Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from House Stop
Speaker 1: work dot Com. Okay, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
Speaker 1: today's episode, concerns the mind's eye, concerns mental imagery, and
Speaker 1: so we decided that the best way to kick off
Speaker 1: this episode is to take you on a little guided
Speaker 1: mental journey. YEA, so close your eyes unless you're driving
Speaker 1: or doing something that requires your eyes to be open,
Speaker 1: and in that case, don't close your eyes if you
Speaker 1: If you are able to close your eyes, close your
Speaker 1: eyes if not. Just imagine you're eight years old and
Speaker 1: you're walking along a beach with your mother, your barefoot.
Speaker 1: The tide is coming in, and you see trails of
Speaker 1: footprints leading back and forth along the beach where other
Speaker 1: people have walked the same path today. But the waves
Speaker 1: are coming higher and higher and slowly smoothing all those
Speaker 1: footprints away. But then you look up at your mother
Speaker 1: and you notice something strange. She's wearing armor, a steel
Speaker 1: chest plate and a visored helm with chainmail drooping across
Speaker 1: her arms and legs, rustling lightly as she walks across
Speaker 1: the front of her chest plate is a painted figure.
Speaker 1: It's Foghorn, Leghorn. She raises the visor on her helm
Speaker 1: and smiles at you. A mosquito hovers in front of
Speaker 1: her face, and she flails one arm to knock it away,
Speaker 1: and you both laugh. But then you notice something else.
Speaker 1: Your mother has a piece of metal dangling from her
Speaker 1: hip opposite you. It's a long sword. She puts one
Speaker 1: hand on the hilt and says, don't worry, only a
Speaker 1: bit of insurance in case he shows up. A wave
Speaker 1: of seawater rolls up over your feet, washing dry sand
Speaker 1: from between your toes, and you ask who. Then there's
Speaker 1: a faint rumbling under your feet. It's not just the
Speaker 1: tickling of the waves. The ground is shaking, and about
Speaker 1: two out in the water, a dark shape begins to
Speaker 1: rise up from the waves. At first it's just a green,
Speaker 1: black lump, but then the huge glaring eyes, the cavernous mouth,
Speaker 1: climbing higher and higher as it approaches. It's Godzilla. Not
Speaker 1: the friendly Godzilla who defends Earth against all the heel monsters.
Speaker 1: This is the angry Godzilla who breathes beams of radiation
Speaker 1: and crushes ten story buildings with a single swipe. Your
Speaker 1: mother puts an arm across your chest. She draws her
Speaker 1: long sword and says stand back. This could get serious,
Speaker 1: And with the flip of a switch, her hover boots engage,
Speaker 1: her feet lift off the ground, and then she's rocketing
Speaker 1: towards the head of the monster to defend the realms
Speaker 1: of humankind. Alright, so, uh, we we try to draw
Speaker 1: in a few different types of of imagery. There are
Speaker 1: a few different types of memory memories. Right. We wanted
Speaker 1: to have sort of generic landscape that would be easy
Speaker 1: for a lot of people to picture, like a beach.
Speaker 1: Most people have some kind of image, generically of what
Speaker 1: a beach looks like. We also wanted something familiar. Usually
Speaker 1: they say to picture a relative or familiar family member.
Speaker 1: So hopefully you've got an image of a mother or
Speaker 1: family figure there. But then also some pop culture images. Right,
Speaker 1: most people hopefully know what Godzilla looks like. If you don't,
Speaker 1: you gotta go back and watch the original Godzilla from
Speaker 1: the fifties and right, uh, and then uh and then
Speaker 1: fall horn like horn and personal favorite of mine. You know.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things with this exercise is to
Speaker 1: think back on it and think back of the specifics
Speaker 1: and ask yourself questions like who did I have a
Speaker 1: more vivid memory of what I looked like as a child,
Speaker 1: what my mother looked like, what Godzilla looked like, and
Speaker 1: in these details are not necessarily telling of your relationship
Speaker 1: with your mother versus your relationship with Godzilla. But but
Speaker 1: but it it kind of raises our awareness of the
Speaker 1: vast spectrum of visual stimuli that are informing our our
Speaker 1: inner vision of the world. Yeah, and this is a
Speaker 1: strange thing because the only person who can experience your
Speaker 1: mental imagery is you. You can sort of describe your
Speaker 1: mental imagery to other people, but nobody can take a
Speaker 1: look at it to see what it is you're picturing
Speaker 1: in your mind. So this is something that you largely
Speaker 1: have to deal with entirely on your own, and you
Speaker 1: don't know how similar or how different your own process
Speaker 1: of mental imagery is to that of other people unless
Speaker 1: you really put your heads together and start talking about
Speaker 1: your mental images and detail and trying to figure out
Speaker 1: if their differences. It's not a standard thing that people do,
Speaker 1: really right, because even to describe it, if I describe
Speaker 1: my mental images to you, they become your mental images.
Speaker 1: Like it's in a way I'm kind of panting off
Speaker 1: the blueprints, and then you build a different building. It's
Speaker 1: the same building, but a different building. And likewise, maybe
Speaker 1: you paint, maybe you write, and some other artistic medium,
Speaker 1: you create music to try and convey these images in
Speaker 1: your head, but you're still but you're still then limited
Speaker 1: by your artist artistic ability and then under people's interpretations
Speaker 1: of those works of art. You know, I already realized.
Speaker 1: I didn't think about this when I was writing this,
Speaker 1: but I did already see a contradiction in what I
Speaker 1: told people to imagine the original angry Godzilla. But then
Speaker 1: I also said green black, right, Well, Godzilla in color
Speaker 1: is sort of greenish black, but the original angry Godzilla
Speaker 1: black and white. He's just you know, you look at
Speaker 1: him and he just looks like this charred monster. You know.
Speaker 1: So this is a this is already a mental confabulation
Speaker 1: on my part. I'm imagining a Godzilla that never existed
Speaker 1: anywhere in reality. But anyway, so most of you were
Speaker 1: with us there on that journey. You were to some
Speaker 1: extent able to picture some of the things we were
Speaker 1: talking about. You could see in your mind's eye the beach,
Speaker 1: the armor, your mother, the sword, the fog Horn, Leghorn,
Speaker 1: the Godzilla. But there are some people who probably couldn't
Speaker 1: see any of that. They were there with us, they
Speaker 1: were understanding the concepts, they were able to follow the plot,
Speaker 1: whatever plot there was, and they could probably recount a
Speaker 1: list of the events that happened in the little scene
Speaker 1: we just described, but they couldn't see any of it
Speaker 1: in their imagination. And this is the concept we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about today. One study has found that this
Speaker 1: might be about up to one in fifty people who
Speaker 1: have this kind of experience where they just don't create
Speaker 1: pictures inside their mind the way most people do. Uh
Speaker 1: And this condition now hasn't come to be known as
Speaker 1: a fantasia or the blindness of the mind's I So,
Speaker 1: the American biotech leader Craig Venter, you know about him, right.
