 1: I thought maybe we should start today by thinking about
Speaker 1: what is the physical reality of an image in the
Speaker 1: mind's eye? When you okay, so you stopping, you picture
Speaker 1: something you picture Garfield Garfield in mind? What is happening
Speaker 1: in your brain when you picture Garfield? Like, is there
Speaker 1: some two dimensional grid of brain cells that's like a
Speaker 1: screen where colors fill in like pixels on a computer
Speaker 1: screen and they form Garfield. It seems kind of implausible,
Speaker 1: but you know, entertained that for a second. If there
Speaker 1: were a way for a mental image to be projected
Speaker 1: into a physical space, what would be the physical nature
Speaker 1: of the original signal in the brain and how would
Speaker 1: it be transferred to the physical form without being interpreted
Speaker 1: through the body. So I was looking at a couple
Speaker 1: of papers on the subject of like research and thought
Speaker 1: about mental imagery. And one one of the ones I
Speaker 1: was looking at was called Unpicturing a Candle The Prehistory
Speaker 1: of Imagery science, and this was published in Frontiers and
Speaker 1: Psychology by Matthew mckissicks, Susan Aldworth, Fiona McPherson, John Onion's,
Speaker 1: Crawford Winlove, and Adam Zema and this lot of names.
Speaker 1: Uh In and the authors here focus on the history
Speaker 1: of scholarship and philosophy concerning visual imagination before modern neuroscience,
Speaker 1: but they also cover some modern neuroscience with a specific
Speaker 1: focus on the idea of imagining a concrete object, for
Speaker 1: example picturing a candle. And so the authors explored the
Speaker 1: history and so for example, they start by looking at
Speaker 1: like Plato and Aristotle, and they point out that Plato
Speaker 1: actually did not hold a very high regard for the
Speaker 1: importance of mental imagination uh Like. For Plato, mental imagery
Speaker 1: is a copy of a copy. It is a sort
Speaker 1: of imperfect fac simile of an object in the world
Speaker 1: which is already merely an imperfect copy of a perfect
Speaker 1: divine form that we're getting into the idea of the
Speaker 1: realm of forms, the idea that a chair, that there's
Speaker 1: a perfect version of a chair that exists in the
Speaker 1: realm of forms. The chair we can build is an
Speaker 1: imperfect interpretation of that. But then the then his view
Speaker 1: is because I'm more likely to think of it the
Speaker 1: other way, like I'm thinking, then, well, the version of
Speaker 1: the chair in our mind, that's the realm of forms.
Speaker 1: But he's saying, no, that's that's even another level removed
Speaker 1: from the realm of forms. It's an imperfect version of
Speaker 1: the imperfect chair that is in itself an imperfect version
Speaker 1: of the ideal chair. Absolutely, your mental image of a
Speaker 1: pineapple is a flawed copy of some act wold pineapple,
Speaker 1: which is an imperfect realization of eternal pineapple nous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I and I think I think he is correct here, because,
Speaker 1: as we stayed in the last episode, we often we
Speaker 1: often attribute a lot of detail and accuracy to our
Speaker 1: mental images when they're when it's really not there. It's
Speaker 1: it's often a lot more obscure and unfinished than we
Speaker 1: give it credit. Yeah, I mean I almost wouldn't think
Speaker 1: about it in terms of accuracy, but in terms and
Speaker 1: maybe this is more specific to the way my brain works,
Speaker 1: but I think about it even in terms of completeness,
Speaker 1: like that, when I have a mental image of something,
Speaker 1: it's not the same as looking at the thing, because
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm only vaguely grasping the totality of the image.
Speaker 1: When I'm mentally picture something, it's not like it's just
Speaker 1: not like looking at a fixed version of the image.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a hazy scanning of different little
Speaker 1: elements of the image that I can picture in a
Speaker 1: moment against a field of a general impression of the
Speaker 1: larger image. Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah, I believe.
Speaker 1: An example that's often used here is that of a bicycle.
Speaker 1: If I say, hey, imagine a bicycle. Easy done. I'm
Speaker 1: imagining a bicycle right now. But if we go to
Speaker 1: the next step and say that bicycle you're imagining, describe
Speaker 1: for me the functionality of its of the of the
Speaker 1: wheels and the gears and the pedals and everything. Explain
Speaker 1: to me how that works. Oh yeah, This goes back
Speaker 1: to our illusion of explanatory depth. Episodes where everybody can
Speaker 1: picture a bicycle, but can you draw a bicycle? And
Speaker 1: it turns out it's just try it. You might end
Speaker 1: up laughing really hard at yourself because you think you
Speaker 1: can draw a bicycle, but there's a decent chance you can't.
Speaker 1: I 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 imagery important,
Speaker 1: he thought that you literally could not think without it.
Speaker 1: They quote him saying, the soul never thinks without a fantasma,
Speaker 1: and the phantasma is like some kind of mental image,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure this would come as news to our
Speaker 1: many listeners who tell us about their experiences with a fantasia,
Speaker 1: meaning that they say they don't have the ability to
Speaker 1: form mental images, they can't picture something in their heads.
Speaker 1: And yet you know, we've got no reason to disbelieve
Speaker 1: them on that, And at the same time they seem
Speaker 1: perfectly capable of thinking. So it seems perfectly clear to
Speaker 1: me that mental imagery is not necessary for thought, right,
Speaker 1: it is necessary for choosing the form of the Destroyer.
Speaker 1: Should Gozer uh the Traveler appear to you. I have
Speaker 1: to think back of that scene and Ghostbusters. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: how they choose the stay Puff marshmallow man form. But
Speaker 1: you have all of the Ghostbusters that had a fantasia,
Speaker 1: then the the Destroyer would not have been able to manifest.
Speaker 1: I think you of that in the original episode. Probably did.
Speaker 1: I haven't thought about it since then. But that's great
Speaker 1: unless goes Are the Destroyer is even more nefarious than
Speaker 1: we imagine, and he can also manifest in the shape
Speaker 1: of something that you put together through, say words or whatever. Maybe,
Speaker 1: but I kind of like the idea that it's being
Speaker 1: an interdimensional entity. It's it's limited, and it really like it.
Speaker 1: It cannot venture into this form unless there is a
Speaker 1: clear visual image that it can draw from, Like that
Speaker 1: has to be the uh, the foothold for it to
Speaker 1: climb back in and begin destroying. Well, to tie it
Speaker 1: back to psychic photography, actually, this is what the case
Speaker 1: of goes Are taking the form you imagine would be
Speaker 1: exactly like thoughtography 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. John Toison undeveloped
Speaker 1: sel I agree. Uh So, picking up again with the
Speaker 1: history of mental imagery. Uh, Descartes had thoughts about visual
Speaker 1: imagination apparently placed it on par with the senses as
Speaker 1: manifestations of the body, which, of course, for in Descartes's view,
Speaker 1: that makes them fallible because of course they can always
Speaker 1: be mistaken, unlike in his view pure logical deduction. If
Speaker 1: you recall 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 deck Heart thought, no, you can't ever fully trust
Speaker 1: the senses. You've got to go on just like pure
Speaker 1: logical proofs. I'm not quite sure why, for some reason
Speaker 1: that that seems like a funny belief looking back on
Speaker 1: it now. Of course, later mental imagery became the domain
Speaker 1: of psychology. Uh. And of course you know that that
Speaker 1: would be treated in different ways depending on the different
Speaker 1: schools of psychology. One thing that I think is interesting
Speaker 1: in the history of psychology is the behaviorist school of course,
Speaker 1: not being interested in mental imagery because it's not an
Speaker 1: outwardly measurable behavior. So J. B. Watson apparently referred to
Speaker 1: mental imagery as quote motor habits in the larynx, which
Speaker 1: I think is a behaviorist way of saying something you
Speaker 1: only know about because people talk about it. I am
Speaker 1: continually fascinated by thinking about behaviorism because we occasionally hear
Speaker 1: from people, uh we We've gotten a couple of listener
Speaker 1: emails over the years, people responding to topics from a
Speaker 1: behaviorist point of view, essentially not crediting anything that's about
Speaker 1: the inner experiences or consciousness of people. It's only you know,
Speaker 1: the psychology can only be about outwardly measured behaviors. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a statement like that. Though. It makes me wonder
Speaker 1: if J. B. Watson was perhaps perhaps had a fantasia.
Speaker 1: You know, I mean this idea because we this lines
Speaker 1: up with what we've heard from a lot of people
Speaker 1: who's claimed to have a fantasia. And they'll say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard people talking about picturing something in their mind
Speaker 1: when they read a book, and I thought they were
Speaker 1: just being you know, 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 phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I mean, that'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,
Speaker 1: imagination that, like anything inside your head, is a motor
Speaker 1: habit in the larynx. Do you think Ether would have
Speaker 1: changed his mind at all? I don't know. Then again,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm not being fair. I don't want to put
Speaker 1: words in Watson's mouth, but uh yeah, So I think
Speaker 1: we don't need to feel bound by the behaviorist view
Speaker 1: of this thing, and we can entertain the idea of
Speaker 1: mental imagery. You experience it, other people say they experience it.