Speaker 1: He's famous for being a leader in the quest of
Speaker 1: sequence the human genome, and he's famous for creating a
Speaker 1: synthetic organisms. Uh So, he has actually described that he
Speaker 1: has an unusual way of thinking, a way of thinking
Speaker 1: that's essentially purely conceptual, like we've been describing, without any
Speaker 1: mental imagery. Venter says, quote, it's like having a computer
Speaker 1: store the information, but you don't have a screen attached
Speaker 1: to the computer. He's describing his own mind. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I I have trouble understanding what that would be like.
Speaker 1: But maybe maybe to understand it better, we should first
Speaker 1: look at some facts about what the mind's eye itself
Speaker 1: is before we get into the blindness of the mind's eye.
Speaker 1: What's going on when you create pictures in your head. Well,
Speaker 1: of course we're talking about mental imagery here, but also
Speaker 1: there's some other sensations thrown in as well. It all
Speaker 1: amounts to a quasi perceptional experience that occurs in the
Speaker 1: absence of the appropriate external stimuli. Um. So, I can
Speaker 1: close my eyes, I can see a deceased loved one's face.
Speaker 1: I can hear their voice. I can imagine myself standing
Speaker 1: on the shore of a distant ocean, past ocean, or
Speaker 1: even some future sure that I haven't even walked on yet.
Speaker 1: I mean, this, this is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: I mean, most of us take for granted. We can,
Speaker 1: we use it, we employ it every day. Um Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, as I did with the Angry Godzilla and color,
Speaker 1: you can picture things you've never actually seen, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can? Yeah, there are things. If you're like me,
Speaker 1: I feel there are things in books. For instance, no
Speaker 1: one has ever painted a picture of this character or
Speaker 1: this scene. Uh, and yet you have a very crystal
Speaker 1: clear vision, Like I have a better visual memory of
Speaker 1: some things that have occurred in books than things that
Speaker 1: have occurred in real life. You know. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about. Uh Is isn't
Speaker 1: it so weird to finally see a book you've read
Speaker 1: but it's never been illustrated or made into a film
Speaker 1: or anything finally made visual by someone else? It's always
Speaker 1: people always have the same reaction. That's not what I thought.
Speaker 1: So and so looked, like, let's know what it looks like. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the things we perceive in the mind's eye, they're they're
Speaker 1: products of memory. They're constructed from specific or varied memories.
Speaker 1: They may be accurate, they may be amalgams of diverse influences. Really,
Speaker 1: this runs the gamut from something you saw yesterday that
Speaker 1: you near perfectly remember, to have you know, a vague
Speaker 1: site from your childhood that you at least think you remember,
Speaker 1: to an envisioned future scene in your own life, something
Speaker 1: you dreamt, something you daydreamed, landscape, be viewed from the
Speaker 1: imagined walls of a fictional world, or your own creation
Speaker 1: of a of an author's creation. It's just like pretty
Speaker 1: much any time we are envisioning something, any time we
Speaker 1: are closing our eyes or even with our eyes open
Speaker 1: are imagining something, we are seeing something in our mind
Speaker 1: that is, of course the mind's eye, uh, doing its thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think this has always been a very interesting
Speaker 1: avenue for philosophy to investigate, because it is something that
Speaker 1: we recognized was sort of strange about the human experience
Speaker 1: before we had neuroscience or psychology or or any of
Speaker 1: these scientific ways of investigating it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: because because it it obviously plays such a central role
Speaker 1: in the way we navigate the world and the way
Speaker 1: we think about time and a world of movable objects. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, we've been as long as we've had philosophers,
Speaker 1: as long as we've had people among us with with
Speaker 1: time to you know, look up from their labors and
Speaker 1: think about the human condition, we've been thinking about the
Speaker 1: mind's eye. Um. On the podcast here, we've talked about
Speaker 1: the method of loki before the the ancient Greek technique
Speaker 1: in which person utilizes spatial memory to memorize nonspatial information. Uh. Look,
Speaker 1: that kind of plays into into some of this. That
Speaker 1: involves a certain amount of a reflection on what's on
Speaker 1: how we're using the mind's eye. You know. I I've
Speaker 1: tried to use the method of LOCAI and I have
Speaker 1: not been very good at it. Yeah, I wonder if
Speaker 1: I'm just not doing it right, like I when I'm
Speaker 1: able to to really get it set in my mind
Speaker 1: as help me remember. By the way, this is so
Speaker 1: a quick version of it is, if you need to
Speaker 1: make a list of digits of numbers to remember, you're
Speaker 1: not going to remember those digits. So instead you imagine
Speaker 1: your house being full of odd characters that each embody
Speaker 1: one of the digits in that number sequence, and then
Speaker 1: you can remember by picturing the room and where all
Speaker 1: of the odd characters were in the room, and then
Speaker 1: you just remember what digit they correspond to or something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah. Like a very simplified version of this
Speaker 1: that I have employed frequently in the past. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a um uh you know, often called the
Speaker 1: memory palace because it's an imagined place that you fill
Speaker 1: with these examples. But oftentimes I only have room in
Speaker 1: my mind for one example, and that is, uh, that's
Speaker 1: when I am a swimming lapse and I want to
Speaker 1: remember what number lap I'm on, because if I forget
Speaker 1: the lap number, then I'm going to make myself revert
Speaker 1: to the to the lower number. So if I if
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure I'm on four, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do three. And I don't want to keep doing one
Speaker 1: less than I want to do because I'm gonna wear
Speaker 1: myself out right. But I'm also busy swimming. I'm having
Speaker 1: a hard time necessarily remembering which lap I am currently on.
Speaker 1: So instead of trying to remember four, as easy as
Speaker 1: that would seem, I find it easier to just force
Speaker 1: myself to think of, say, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
Speaker 1: like think of think of that, and that'll stick in
Speaker 1: my head just a little better as I'm you know,
Speaker 1: vigorously of swimming these laps um, you know, So it'll
Speaker 1: just be some sort of visual association with just a
Speaker 1: single digit. I don't know, I don't know if anybody
Speaker 1: else out there has has done something of that that
Speaker 1: that nature, but that is kind of a simplified um, good, creamy,
Speaker 1: what's what's your visual image. For eight, I can't think
Speaker 1: of anything for eight. Oh, for eight, I think of
Speaker 1: Alan robe Gerlays the Voyeur, where you have a character
Speaker 1: who keeps making figure eights out of rope. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I think of him setting by the shore, um, not
Speaker 1: quite contemplating horrible things and making little figure eights. That's
Speaker 1: a good thing to have in your mind here at
Speaker 1: the gym or the y m c A guess wherever
Speaker 1: you swim laps. So one of the important things when
Speaker 1: when thinking about the memory Palace and then ultimately thinking
Speaker 1: about memory and the mind's eye, is just to to
Speaker 1: refresh here a little bit about human memory itself. Human
Speaker 1: memory is not just like a tape, real rolling in
Speaker 1: the brain that we just oh, let's go back and
Speaker 1: look and see what happened yesterday. Human memory in multiple ways.