Speaker 1: You've got no reason to disbelieve them. So I think
Speaker 1: humans probably have mental imagery. But but long in history,
Speaker 1: it has clearly been assumed that there is some kind
Speaker 1: of physical representation space and perceiver within the brain for
Speaker 1: mental imagery. Uh. And one thing I'm thinking about that
Speaker 1: I came across while preparing for this episode is an
Speaker 1: illustration by the sixteenth seventeenth century English physician and occultist
Speaker 1: Robert Flood spelled f l U d D kind of
Speaker 1: like Elmer Flood Flood with an L flood, also like
Speaker 1: Randall Flag. Oh yeah, that's true. Maybe this is one
Speaker 1: of the incarnations of the Man from the Desert. But anyway,
Speaker 1: And one of Robert Flood's tracts he illustrated the eye
Speaker 1: of imagination or the oculus imagination onis, which was this
Speaker 1: third eye inside the brain which, getting it wrong and
Speaker 1: backwards in multiple ways, projected mental images onto some kind
Speaker 1: of screen or representation space in the back or like
Speaker 1: in the back of the head or behind the head,
Speaker 1: where mental images would take form after being projected by
Speaker 1: this third eye. And now, of course we know that
Speaker 1: the eye does not project a beam of seeing, but
Speaker 1: receives incoming light. So even yeah, I think we're we're
Speaker 1: confused in more ways than one here. Yeah, Like if
Speaker 1: there really were a tiny viewing screen inside the brain
Speaker 1: and an eye to see it, it would be too
Speaker 1: dark to watch the movie, right, so that would be
Speaker 1: a problem. But but yeah, I mean, like I think
Speaker 1: third eye views are are popular throughout history. People kind
Speaker 1: of think there's an observer in the observer, right, And
Speaker 1: and granted, we do have a pennial gland, which is
Speaker 1: essentially an atrophied photo receptor with some connections to the
Speaker 1: parietal eye of reptiles. But but it produces uh a 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 that, not that I've ever seen. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is funny because I was reading that deck Cart
Speaker 1: believed that the pineal gland was the point of interaction
Speaker 1: between the body and the immaterial soul. That did you
Speaker 1: know this, um? And may we did. We did episode
Speaker 1: on the pineal gland way back in the day, so
Speaker 1: it's possible, Okay, I came across this. Yeah, but I'm
Speaker 1: thinking back to this idea of having, yeah, a viewer
Speaker 1: inside the viewer, like an internal I inside the brain
Speaker 1: for mental imagery. And there are reasons I think that
Speaker 1: there are problems with this because if in order to
Speaker 1: see mental images we have to project them physically somewhere
Speaker 1: inside the brain. What is the part of the brain
Speaker 1: that is looking at the image? Is that another brain
Speaker 1: with eyes inside the brain? Uh? Incognitive philosophy. This is
Speaker 1: sometimes called the homunculous theory. That's a you know, a
Speaker 1: name of ridicule for it, like the idea that there
Speaker 1: has to be somebody inside your brain to see what
Speaker 1: your brain is seeing or thinking. Right, as with like
Speaker 1: the homunculous ideas and human reproduction where there's a tiny
Speaker 1: little version of you inside of a sperm cell. Yes,
Speaker 1: And like the homunculous idea of of reproduction, it's an
Speaker 1: infinite regress, right, because if there's a little eyes and
Speaker 1: a brain inside your head in order to see what
Speaker 1: you're thinking, then that brain must have little eyes and
Speaker 1: a brain inside that brain to see what that brain
Speaker 1: is thinking about. And it goes on forever. And another
Speaker 1: version of this, extended to total brain function, is what
Speaker 1: Daniel Dennet calls the Cartesian theater. Again, this is something
Speaker 1: he's he's ridiculing. Basically, it's uh imagining or implicitly assuming
Speaker 1: that the brain has some sort of little pilot inside
Speaker 1: who witnesses all of our sense data and controls our reactions. Um,
Speaker 1: and again it's basically a reduct, you ad absurdam because
Speaker 1: it leads to this infinite regress. Who's seeing the images
Speaker 1: inside the brain, and the homunculus or the pilot or
Speaker 1: the Cartesian theater must be another smaller one. So I
Speaker 1: don't think it can be that inside the brain mental
Speaker 1: images are seeing the same way our eyes see things
Speaker 1: in the world. So what actually is happening in the
Speaker 1: brain when you're asked to imagine a concrete image. Maybe
Speaker 1: we should take a break and then explore that when
Speaker 1: we come back. Yes, everyone think of a bicycle during
Speaker 1: this commercial break. Alright, we're back, and hopefully you still
Speaker 1: have that bicycle floating around inside your mind. We should
Speaker 1: give them something more interesting to picture concretely, something with details.
Speaker 1: Picture a democorgan democgorgan is good. Yeah, It's just interesting
Speaker 1: how many like fabled unreal entities are good things to
Speaker 1: focus your mind on. And I think it perhaps it's
Speaker 1: because there are there are combinations, they're they're hybrids with
Speaker 1: different elements. So you you're you're you know what, you're
Speaker 1: kind of thinking of a list and compiling that list
Speaker 1: into this single mental image and ultimately gives you something
Speaker 1: to focus on, right, but the details are provided to you.
Speaker 1: Whereas the bicycle, you're just saying bicycle, we're not saying,
Speaker 1: imagine a contraption with two wheels and its etcetera. Two
Speaker 1: 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 and move. Okay, Now, when you do picture the demogorgon,
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
Speaker 1: brain when you picture mental imagery. Um, So, brain cells
Speaker 1: in the temporal lobe, and this is the temporal lobes
Speaker 1: are at the bottom and sides of the brain, sort
Speaker 1: of around the ears. They become activated. And previous research
Speaker 1: has shown that the temporal lobes are involved in attributing
Speaker 1: and 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 the lights coming through the eyes.
Speaker 1: Signals are passing from your optic nerve, from your retina's
Speaker 1: the optic nerve, and uh, they're ending up in the
Speaker 1: visual processing areas and 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 Gizah, we seem to be starting with
Speaker 1: activity that involves visual memory. So there's stuff going on
Speaker 1: in the temporal lobes, and the excitation of these cells
Speaker 1: then triggers activity in the visual cortices of the occipital lobe.
Speaker 1: Again that's the very back of the head. And of
Speaker 1: course this is the same part of the brain that
Speaker 1: receives and begins to process visual information received by the
Speaker 1: retina transmitted by the optic nerve when you normally see something.
Speaker 1: And the authors of this paper I mentioned earlier, they
Speaker 1: they point out that when you conjure mental imagery, it's
Speaker 1: not exactly but it's sort of roughly an inversion of
Speaker 1: the process of seeing with the eyes. Basically, it's similar
Speaker 1: cascades going in opposite directions. And it also, i would say,
Speaker 1: seems to suggest that if it were possible to project
Speaker 1: an image from ted serious head onto film, if anything,
Speaker 1: he should have been holding the gizmo and the camera
Speaker 1: on the back of his head rather than the forehead.
Speaker 1: Because it seems like the activity is going from a
Speaker 1: sort of beginning with uh, with executive function. Of course,
Speaker 1: that's uh, you know, intentionally causing the memories. Then there's
Speaker 1: memory stuff in the temporal lobes, and then it's going
Speaker 1: to the occipital lobe in the back of the head.
Speaker 1: I'll see, if you'd only known that, it would have
Speaker 1: worked every time. Now, why do you need executive function
Speaker 1: in the front of the brain as well? Well? Apparently
Speaker 1: that's involved in intentionally trying to call up and hold
Speaker 1: mental images. So like conscious management of what's happening in
Speaker 1: 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, two
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 up
Speaker 1: a speeding automobile down an interstate, watching what all the
Speaker 1: cars are doing, and you know, reading an occasional sign
Speaker 1: looking up for speed traps, all of these things that
Speaker 1: we're doing, and at the same time, we might have
Speaker 1: an audio book playing that is filling our head with
Speaker 1: like with a you know a rich visual world, and
Speaker 1: we're entertaining both of these at the same time. I
Speaker 1: would say that that is, while I accept that we
Speaker 1: can handle those things both at the same time, I
Speaker 1: would say it is not without costs to uh to
Speaker 1: either one. Like I would say that you probably have
Speaker 1: a more rich experience of the book and mental image
Speaker 1: reassociated with the book if you were not driving, and
Speaker 1: you'd probably be better at driving if you were not
Speaker 1: listening to the book, because there is actually a competition
Speaker 1: for resources going on. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course that I think a lot of us tended
Speaker 1: to read in environments where there are other distractions. Maybe
Speaker 1: not is 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 mean,
Speaker 1: it's not even going to necessarily be a situation where
Speaker 1: you're consciously choosing things to imagine. You know, you're you're
Speaker 1: gonna be subject to the visual summonings of the default
Speaker 1: mode network where uh, you know, mental images from the
Speaker 1: past or the physy future are going to you know,
Speaker 1: venture into your mind like Victorian ghosts. But speaking of ghosts,
Speaker 1: I mean, I do think it's a little bit spooky
Speaker 1: that once I read this, this does in fact seem
Speaker 1: true to me. I just had never really thought of
Speaker 1: it this way, that when you mentally picture something, you're
Speaker 1: you are intentionally using your brain. You're performing some kind
Speaker 1: of internal brain resources management with the executive function mostly
Speaker 1: in your frontal lobe. I think to say, turned down
Speaker 1: resolution on incoming mint visual imagery and devote some of
Speaker 1: those resources to mental imagery. And if you, if you
Speaker 1: practice it right now, I think you'll probably notice the
Speaker 1: same thing. You just like, look at something and then
Speaker 1: try to picture something mentally, and you'll notice that you're
Speaker 1: looking kind of gets downgraded in like quality and and arrested.
Speaker 1: Are are you feeling this? Yeah? I mean, but this
Speaker 1: is also kind of the It kind of goes both ways, right,
Speaker 1: Like both cannot have have complete dominance at the same time.