Speaker 1: It's not multiple certainly not that accurate, right, because human
Speaker 1: memory consists of several different types of memory that are
Speaker 1: working in uh kind of an unequal chorus um to
Speaker 1: create the human experience of memory that we have. So
Speaker 1: we have sensory memory, um, you know what something feels like,
Speaker 1: what it smells, it smells like, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: We have short term memory, and we have long term
Speaker 1: term memory. We have and then we divide long term
Speaker 1: memory out. We have explicit memories of consciousness, we have
Speaker 1: implicit memories of unconsciousness. We have declarative memories of facts
Speaker 1: and events. We have procedural memories involved that involves skills
Speaker 1: and tasks. We have episodic memory that deals with events
Speaker 1: and experiences, and we have semantic memory that concerns facts
Speaker 1: and concepts. So we have all these different types of memories,
Speaker 1: each one dealing with in a way certain you know,
Speaker 1: different types of skills, different types of ways of utilizing
Speaker 1: memory when we engage with the world. And studies have
Speaker 1: shown in the past that, uh, if you have a
Speaker 1: part of the brain associated with the one type of
Speaker 1: memory is injured, sometimes you see those other types of
Speaker 1: memory compensating. So it's like a a in a way,
Speaker 1: it's like a staff. It's like a staff of different
Speaker 1: memory drones, and they all have their jobs to do.
Speaker 1: But if somebody is slacking, then it may fall to
Speaker 1: another employee to uh to to you know, to step
Speaker 1: up and and cover for their shortcomings. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: that's a good metaphor that the brain is more like
Speaker 1: a workforce than a machine. If one part of a
Speaker 1: machine and breaks, the whole machine probably isn't gonna work.
Speaker 1: But if one part of a workforce is slacking or
Speaker 1: calls in sick today, the others can often find a
Speaker 1: way to cover for them, right, And they might cover
Speaker 1: you know, everyone does their job a little bit differently,
Speaker 1: so their their skill set might allow them to cover
Speaker 1: in a slightly different way. But back to philosophers. So
Speaker 1: philosophers have continue to argue about the minds, and we're
Speaker 1: certainly not gonna be able to do an exhausted journey
Speaker 1: through all of their their takes. But you go back
Speaker 1: as far as Plato, for example, when Plato brought us
Speaker 1: one of the most famous examples of this. Uh, he
Speaker 1: utilizes mental images in his famous allegory of the Cave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's sort of the idea that the world that
Speaker 1: we perceive is not the true reality, you know. But
Speaker 1: Plato had this whole belief in ideal forms, you know,
Speaker 1: things that were the more true version of the thing
Speaker 1: than the thing we're familiar with. Right, there's a realm
Speaker 1: of forms out there, and in that realm of forms,
Speaker 1: there's such thing as a perfect chair. But in this
Speaker 1: world that we can only build in perfect chairs that
Speaker 1: inch maybe a little closer and closer towards that unobtainable ideal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so his metaphor for explaining this was that of
Speaker 1: the cave, where there are people who are chained up
Speaker 1: in a cave and they don't even really realize that
Speaker 1: they're in a cave, and uh, and there's an opening
Speaker 1: to the cave through which light comes through and figures
Speaker 1: pass in front of the opening to the cave, casting
Speaker 1: shadows on the wall of the cave, and all we
Speaker 1: see we're facing the back of the cave of the wall,
Speaker 1: and we see the shadows, and we think the shadows
Speaker 1: are the real things, but they're not there. They're only
Speaker 1: the the sort of like the vague outlines of the
Speaker 1: things that that are the true forms. If anyone out
Speaker 1: there is watching The Path on Hulu, there's actually a
Speaker 1: scene um in the first episode where they roll out
Speaker 1: this this allegory and it's it's pretty entertaining, but but
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly it's an it's an allegory. You can
Speaker 1: have a lot of fun with either trying to contrast
Speaker 1: your worldview to another individual's worldview, to try and win
Speaker 1: someone over with your true version of reality versus there
Speaker 1: they're you know, their illusion based understanding of reality. But
Speaker 1: it also gets down to like what is our perception
Speaker 1: of reality itself? These mental images that fill our mind
Speaker 1: when we close our eyes, those are imperfect. But also
Speaker 1: the mental images when we have our eyes open, we're
Speaker 1: still just in a sense, we are still just seeing
Speaker 1: those shadows on the walls of the cave. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Aristotle also referred to mental imagery and his work referred
Speaker 1: to it as a as a fantasia with an A
Speaker 1: with a P, not an APR, not the Disney movie. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this was central to his theory of memory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: though you know, I can see why the Disney movie
Speaker 1: would be called that, I mean they it evokes the
Speaker 1: concept of fantasy, even though he didn't I think directly
Speaker 1: mean fantasy and the way we do, like somebody coming
Speaker 1: up with a with a fantasy to escape from life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the idea of being able to to imagine
Speaker 1: things in your mind. Now. Reneed I Carts also thought
Speaker 1: a lot about mental imagery and how they form in
Speaker 1: the mind. Uh. The view that an idea is a
Speaker 1: quasi perceptual thing, perhaps even pictorial formed in the imagination,
Speaker 1: and he did distinguish between images formed in the brain
Speaker 1: and ideas in the mind. Because he was a duelist.
Speaker 1: He saw uh, he saw the mind and the body
Speaker 1: as separate. The essence of mind is thought, and the
Speaker 1: body is an extension of it. Thoughts are not extended
Speaker 1: in space, but the body is. Now, that's where in
Speaker 1: philosophy you have. You have like idealism, which states that
Speaker 1: reality is equivalent to mental images, and the mental images
Speaker 1: are reality itself. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want
Speaker 1: to take this very far, the people who believe in
Speaker 1: hard core idealism would probably say that there is no
Speaker 1: like that reality is merely the mental image of a
Speaker 1: higher being or something like that. Yeah. So, as you
Speaker 1: can see, you can really go down the deep end,
Speaker 1: into the deep end contemplating mental imagery and what are
Speaker 1: the philosophical ramifications of it. Um, there's a you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot, There's a great deal more we can
Speaker 1: discuss this kind of the philosophical groundwork. I guess you
Speaker 1: could say. Um. For instance, though in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: there's a great deal of debate over the over the
Speaker 1: connection from between mental images and language. So one side
Speaker 1: argued that representations underlying the experience of mental imagery are
Speaker 1: the same type as those used in the language. And
Speaker 1: then there was the other camp, and they held that
Speaker 1: that these representations served to depict, not describe objects. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what does that mean in practice? Well, my understanding
Speaker 1: is that basically comes down to, you know, to what
Speaker 1: extent is mental imagery like the the the groundwork of
Speaker 1: language itself. Um Well, like I said earlier, at times,
Speaker 1: it feels like it's it's very difficult to um to
Speaker 1: overstate the importance of mental imagery in our perceptions of reality.
Speaker 1: Um So, just how deep does that go? Does it
Speaker 1: underlie just about everything in cognition? Does an underlie language?
Speaker 1: Does it underlie um, just every little detail of our experience? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: this does seem to sort of tie into us stuff
Speaker 1: we talked about in the Tip of the Tongue episode,
Speaker 1: where you can you can perhaps you can have the
Speaker 1: face in your mind, you know, oh, I know this
Speaker 1: actor's face, and you can picture it, and you can
Speaker 1: know the actor's name well enough that if somebody said it,
Speaker 1: you'd be like, yeah, that's it. You'd immediately recognize it.