Speaker 1: So you might be able to to dim the thermist
Speaker 1: that you're staring at by allowing mental images to you know,
Speaker 1: to to be summoned into your mind. But on the
Speaker 1: same level, if you feel 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 present 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 image
Speaker 1: ory just by using your senses. Yeah, Like it reminds
Speaker 1: me of meditation practices. Like, certainly they are closed eye
Speaker 1: meditation practices, which in that environment you're really opening it
Speaker 1: up to the visual way of seeing, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: to to the mental image alone. But there are plenty
Speaker 1: of open eye practices where you know, the instructor will say,
Speaker 1: you know, pick something in the room, doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: it is. It can be an electrical socket. But stare
Speaker 1: at that electrical socket. Stare long and hard at that
Speaker 1: electrical socket, and that becomes kind of the you know,
Speaker 1: the visual mantra that will force out the other 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 is 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. Yea,
Speaker 1: most of the time, most people, uh, this is an
Speaker 1: interesting thing. Most of the time, most people manage not
Speaker 1: to get confused. Isn't that interesting too, Like what kind
Speaker 1: of partitioning must be going on in the brain, because
Speaker 1: you can picture a pineapple on the desk in front
Speaker 1: of you right now, and you can picture that, But
Speaker 1: most of the time you don't become confused and think
Speaker 1: you're actually seeing a pineapple there. Yeah, not even awareness
Speaker 1: is focused, you know, certainly, certainly we all have those
Speaker 1: those situations where you walk into a room and out
Speaker 1: of the corner of your eye you think, for a second,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a goblin standing in the corner, or
Speaker 1: there's a cat, or or something's out of place, and
Speaker 1: then you know a second glance, you realize, oh, it's
Speaker 1: just the way that the shadow is following, or it's
Speaker 1: the way that the drape is positioned, etcetera. Like we
Speaker 1: come back to it again, like our awareness doesn't just
Speaker 1: do a single take. It as a double take, and
Speaker 1: it you know, you confirms or denies the presence of
Speaker 1: the thing you thought was there initially, right. I think
Speaker 1: the the persistence of the stimulus is one key there
Speaker 1: that like, you can keep looking at something and your
Speaker 1: you know, your imagination will fluctuate, but the light coming
Speaker 1: into your eyes is going to stay about the same.
Speaker 1: Um and some beautiful lyrics there that could be an
Speaker 1: eagle song. I just tried to sing some eagles. But
Speaker 1: we don't want to get night cheese, so we're not
Speaker 1: gonna leave it in. Uh Now, Now, it does appear
Speaker 1: that there's a possibility for some bleed over in the
Speaker 1: visual processing between mental imagery and actual uh uh seeing
Speaker 1: with the eyes. For example, this thing called the Perky effect.
Speaker 1: This is named after the American psychologist C. W. Perky.
Speaker 1: So how does this work? Well? Uh Perky She she
Speaker 1: would have somebody try to visualize something like a leaf
Speaker 1: or a banana while looking at a blank screen, and
Speaker 1: then meanwhile she would project a very faint, soft focus
Speaker 1: image of something like a leaf or a banana onto
Speaker 1: the screen at just about the threshold brightness of visual perception.
Speaker 1: And in these experiments, Perky found that subjects would incorporate
Speaker 1: visual features of the actual image that was faintly projected
Speaker 1: thinking that these were features of their imagined image, for example,
Speaker 1: the type of leaf or the orientation of the banana.
Speaker 1: And there have been various attempts to replicate this finding,
Speaker 1: some successful and some unsuccessful, so I think we're not
Speaker 1: totally sure how robust this effect is. But I think
Speaker 1: now a common assessment of what of this effect is
Speaker 1: that what's really being detected here is the fact that
Speaker 1: using visual imagination steals processing resources from normal visual perception,
Speaker 1: like we were talking about earlier, So if you're trying
Speaker 1: to imagine something, you're less likely to notice consciously than
Speaker 1: an image is being faintly projected in front of you,
Speaker 1: even though you might pick up some visual cues such
Speaker 1: as color 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: to say, got Garfield and a jpeg, and that's not
Speaker 1: an old computer floppy disk, and then you could somehow
Speaker 1: you're trying to project the image of Garfield physically from
Speaker 1: the 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
Speaker 1: be seen anywhere on the disk. 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, imageries 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: with this one section of the film where the character
Speaker 1: Cameron Veil can cyberpath thickly scan a computer hide hard
Speaker 1: drive with his brain. Uh. And that always bugged me
Speaker 1: because I'm like, Okay, it's one thing to imagine one
Speaker 1: brain speaking to another brain, you know, even though there's
Speaker 1: you know, 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: it's the same problem with this idea of photography, that
Speaker 1: that somehow you could you could put the mental image
Speaker 1: in your mind onto the film. That's why I prefer one.
Speaker 1: A great example of a far more believable system of
Speaker 1: telepathic communication would be that used by the Gelflings in
Speaker 1: the Dark Crystal and also in the the new so
Speaker 1: far really fabulous Netflix of prequel series. Oh I also
Speaker 1: started it, haven't finished great loving it so far. But
Speaker 1: the the Gelflings are able to to dream vast where
Speaker 1: they're able to u 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 that would have a survival
Speaker 1: that would be a survival adaptation as well. Like that's
Speaker 1: something that would be uh, you know, supported through natural selection. Well,
Speaker 1: you can think about it as another form of language.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've got language to code experiences and share
Speaker 1: them between each other. So you could imagine creatures could
Speaker 1: I don't know, project electromagnetic symbols or something to each other,
Speaker 1: you know, pulses of stuff that would encode and decode
Speaker 1: information across brains the same way. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: any good evidence that humans can do that, but you
Speaker 1: could imagine a species that did do that. Right. Likewise,
Speaker 1: it's and perhaps there's a science fiction Surely there's a
Speaker 1: science fiction or fantasy treatment of this out there somewhere.
Speaker 1: You can imagine something with the chromatophores along the lines
Speaker 1: of cuttlefish, or you know, an octopus being able to
Speaker 1: take a ntal image in its head and recreated on
Speaker 1: its body. Oh, I love that that. Somebody has surely
Speaker 1: done that before, and that would be that would be
Speaker 1: an interesting way to do it. And of course humans
Speaker 1: have a similar ability through language and uh and and
Speaker 1: an artistic skill. We can take a mental image and
Speaker 1: we can recreate some version of it outside of our
Speaker 1: body in a way that that stays stationary. But it
Speaker 1: is not uh, it is not the you know the
Speaker 1: art of of of telepathy. Or or or the thoughtography
Speaker 1: or whatever it is. It is the the the it
Speaker 1: is the arts themselves. It is that it is the
Speaker 1: 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 a recent research in
Speaker 1: mental imagery, and this is called mental imagery, Functional Mechanisms
Speaker 1: and Clinical Applications. This is in Trends and Cognitive Sciences
Speaker 1: from but Joel Pearson, Thomas Nasa Lauris, Emily Holmes, and
Speaker 1: Stephen Kostlin Um. And one of the things that they
Speaker 1: said in the paper it echoes a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff we were talking about already. But um, one thing
Speaker 1: they say that stuck with me is that the authors
Speaker 1: conclude that the existing research suggests mental imagery should be
Speaker 1: considered quote a weak form of perception. And that's interesting
Speaker 1: because you don't normally think about mental imagery as perception. Normally,
Speaker 1: perception is what you know, your five senses, or maybe
Speaker 1: the other senses, if you know about the weirder ones. Um.
Speaker 1: But here they're saying, no, it is like a form
Speaker 1: of perception. It's almost like a lower resolution form of seeing. Now,
Speaker 1: why is it a weak form of perception? Well, visual
Speaker 1: regions in the brains show less blood flow and less
Speaker 1: excitation of neurons during the generation of mental imagery than
Speaker 1: they do in the actual viewing of images with the eyes,
Speaker 1: even though you use some of the same regions for both.
Speaker 1: And I also just wanted to mention some interesting questions
Speaker 1: that the authors bring up as sort of unresolved in
Speaker 1: this review. Again, this was from so there maybe development
Speaker 1: since then. But um. One of the things they ask is,
Speaker 1: we know that there are strong similarities between normal visual
Speaker 1: perception seeing with the eyes and mental imagery. What are
Speaker 1: the major differences. Another thing that I was really interested
Speaker 1: in is they asked the question of can mental imagery
Speaker 1: be unconscious? And if you try to understand that for
Speaker 1: a second, is it possible to picture something without being
Speaker 1: aware that you're picturing it or is mental imagery something
Speaker 1: that only occurs consciously? Can you only picture something if
Speaker 1: you're aware that you're picturing it? So? Well, what would
Speaker 1: be what would be an example then, based on that
Speaker 1: logic of someone picturing something without realizing they pick drink something. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean that that's sort of the
Speaker 1: tough question, like is because it would be difficult to
Speaker 1: measure that. I 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 lately you assembled
Speaker 1: it hands on. Uh And then likewise, there's a domain
Speaker 1: of hallucination and 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 or let's see, Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: 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, decade, 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 because there are characters
Speaker 1: that one encounters visually where that the character is going
Speaker 1: to describe itself or there's gonna be some voice to
Speaker 1: describe it, but there's no language attached to it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say almost purely visual. Yeah, I noticed most
Speaker 1: of the time when I'm trying to recall visual characteristics
Speaker 1: of something, I picture it first. But yeah, it gets
Speaker 1: especially complicated when you're thinking about characteristics of something that
Speaker 1: you've imagined from writing but not from seeing. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: 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. Thank 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 in going are It's it's
Speaker 1: again like imagining the psychics and scanners being able to
Speaker 1: read hard drives, like this just doesn't make sense. But
Speaker 1: there are a number of experiments that sort of would
Speaker 1: find a way around this incoherence. We're talking about through
Speaker 1: another layer of encoding and decoding of brain activity that
Speaker 1: that could be learned through brain computer interfaces and machine learning.