Speaker 1: But you can't make the connection but of course, in
Speaker 1: recent years we've seen the study of mental imagery make
Speaker 1: a more scientific transition. I think we we've started to
Speaker 1: look at it from a neuroscientific point of view, where
Speaker 1: people are saying, Okay, well, let's identify what brain regions
Speaker 1: are actually being used and activated when people are in
Speaker 1: the process of coming up with mental pictures. And one
Speaker 1: of the sources we used for this episode, it was
Speaker 1: a paper by Adams Zalman and colleagues, and and uh,
Speaker 1: these authors identify that essentially in the brain voluntary imagery
Speaker 1: that the mental images you come up with have been
Speaker 1: associated in previous research with the brains frontal parietal executive
Speaker 1: systems or of the executive control you know, the president
Speaker 1: of your brain sitting there directing traffic, and with the
Speaker 1: posterior brain regions, which you know in the back of
Speaker 1: the brain that's often the identified with visual processing. And
Speaker 1: together you sort of put these things, uh into a
Speaker 1: teamwork relationship, and they are what allows you to come
Speaker 1: up with mental pictures. That's right. And uh, we've also
Speaker 1: seen studies where taking f M R I, we've done
Speaker 1: p and we've done pet scans on individuals summoning mental images.
Speaker 1: You know, they're asked to summon a mental image, and
Speaker 1: then we look at the brain see what it's doing
Speaker 1: in real time, and uh reveals that activation in brain
Speaker 1: areas that are used in visual perception, which doesn't sound
Speaker 1: that surprising. Uh, this is pretty cool. Visual and mental
Speaker 1: imaging share roughly two thirds of the same active activated
Speaker 1: brain regions. So there's a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: cross over there between the visual and mental imaging systems,
Speaker 1: a lot of shared mechanics. Yeah, Like if, for example,
Speaker 1: if you show somebody a picture of somebody's face and
Speaker 1: then you ask the same test subject imagine this person's face,
Speaker 1: a lot of their brain activity is going to be
Speaker 1: roughly similar. Right. In fact, study found that when the
Speaker 1: same task is performed in perception and then with eyes
Speaker 1: closed using mental images, you get overlaps. So so again,
Speaker 1: a lot of the same mechanisms, a lot of the
Speaker 1: same brain equipment is being used, whether you're dealing with
Speaker 1: just visual perception or mental perception. Of course, that's funny
Speaker 1: because the phenomenal experience is completely different, right, Like you, uh,
Speaker 1: somebody to somebody who has a fantasia. This might be
Speaker 1: new information, but it's obviously not going to be new
Speaker 1: information to most people out there. Uh, when you picture
Speaker 1: something in your mind's eye, it is extremely different than
Speaker 1: seeing it in front of you. But it's hard to
Speaker 1: explain how it's different. Yeah, you know, Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a two thousand fIF BBC article titled
Speaker 1: a Fantasia A Life without Mental Images by James Gallagher,
Speaker 1: and I'll be sure to include a link to that
Speaker 1: article on the landing page for this episode Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com because in addition to running
Speaker 1: through some examples of uh, some accounts of individuals who
Speaker 1: have this blindness of the mind's eye, which we're going
Speaker 1: to discuss more here, there's also a quiz you can take, uh,
Speaker 1: and it's just an eight question quiz about asking you
Speaker 1: like the level of detail that you experience when you
Speaker 1: are asked to mentally envision uh, you know someone you
Speaker 1: see every day? Uh, A sunrise, I believe, clouds in
Speaker 1: the sky, the clouds clearing in the sky, a thunderstorm,
Speaker 1: the the these sort of images some of the same
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that we ask you to summon at
Speaker 1: the beginning of this episode. Yeah, but it doesn't just
Speaker 1: ask you can you picture it? It asks you to
Speaker 1: rank level of details. So, for example, it might say, picture,
Speaker 1: get someone in mind, and maybe a close friend or
Speaker 1: spouse or close family member, and picture that person, and
Speaker 1: then on a scale of not very well at all,
Speaker 1: too extremely well, how well can you see in your
Speaker 1: mind's eye the contours of their face and the shape
Speaker 1: of their body, and what color their eyes are, and
Speaker 1: and so it's asking for specific details of the image
Speaker 1: to get at the vividness of the picture in your mind.
Speaker 1: And that suggests to me, and I think their findings
Speaker 1: do suggest so far that it's not just an on
Speaker 1: off switch. It's not like you can make pictures with
Speaker 1: your mind or you can't. There seems to be a spectrum.
Speaker 1: Some people seem to have very intense, very lucid, vivid
Speaker 1: mental images. Other people have kind of hazier, blurrier or
Speaker 1: more generic mental images. And some people have almost no
Speaker 1: mental imagery at all, or even report having none. And
Speaker 1: it's so at the opposite into the scale of the
Speaker 1: main topic today. You know, we're talking about these a fantasiacs,
Speaker 1: but there's also what's come to be known as hyper fantasia, right,
Speaker 1: And these would be people who I think would experience
Speaker 1: visions of the mind ie with just extreme lucidity is
Speaker 1: far compared to most of us. So they're not just
Speaker 1: vague pictures, but they have bright colors and vivid details.
Speaker 1: So if I tell you imagine a beach, you might
Speaker 1: picture sand and waves and maybe some umbrellas. But I
Speaker 1: bet you wouldn't naturally say, Okay, I can tell you
Speaker 1: there are seven umbrellas in the picture in my mind,
Speaker 1: and these are the colors of stripes on the umbrellas.
Speaker 1: But somebody might actually be able to have that level
Speaker 1: of vividness in their mind's eye. Yeah. This idea of
Speaker 1: a spectrum of of of mental detail and visual imagery,
Speaker 1: it uh, it really makes you reanalyze just how you're
Speaker 1: painting the picture in your head of these memories, you know,
Speaker 1: I get. I think we both scored around the same
Speaker 1: on this where we had kind of like typical image.
Speaker 1: I was in the typical range. Yeah, But even even
Speaker 1: then I was I found myself asking questions like, well,
Speaker 1: how when I think about these people that I see
Speaker 1: every day in my life and they are very important
Speaker 1: to me, Uh, you know, what does it mean that
Speaker 1: I don't have like just a picture perfect vision of them?
Speaker 1: What Does it mean that when I think back on
Speaker 1: a beach, I find my like a sunrise on a beach,
Speaker 1: I keep thinking of, you know, images of sunrises from
Speaker 1: paintings and films more so than actual beach sunrises that
Speaker 1: I've witnessed. Do you think about the final scene of
Speaker 1: the Warriors? Yeah, that sort of thing. Like I end
Speaker 1: up like putting a fictional Instagram filter over all of
Speaker 1: these these memories, and I'm not really remembering. I'm not
Speaker 1: really summoning a mental image of a thing I actually saw.
Speaker 1: I'm summoning this mental image that's composed of these varying elements.
Speaker 1: You know. One thing I read when we were doing
Speaker 1: our research for this episode was a first person essay
Speaker 1: that I came across the software designer Blake Ross, who
Speaker 1: was involved in Mozilla Firefox on Facebook, and he's also
Speaker 1: done some screenwriting, and he found out after reading an
Speaker 1: article I think in either in the New York Times
Speaker 1: or in Discover magazine by Carl Zimmer about a fantasia
Speaker 1: that he he had this experience, and he also was
Speaker 1: just shocked to find out that other people weren't like him.
Speaker 1: His discovery was that, oh, I never realized other people
Speaker 1: could see pictures in their minds. His whole life, he
Speaker 1: thought when people said stuff like picture this, they were
Speaker 1: just being metaphorical. He didn't realize other people could actually
Speaker 1: hold these pictures in their brains. And in this essay
Speaker 1: he starts he recounts how when he found out about this,
Speaker 1: he was asking all his friends, what's it like to
Speaker 1: picture something in your mind? And asking all these questions
Speaker 1: I've never really thought to ask myself about my process
Speaker 1: of mental imagery that we're very interesting, like he was
Speaker 1: asking his friends, Okay, when you see a picture in
Speaker 1: your mind, like you picture a beach, is it still?
Speaker 1: Is it a still photograph? Or is it more like
Speaker 1: video where things are moving? And that distinction just hit
Speaker 1: me like a wrecking ball. I was like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: When I picture something in my mind, I can make
Speaker 1: it move consciously if I need to. But when I
Speaker 1: just picture a beach, it is almost neither still nor moving.
Speaker 1: It is it exists in super position between these two things.
Speaker 1: It's kept for me, I guess when I think about it,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the old music video for What
Speaker 1: Was It? Where the people go into the painting or
Speaker 1: into the drawing on take on Me. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: feel like my my mental imagery is kind of like
Speaker 1: the take on Me video. It's stuff is moving, but
Speaker 1: it's all kind of station are as. Well. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I certainly can imagine something moving on purpose,
Speaker 1: But when I just picture a thing and I don't
Speaker 1: imagine it moving on purpose, I don't think it's still
Speaker 1: but it's not moving either. It's very strange. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of two of the experience of reading a book,
Speaker 1: especially a book that is set more or less in
Speaker 1: the real world, And at times I'll find myself stopping
Speaker 1: and thinking about, like, oh, I'm picturing this in this
Speaker 1: living room from that I that I visited or lived
Speaker 1: in at some point in my life, Like that, for
Speaker 1: some reason, is the living room that my brain is
Speaker 1: drawing in for this setting where I'm picturing this character. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes the character just is that character and
Speaker 1: that and there's not really like a firm mental image
Speaker 1: in your head exactly what they look like. Other times
Speaker 1: you can't shake their um their appearance as being that
Speaker 1: of someone you know or or you know a character
Speaker 1: actor from a movie, etcetera. But I do find myself
Speaker 1: like analyzing, like where are all these elements coming from Like,
Speaker 1: some of them are obviously coming from the author. The
Speaker 1: author is providing the blueprint, the author is providing the scaffolding.
Speaker 1: But then that scaffolding is kind of like magnetically drawing
Speaker 1: in elements from my own visual memory. Yeah, definitely, I
Speaker 1: know exactly what you're talking about. There. Uh. An interesting
Speaker 1: thing about fiction that that Blake Ross says in his
Speaker 1: first person essay about this is he He reports that,
Speaker 1: so he's always read books, you know, he's enjoyed fiction,
Speaker 1: and he's written fiction. But when he writes fiction, he
Speaker 1: has almost no visual description because he just doesn't picture
Speaker 1: things in his head. And when he reads, he skips
Speaker 1: visual description. He just kind of jumps over it. That's
Speaker 1: not it has no meaning to him. Really. Huh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's fascinating. Okay, now it's time to take
Speaker 1: a quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when
Speaker 1: we come back, more on the mind's eye and a fantasia.
Speaker 1: All right, So, just how common is a fantasia? Um,
Speaker 1: it's a difficult question because this is something that hasn't
Speaker 1: really been uh in the public mind set. It hasn't
Speaker 1: been out there. It hasn't been something you could a
Speaker 1: pamphle it on until very recently. There was one interesting
Speaker 1: study on this from before it had a name. Before this,
Speaker 1: a fantasia term came out that was studying sort of
Speaker 1: the lack of generative power and mental imagery. And that
Speaker 1: that was in two thousand nine, right, study by Fall, yeah,
Speaker 1: Bill Fall, psychologists. And what did it find? He found
Speaker 1: that between two point one percent and two point seven
Speaker 1: percent of participants in his study claimed to have no
Speaker 1: visual imagination. So that's where we got that number up
Speaker 1: at the beginning that it might be around one in
Speaker 1: fifty of you who just didn't see any pictures when
Speaker 1: you were following along in the story with us. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: of course we have to that that number is not
Speaker 1: coming from like a you know, large scale study, so
Speaker 1: the results aren't really fully supported, but it gives us
Speaker 1: sort of at least a ballpark. I think, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: something to work with. But but a lot of this
Speaker 1: recent research has popped up because of an interesting I'm
Speaker 1: about to use a great word here, synergy between between
Speaker 1: actual medical research and some writing in the popular press. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think like Carl Zimmer's articles had something to do
Speaker 1: with people coming out of the woodwork to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: now I have this experience of a fantasia. I can't
Speaker 1: make mental pictures. But it started with the research of
Speaker 1: Adam Zaman, right. Yeah, he's a professor of cognitive and
Speaker 1: behavioral neurology of the University of Exeter and Medical School,
Speaker 1: and along with co authors uh Um MICHELLEA. De Wira,
Speaker 1: and Surio Della Sala, they coined the term a fantasia
Speaker 1: in their two thousand fifteen paper Lives Without Imagery congenital
Speaker 1: a Fantasia that was published in the journal Cortex. Now,
Speaker 1: people had, as we said, previously described things along these
Speaker 1: lines like it had always been kind of noted that, well,
Speaker 1: there's some people out there who say that they can't
Speaker 1: create any mental pictures. But nobody really looked very deeply
Speaker 1: into this, and I think some of the earth I
Speaker 1: think the earliest example that the office we were looking
Speaker 1: at were able to draw on was just the nineteenth century. Now,
Speaker 1: this condition and the condition had in these earlier works
Speaker 1: of condition had previously been referred to as a defective
Speaker 1: revisualization or visual ear reminiscence. What a great word, ear reminiscence.
Speaker 1: Somebody was trying to make us say that, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: not gonna work. It's a fantasia. Uh. And there are
Speaker 1: skeptics actually out there who say that that what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here does not exist at all. I think
Speaker 1: that's fascinating because how would you prove them wrong? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And why why would you make that argument? I don't know. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, arguing about the existence of somebody else's internal experience.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just it's crazy. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: almost seems seems like you'd have to be making the
Speaker 1: counter argument of saying, oh, you don't have any fantasia,
Speaker 1: You just have a lazy mind, right, your imagination is
Speaker 1: just a bit stunted. But I can understand why people
Speaker 1: might be tempted to this direction because I, as I
Speaker 1: we've said before, I think you probably would agree with this.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what this is like. Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: no ability to you whatsoever, to put myself in a
Speaker 1: position of not being able to make mental pictures that
Speaker 1: I don't even understand what that means really, Right, It's
Speaker 1: kind of like if most of us are more or
Speaker 1: less the same computer hardware with differing software. You know,
Speaker 1: we can talk all day about I don't understand how
Speaker 1: your software works, and this is how my software works.