Speaker 1: And this we're getting into into the creation of a
Speaker 1: of a technological translator. Yes exactly. It kind of the
Speaker 1: same way that you would use language to translate the
Speaker 1: contents 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 won't lie. I would say
Speaker 1: this starts to get me a little bit worried. I
Speaker 1: want to start with a news piece in Science from January.
Speaker 1: The news piece was by Matthew Hudson and it covers
Speaker 1: the brain computer interface work of a group of researchers
Speaker 1: including uh u Kiasu Kamitani, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University
Speaker 1: in Japan, and a computer scientist named Zoe ming Lu
Speaker 1: at Purdue University in the United States. And this work
Speaker 1: is focused on it's using brain computer interfaces to directly
Speaker 1: read and record mental imagery, which is the imagining of
Speaker 1: a picture. So you try to imagine, like, why would
Speaker 1: anybody be doing this? You know, what would be the
Speaker 1: supposed benefits of a technology to read people's mental imagery. Well,
Speaker 1: we're asked to imagine in this article, maybe being able
Speaker 1: to search through a collection of digital images simply by
Speaker 1: mentally picturing the image we want Okay, that might be
Speaker 1: a thing like I bet you've tried before to Google
Speaker 1: an image that you've seen before, but you didn't know
Speaker 1: what 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, granted,
Speaker 1: it's not something that is really life or death, and
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.
Speaker 1: Right that I could see that being advantageous as well.
Speaker 1: And it can go further than that. I mean, technically,
Speaker 1: you could imagine something like this allowing people without the
Speaker 1: power of speech you're writing to share their thoughts. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know you can't Maybe if you can't speak, you
Speaker 1: can't describe your visual imagery, maybe you could share it
Speaker 1: with something like this. But I want to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: those are the positive versions of what we're imagining. We
Speaker 1: could explore negative versions later on. And so the researchers
Speaker 1: here have been working on computer algorithms that are trained
Speaker 1: through machine learning to match patterns of brain activity recorded
Speaker 1: through things like fm r I with imagery that a
Speaker 1: subject is looking at. And because actually looking at an
Speaker 1: image and then mentally imagining the same image are sort
Speaker 1: of similar in the brain, They're not exactly the same,
Speaker 1: but there's some similar stuff going on, researchers have experimented
Speaker 1: with measuring activity in the visual processing areas of the
Speaker 1: brain with f m R I while person is looking
Speaker 1: at different images and then using that data about blood
Speaker 1: flow in the brain to later guess what a person
Speaker 1: is looking at without knowing now ideally what you would
Speaker 1: have at the end of this kind of research. Multi
Speaker 1: stage process is an algorithm that could read the activity
Speaker 1: of a person's visual processing center and materialize an image
Speaker 1: directly on the screen that corresponds to what the person
Speaker 1: is either looking at or imagining. Uh and again, to
Speaker 1: whatever extent the technology will ever fully be realized, it's
Speaker 1: still in the very early stages. Um. But in the
Speaker 1: example sided in this article, I should say that the
Speaker 1: image generation portion was not carried out on real brains.
Speaker 1: The data acquired from human subjects was instead used to
Speaker 1: train a deep neural net work that stood in for
Speaker 1: an actual brain while they tested their image generating program.
Speaker 1: And to quote from Hudson's article here quote the system
Speaker 1: starts with something random similar to TV static, and slowly
Speaker 1: refines its painting over the course of two hundred rounds
Speaker 1: to get closer to the ideal image. The system calculates
Speaker 1: the difference between the deep neural network activity and the
Speaker 1: templated deep neural network activity. Those calculations cause it to
Speaker 1: nudge one pixel this way and another pixel that way
Speaker 1: until it gets closer to the ideal image. Now, apparently
Speaker 1: at the stage, the algorithms are not very good at
Speaker 1: all at guessing what imagery people have in mind when
Speaker 1: they're imagining realistic photos, but they are pretty good at
Speaker 1: picking out when people imagine abstract shapes. And that makes
Speaker 1: sense because I think those would be like clearer signals
Speaker 1: in the brain probably. But yeah, there's some images along
Speaker 1: with this article that are the paintings generated by this algorithm. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then they're they're compared with the images that originally
Speaker 1: gave rise to them, and the comparisons are wonderfully creepy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They look like like psychedelic entities that have come to
Speaker 1: convey some sort of occult knowledge under the listener. Like
Speaker 1: there's a there's one that's originally a picture of an owl,
Speaker 1: and then the approximation of it is some kind of
Speaker 1: like like primordial worm walrus from the center of the earth. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a red mailbox becomes this kind of alien burning crimson pillar.