Speaker 1: But here we're talking about essentially a difference in hardware. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that analogy completely holds up, but
Speaker 1: essentially this is something a little more, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: base level is different and and how do we even
Speaker 1: begin to describe that to each other? Yeah? So Zaman
Speaker 1: first started studying this, I think in two thousand ten, right,
Speaker 1: because of the story of this. So there was a
Speaker 1: patient who reported having contracted, like acquired a fantasia after
Speaker 1: a medical procedure, right, right, So there was a sixty
Speaker 1: five year old man who had coronary angioplasty and that's
Speaker 1: where they So if you have pockage in one of
Speaker 1: your arteries or something like that, they'll open up one
Speaker 1: of your arteries and stick a catheter in it, and
Speaker 1: somewhere along your body wherever the blockage is occurring, they'll
Speaker 1: inflate a small balloon or something inside your artery to
Speaker 1: widen it, essentially and allow easier passage of blood. It's
Speaker 1: not the kind of thing that you would initially imagine
Speaker 1: altering your brain functioning. Yeah, and it's generally not considered
Speaker 1: a major surgical procedure. It's like it's you. I think
Speaker 1: you're typically left awake for it. They don't even necessarily
Speaker 1: put you under, though they might need to give you
Speaker 1: some drugs to calm you down. But yeah, it's this
Speaker 1: is this is not like a gigantic big deal. So
Speaker 1: it's coronary angioplasty. And after the procedure, this patient was
Speaker 1: unable to form mental pictures and he had not had
Speaker 1: this problem before, and so yeah, and that's where this
Speaker 1: study comes in. And afterwards, after there were some pieces
Speaker 1: published about this, Zaman started to hear from people who said, Hey,
Speaker 1: I have this condition. And not only do I have it,
Speaker 1: I didn't get it from I didn't have an angioplastic
Speaker 1: or any you know, injury or or surgery. I've always
Speaker 1: had it. This is just how I am. So Zaman
Speaker 1: and his co author's day they looked at twenty one
Speaker 1: of these self reporting cases and then they discovered most
Speaker 1: of these individuals um kind of discovered their condition, their
Speaker 1: own condition in their twenties when through conversations or or readings,
Speaker 1: they found a discrepancy between how other people described the
Speaker 1: use of the mind's eye and their own experiences. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine. I just have a hard time imagining how
Speaker 1: you get that far in life without realizing. Now, this
Speaker 1: is another thing that's addressed yet again in that that
Speaker 1: essay I mentioned by Blake Ross where he just talks
Speaker 1: about how whenever he heard people using the language of
Speaker 1: the mind's eye were talking about, you know, picturing something,
Speaker 1: imagining something, he thought it was all metaphorical. He thought
Speaker 1: they were just talking about conceptually meditating on the idea
Speaker 1: of a beach or something. So you're sitting there thinking
Speaker 1: about the concepts of sand and water and sunshine and umbrellas.
Speaker 1: But he didn't realize that other people were literally seeing
Speaker 1: something in their mind. Yeah. I mean, it's like we
Speaker 1: said earlier, when one when you have all these different
Speaker 1: types of memory, and if one is taking you know,
Speaker 1: a back seat, the other ones are going to compensate.
Speaker 1: So it's not like if you have a fantasia, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna be able to function in society at all.
Speaker 1: It seems like quite the contrary. Uh, individuals find a
Speaker 1: way to function. They find they just end up utilizing
Speaker 1: these different modes of memory. Okay, but of these twenty
Speaker 1: one self reporting cases, what did Zamon find about them? Well,
Speaker 1: so I found that nineteen of the twenty one were male.
Speaker 1: And it's worth noting that this might have more to
Speaker 1: do with the readership of Discover magazine. This is not
Speaker 1: a randomized, self selective right. This is where people would
Speaker 1: have read that Carl Zimmer article and they were the
Speaker 1: ones who said, hey, so yeah, I just might have
Speaker 1: to do with the male readership Discover. On the to hand,
Speaker 1: they found it. Five of the twenty one reported that
Speaker 1: it affected relatives as well. This is something I've read
Speaker 1: of people's experiences online. Some of them say, one of
Speaker 1: my parents has this. Yeah, so this leads us to
Speaker 1: believe it might be hereditary. And then ten of the
Speaker 1: twenty one said, uh, said that all all versions of
Speaker 1: the imagery were affected. Now, now, like I alluded to earlier,
Speaker 1: this does seem to me, based on what I've read
Speaker 1: so far, to be sort of a um it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily an all or nothing. It's sort of a spectrum condition.
Speaker 1: Because one of the things that these people reported is
Speaker 1: that it's not like they've never ever in their entire
Speaker 1: live seni mental image. They just generally don't see them.
Speaker 1: Like some of them sometimes reported that they might have
Speaker 1: had very brief involuntary mental images like they they might involuntarily,
Speaker 1: quote flash an image of somebody's face. But it's just
Speaker 1: that this is rare and they can't do it on command. Right,
Speaker 1: It's something that just might occur during while they're awake.
Speaker 1: It might occur during dreams some of them. This is
Speaker 1: another thing, the interesting variation on dream experience. Some report
Speaker 1: that they don't have dreams at all or don't remember
Speaker 1: having them if they do have them, and some report
Speaker 1: that they do have dreams and can experience visual content
Speaker 1: and dreams, but just can't do it while they're awake
Speaker 1: or on command. Yeah. Zeman is a big believer that
Speaker 1: this is essentially a variant of neuropsychological functioning and kind
Speaker 1: of like synesthesia in a sense, and again kind of
Speaker 1: on on a spectrum as well. So, so again, don't
Speaker 1: think of it as a uh you know, as a
Speaker 1: as a as a brain injury. Don't think of it
Speaker 1: as a as as an ailment. It is just a different, uh,
Speaker 1: a different way that the mental chorus is coming together
Speaker 1: to receive reality. Yeah. Another thing that I thought was
Speaker 1: interesting is, uh, so we've been talking about images being
Speaker 1: visual as in like what you know, light, photons, and
Speaker 1: the eyes. But this does seem to extend to varying
Speaker 1: degrees to other senses as well. Right, some of the
Speaker 1: people who report that they have a fantasia for visual
Speaker 1: images also can't imagine the feelings of other senses, if
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And then some report that
Speaker 1: they sort of can, again, making it seem like a
Speaker 1: kind of spectrum issue, like can you hear a piece
Speaker 1: of music that you're not currently listening to? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's That's another good one. I certainly can. Like
Speaker 1: one of the ones I wanted to think was the
Speaker 1: Star Wars theme. I can just play the whole Star
Speaker 1: Wars theme in my mind from beginning to end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And certainly we've all experienced earworms, so that's kind of
Speaker 1: a variant of that now. Um. Also in this uh
Speaker 1: the Zaman paper, they said of the individuals, a number
Speaker 1: of them reported modest effects on their relationships, which I
Speaker 1: guess one can imagine if you and your um, your
Speaker 1: significant other are ultimately engaging with mental imagery and drastically
Speaker 1: different ways. And also, fourteen of the twenty one participants
Speaker 1: reported difficulties with autobiographical memory. So here's a quick quote
Speaker 1: from the paper. The same number identified h compensatory strengths
Speaker 1: in verbal, mathematical, and logical domains. They their successful performance
Speaker 1: in a task that would normally elicit imagery count how
Speaker 1: many windows there are in your house or apartment, etcetera,
Speaker 1: was achieved by drawing on what participants described as knowledge, memory,
Speaker 1: and sub visual models. Yeah, this is interesting. So this
Speaker 1: again gets back into the idea that you end up
Speaker 1: just utilizing different modes of memory the workforce of the brain. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: because I can't imagine. So if somebody said how many
Speaker 1: windows are there in your house? I would do that
Speaker 1: with a picture. I would picture my house and sort
Speaker 1: of picture walking around the sides of my house and
Speaker 1: seeing how many windows are there. But they can do
Speaker 1: this without the picture. It's not like they're unable to
Speaker 1: do it. So there's something else kicking in. Must be
Speaker 1: conceptual facts logged about the house. Okay, so we need
Speaker 1: to take one more quick break and then we'll be
Speaker 1: right back with more or a fantasia. Now that BBC
Speaker 1: paper that we mentioned earlier by James Gallagher. In that paper,
Speaker 1: Gallagher spoke with one Neil kin Mure of Lancaster. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is a self reporting individual with blindness in the
Speaker 1: mind's eye, and he provided some interesting insight on the condition.
Speaker 1: So I have just a couple of quotes here from
Speaker 1: that that piece that I found were interesting. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: my stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep,
Speaker 1: and he explained what he meant. I tried to do it,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences. There
Speaker 1: was nothing to count. No, that's uh, that's that's an
Speaker 1: interesting because I guess that might be one of the
Speaker 1: earliest examples of of here mentally mentally imagined this. Like
Speaker 1: with my own uh son, I had a similar situation.
Speaker 1: Like I distinctly remember the first time I told him
Speaker 1: to close his eyes and encouraged him to imagine an
Speaker 1: elephant because he was really obsessed with with elephants at
Speaker 1: the time. And um, I saw the delight on his
Speaker 1: face as he imagined the elephant. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: after doing this research, I realized, well, there's equally a
Speaker 1: possibility that we wouldn't be able to see the elephant,
Speaker 1: and you know, there wouldn't be anything we're go wrong
Speaker 1: with him if he couldn't see it. In the BBC
Speaker 1: piece um the the The interviewed individual, Neil kim Miller,
Speaker 1: also said that he had a terrible memory, but he
Speaker 1: was good with facts and and then there's an additional quote.
Speaker 1: This is the hardest thing to describe what happens in
Speaker 1: my head when I think about things. When I think
Speaker 1: about my fiancee, there is no image, but I am
Speaker 1: definitely thinking about her. I know today she has her
Speaker 1: hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not
Speaker 1: describing an image I am looking at I'm remembering features
Speaker 1: about her. That's the strangest thing, and maybe that is
Speaker 1: a source of some regret. Yeah, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: the thing because typically these people report that they it's
Speaker 1: not like they can't they don't know what somebody looks like, right.
Speaker 1: They's not like that scene in like Hannibal where they
Speaker 1: show face blindness as just seeing people with like smooth
Speaker 1: skin over their face. Yeah. What's that condition called a
Speaker 1: congenital prosopagnosia? Is that it where you you have a
Speaker 1: born condition where you just can't recognize faces people. You
Speaker 1: see people who are familiar to you, but you just
Speaker 1: they just don't look like anybody, uh you know, whoever
Speaker 1: that is and and it's not like that you, or
Speaker 1: at least not for everybody. Like we said, there seems
Speaker 1: to be a wide variation in how this applies to
Speaker 1: people's lives. But I haven't read that it's like that
Speaker 1: for most people. It seems like they report, yeah, they
Speaker 1: recognize people. Once they see a picture of of a
Speaker 1: close family member or of the president or whoever it is,
Speaker 1: they know who it is. They just can't make the
Speaker 1: picture without looking at it. It's almost kind of like
Speaker 1: we talked about in the P versus NP episode, like
Speaker 1: the kinds of problems that once a solution is presented,
Speaker 1: you can easily check to see if it's correct, but
Speaker 1: you can't come up with a solution and a reasonable
Speaker 1: amount of time by yourself. Uh. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: version of that. You can't make the picture, but when
Speaker 1: somebody shows you the picture you can say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. Yeah definitely. But anyway, I I just find
Speaker 1: this condition really fascinating. And so if you yourself are
Speaker 1: somebody who thinks you may be experiencing a fantasia, or
Speaker 1: if you just want to learn more about it, one
Speaker 1: interesting resource I think would be to go and look
Speaker 1: at some of the message boards online that have recently
Speaker 1: been created by people who claimed to have this experience,
Speaker 1: because there's one I found that was a fant dot asia. Nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it's just like a forum online people talking
Speaker 1: about their experiences. Uh, and it seems to be a
Speaker 1: lot of people having this kind of uh, this awakening
Speaker 1: kind of experience. They're like, oh, man, I didn't even
Speaker 1: realize that this was what was causing all this confusion
Speaker 1: between me and other people all these years, or I
Speaker 1: didn't realize I was the I wasn't the only one
Speaker 1: who was like this, or you know, people really seem
Speaker 1: to be having a lot of fun coming together with
Speaker 1: a community of other people who have the same issue. Well,
Speaker 1: like it reminds one of the whole you know, the
Speaker 1: old example of hey, what if when I think of
Speaker 1: purple and you think of purple? What if we what
Speaker 1: if we're each seeing different colors? But there's never a
Speaker 1: way to prove that out. But but this is kind
Speaker 1: of like a case where what it's kind of like
Speaker 1: if you were one day able to say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the purple I see is different from the purple these
Speaker 1: people see. I'm gonna I'm gonna go hang out now
Speaker 1: with individuals who see purple the way I see. People
Speaker 1: never understood what the deal with Barney was, but now
Speaker 1: I get it. Uh No. But so I have all
Speaker 1: these questions about a fantasia, like what it means, and
Speaker 1: again just emphasize it does seem like we haven't nailed
Speaker 1: down that there's a specific cause and a very specific
Speaker 1: effect yet, because there seemed to be a range of
Speaker 1: different ways this manifests in people's minds. It's associated with
Speaker 1: different things. Some people dream, some people don't. Some people
Speaker 1: have memory problems, some people don't. Um. But one of
Speaker 1: the things I was wondering about was can fantasiacs hallucinate? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So what if an a fantasiac takes a drug that
Speaker 1: often causes visual hallucinations? Do they see anything different? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Are they just going to get the non visual hallucinatory effects? Uh?