Speaker 1: So there are some patterns that seems like they're picking
Speaker 1: up 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 transfer 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 instrument? It's a musical
Speaker 1: instrument that Fry attempts to learn at one point and
Speaker 1: at one point masters thanks to the parasitic worms living
Speaker 1: 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 projected into the air for
Speaker 1: others to see. But it takes It's like it's notably
Speaker 1: difficult to learn and takes a lot of intense training
Speaker 1: and concentration to even form a very vague image in
Speaker 1: the air, and so some of the like the initial
Speaker 1: images that Fry is able to summon using the holophone
Speaker 1: are basically as abstract as these examples we've discussed in
Speaker 1: this study. Uh. 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 accurate 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: Depends on who writes the laws, and I would think
Speaker 1: it is the big corporation with all the lawyers that
Speaker 1: will write the laws. And I guess looking at the
Speaker 1: like sort of certainly the social media examples too, it's like,
Speaker 1: are you It depends to are you born into a
Speaker 1: world in which it's normal for your machines to look
Speaker 1: inside your brain and draw from your mental images, probably
Speaker 1: with some sort of an agreement. Uh. In the same
Speaker 1: 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: a lot of times we have overestimated our people's desire
Speaker 1: for privacy. Uh. Like, I just think about how years
Speaker 1: ago if you had told people here's all the things
Speaker 1: people will be sharing on social media and all the
Speaker 1: kinds of privileges they will be allowing these companies to
Speaker 1: have and learning about their lives and learning about their data,
Speaker 1: people will be like, no way, nobody will ever surrender
Speaker 1: that amount of you know, privacy and autonomy about their
Speaker 1: lives and their data. But people just gave it up
Speaker 1: so willingly. Yeah, and so many are still seemingly fine
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah. So I wonder if I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe it has to do with something about the advertising,
Speaker 1: the marketing, how these things are are rolled out to
Speaker 1: the public that that breaks down our defenses and and
Speaker 1: has us ending up being like, ah, yeah, you know whatever,
Speaker 1: I'll get the brain device. You know, Jeffrey's got one.
Speaker 1: He likes it, you know, Yeah. Yeah, Well, I hold
Speaker 1: out hope that it would be a you know, the
Speaker 1: bridge too far, and that that humans would would rise
Speaker 1: up and reject it so as well. But but I
Speaker 1: also feel like we're already at that point where humans
Speaker 1: should rise up and reject what is being presented to them. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, certainly by the large social media companies and
Speaker 1: um and uh, I don't know. Some people are rising up,
Speaker 1: but we're not quite rising up in the numbers so
Speaker 1: far to limit their power. Protect your mental imagery instead,
Speaker 1: if you want to have more power in sharing your
Speaker 1: mental imagery in the cases where you actually do want
Speaker 1: to share it, when your powers of translation, that means
Speaker 1: practice becoming better at language, better at drawing, better at
Speaker 1: art of whatever kind. Yeah, and indeed, I don't want
Speaker 1: to in this on a you know, too pessimistic note
Speaker 1: dystopian and note is, etcetera, because ultimately, like what all
Speaker 1: this reveals, it's just like just how incredible our brain's
Speaker 1: capacity for mental imagery really is. Because you know, certainly,
Speaker 1: these technologies that attempt to understand it or even replicated
Speaker 1: these uh pseudo scientific or outright superstitious ideas about what
Speaker 1: a mental image is and how it might be you know,
Speaker 1: inflicted on the world, they all get. They're all circle
Speaker 1: circling the mystery and the wonder uh that we all
Speaker 1: experience every day. It's yet another case where you know,
Speaker 1: there's a purported magical ability that is actually maybe less
Speaker 1: fascinating than the reality that we're just so used to
Speaker 1: of the fact that we have something like language. Absolutely
Speaker 1: all right, Well, there you have it are two part
Speaker 1: look at the mental image and various ideas surrounding it.
Speaker 1: And I think we we crammed a fair number of
Speaker 1: of horror film and other uh you know, horror related
Speaker 1: ideas in there, so I think it's it's firmly implanted
Speaker 1: in our October offerings, but if you're new to the show,
Speaker 1: we do this every October. Every October is wall to
Speaker 1: wall Halloween related content. Uh So, if you want to
Speaker 1: you want more, you can go to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com and check out past October's. Likewise,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out some of our Invention
Speaker 1: episodes that are October theme, go check that out as well.
Speaker 1: That's our other show. It's a journey through human techno history,
Speaker 1: and indeed we are rolling out October episodes as well
Speaker 1: over there, so help both shows out. Make sure you
Speaker 1: have subscribed and rate in review huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
Speaker 1: the future, just to say hello, you can email us
Speaker 1: at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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