Speaker 1: Or is it going to sort of ignite a type
Speaker 1: of visual imagery that isn't normally there sort of heighten
Speaker 1: the flashes that some of the you know, the the
Speaker 1: the occasional flashes that some of these individuals experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so I looked this up actually on the on
Speaker 1: the forum boards, and they had actually addressed it. So
Speaker 1: one member of a message board said they typed a
Speaker 1: question that struck me as intriguing. This person said they
Speaker 1: were confused. Essentially, they said, how is hallucinating different from
Speaker 1: seeing things in your mind? Again, that question is hard
Speaker 1: to answer, but to somebody who has, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a mind's eye, it's very clearly different. I don't feel
Speaker 1: like I'm hallucinating when I imagine something, but try to
Speaker 1: describe the difference. Well, you're seeing something in your mind
Speaker 1: that's not there. Okay, that sounds like hallucination, but yeah,
Speaker 1: but then it's also yeah, then it's also just like
Speaker 1: seeing Yeah. So yeah, we come back again to the
Speaker 1: cave and we're all still lined up staring at the
Speaker 1: play of shadows on the wall. Yeah. Some of us
Speaker 1: maybe just have a slightly different view of the shadows
Speaker 1: and others. Okay, Robert, I've got a question for you. Okay,
Speaker 1: hit me. Do you think you could try to simulate
Speaker 1: this in you're in your own mind? Like? Could you try?
Speaker 1: I know you it would be impossible for us to
Speaker 1: really fully be able to do it, But can you
Speaker 1: try to go through a standard day to day process
Speaker 1: something you would do all the time without using any
Speaker 1: mental pictures. I was trying this morning, and I couldn't
Speaker 1: do it. Just trying. Yeah, trying not to think of
Speaker 1: mental images immediately calls to mind mental images. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, telling somebody like, think of a rhinoceros wearing
Speaker 1: a jet pack. You just did it. Uh. And even
Speaker 1: it works in the in the general sense, just saying,
Speaker 1: try not to think of mental images, and immediately my
Speaker 1: mind is filled with rhinoceroses and jet packs. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: if anything, I have to try and keep from daydreaming
Speaker 1: and keep from or keep from you know, pummeling myself
Speaker 1: with with different mental images. Uh, and and actually focus
Speaker 1: in on a task, you know. Yeah. I mean the
Speaker 1: way this really seems like it would come through is like,
Speaker 1: how does if you can't have mental images, how do
Speaker 1: you have fantasies about things you would like to do?
Speaker 1: So you imagine, you know, your boss makes you furious
Speaker 1: and you wish you could punch him in the nose.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't actually do it, but you at least have
Speaker 1: that image for a moment, right. Uh. I think that's
Speaker 1: probably a nearly universal experience for people, and of having
Speaker 1: thought of it. But what happens if you can't have
Speaker 1: that image in your mind, do you do you think
Speaker 1: about it conceptually? It's like I I just thinking about
Speaker 1: the concept of punching my boss in the face. Well,
Speaker 1: and then also even if like I was just thinking
Speaker 1: to myself, like, what are some of the times when
Speaker 1: I'm actually able to to not, you know, mentally imagine
Speaker 1: anything and have these mental visualizations in my mind, I think, well, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe when I'm doing yoga because I'm able to sort
Speaker 1: of shut out a lot of stuff. I'm able to
Speaker 1: shut off the default mode network to a large extent.
Speaker 1: But even then, if I'm focusing on a pose, I
Speaker 1: am also focusing on a mental image of what I
Speaker 1: must look like in that pose, which may or may
Speaker 1: not have match up to how I'm actually doing the pose.
Speaker 1: So what is it like then to engage in a
Speaker 1: in a physical activity like that with a fantasia? I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously you can do it, but it just
Speaker 1: kind of drives home just how much mental visualizations, um,
Speaker 1: how big a role they play and just everything we do. Okay,
Speaker 1: another question fiction writing. This is something again from the
Speaker 1: from the Blake cross Piece. So he's he is, He's
Speaker 1: done some screenwriting, and he describes his process for fiction
Speaker 1: writing without having mental images, which he described in terms
Speaker 1: of words and parts of speech. I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 1: So he said, like, when I'm imagining something, I imagine
Speaker 1: a noun, the word, and then I imagine a verb
Speaker 1: that follows it, the word um. And so there's something
Speaker 1: very different about his process for writing than I would have.
Speaker 1: So when I'm imagining a scene, there's there's translation going on.
Speaker 1: I think of a picture, and then I have to
Speaker 1: put the picture into words. But could it be possible
Speaker 1: that this allows people to do creative writing without any translation.
Speaker 1: The original creative thing that's happening is words. That's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like they're not having They're not in that situation that
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, where as an artist or a creator
Speaker 1: of any kind, you are stuck trying to translate the
Speaker 1: mental image into who something another person can share in.
Speaker 1: Like you said, there's no translation going there. Well, it
Speaker 1: makes me wonder if the maybe the ultimate form of
Speaker 1: direct written communication with almost nothing lost in between, would
Speaker 1: be an a fantasiac writing to another a fantasiac somebody,
Speaker 1: because there you're not translating it into pictures on both
Speaker 1: sides or on either side. I will say that something
Speaker 1: that does remind me of is like in my own
Speaker 1: writing process. There there's definitely the point where I have
Speaker 1: an image in my mind or seen in my mind,
Speaker 1: characters in my mind, and I'm trying to bring that
Speaker 1: to life on the page. But then if I'll get
Speaker 1: into these situations where I'm writing and in a way
Speaker 1: what I'm writing is coming before the mental image, so
Speaker 1: I kind of create the point. Not to say it's
Speaker 1: it's a fantasia at all, but I'm kind of writing
Speaker 1: before the mental visualization. I'm kind of reading what I've
Speaker 1: writen I've written and an experienced it more or less
Speaker 1: in real time as a reader would. Oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I bet you've had the experience I know I have
Speaker 1: of writing something before you get the picture, and then
Speaker 1: getting the picture and then going back and revising what
Speaker 1: you've written based on the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: This so this is yeah, the writing is definitely a
Speaker 1: fascinating area to think about, this because it is this
Speaker 1: sort of it's the mental image, but in this stripping
Speaker 1: down of the mental image, the translating it into into
Speaker 1: another form. Uh yeah, yeah, well it's fascinating to be
Speaker 1: coming into this topic and it's such an interesting time
Speaker 1: for it, you know, when when it seems we're on
Speaker 1: the cusp of a lot of new learning about what
Speaker 1: this condition is, how many people have it, what it's
Speaker 1: like for them, and Hey, if you out there actually
Speaker 1: experience this, if you have some level of a fantasia
Speaker 1: or you're toward that end of the mental image re spectrum,
Speaker 1: I think it would be great to hear about your experience,
Speaker 1: if you want to write in and tell us what
Speaker 1: it's like. Yeah, and if you're on the other end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum, if you're a hyper visualizer, let us
Speaker 1: know about that as well. Uh. In the meantime, head
Speaker 1: on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That is the mothership. That is where you will find
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Speaker 1: want to get in touch with us with your experience
Speaker 1: of mental imagery or with feedback on this episode or
Speaker 1: any other, you can email us at blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Speaker 1: Dot com not my boy,