Speaker 1: If I ask you to imagine something like the sun
Speaker 1: peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm, do
Speaker 1: you see it with rich visual detail like a movie.
Speaker 1: Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you
Speaker 1: not really have any internal picture at all, but instead
Speaker 1: just a concept. In an earlier episode, we tackled the
Speaker 1: spectrum of internal visual imagination from hyperfantasia at one end
Speaker 1: to a fantasia at the other end. How does your
Speaker 1: experience differ from other people's and what does this have
Speaker 1: to do with the mind's eye or the mind's ear,
Speaker 1: or how your brain cobbles together the skills that you
Speaker 1: have to nail the tasks before you. Welcome to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
Speaker 1: author at Stanford and in the episodes we dive deeply
Speaker 1: into our three pound universe to uncover some of the
Speaker 1: most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode returns to
Speaker 1: an issue that I hit a little while ago about
Speaker 1: how we visualize on the inside. Specifically, we talked about
Speaker 1: a fantasia and hyperfantasia. In a fantasia, you just don't
Speaker 1: picture anything in your head when you're asked to visually
Speaker 1: imagine something, and in Hyperfantasia, it's like a movie going
Speaker 1: on on the inside, and every one of us is
Speaker 1: somewhere on this spectrum between these two end points. And
Speaker 1: if you heard that episode, you know that I talked
Speaker 1: with Ed Katmoll, who's the founder of Pixar Films, and
Speaker 1: Ed was surprised to discover a while ago that he
Speaker 1: is a fantasic. And when he quizzed some of the
Speaker 1: best artists and animators at Pixar, he was even more
Speaker 1: surprised to discover that many of them were a fantasic.
Speaker 1: So the key lesson that emerged from that episode is
Speaker 1: that we each have our own experience of reality, but
Speaker 1: most of the time we assume that our experiences are
Speaker 1: human universals. It never even strikes us that other people
Speaker 1: might be having a different reality.
Speaker 2: And this is.
Speaker 1: Something we've seen in the scientific community, even very recently.
Speaker 1: Some researcher will introspect and think about how they're experiencing
Speaker 1: the world, and then they will argue that that is
Speaker 1: how brains work. They're operating under the assumption that all
Speaker 1: brains are having the same experience on the inside. It's
Speaker 1: very reasonable assumption it just turns out to be incorrect.
Speaker 1: Episode on how We Imagine on the Inside that turned
Speaker 1: out to be a very popular episode.
Speaker 2: I got a lot of emails about this.
Speaker 1: And I think this is because it's a real eye
Speaker 1: opener to almost everybody when they realize that it's difficult
Speaker 1: to know whether your version of reality is true for everybody.
Speaker 1: You only know that it's true for you, and when
Speaker 1: things get subjected to rigorous study, it often turns out
Speaker 1: that there's a different experience going on from person to person.
Speaker 1: And one thing that was very interesting to me and
Speaker 1: came out of these emails was this question about how
Speaker 1: people lean into their own strengths and compensate for their weaknesses,
Speaker 1: with the end result being that you often just don't
Speaker 1: know from looking at somebody's behavior or performance what that
Speaker 1: person can or can't do on the inside. And I
Speaker 1: was reminded about this issue of how the brain might
Speaker 1: cobble together lots of ways of acomplishing a task. When
Speaker 1: Ed Catmull told me about his interaction with Glenn Keen,
Speaker 1: who's one of the best animators that Pixar has ever known.
Speaker 1: I didn't play that clip in the earlier episode but
Speaker 1: I wanted to concentrate on that now.
Speaker 3: When I had my dinner with Glenn Keene after we
Speaker 3: had the results, because as I mentioned, when I first
Speaker 3: met with Glenn, he said, yeah, he can't visualize, and
Speaker 3: he knows that and it's just part of his skill.
Speaker 1: So Ed had run an internal study at Pixar and
Speaker 1: found that many of the great artists and animators couldn't visualize.
Speaker 1: That was a much more normal thing than would have
Speaker 1: been expected. And Ed presented those results to Glenn.
Speaker 3: Then he said that he felt relieved because he was
Speaker 3: always a little worried that something was.
Speaker 4: Wrong with him.
Speaker 3: And I was surprised at that one because he was
Speaker 3: so good. But it was also true with some of
Speaker 3: the people with a fantasia was they they felt relieved
Speaker 3: because they felt there might be something wrong with them.
Speaker 3: I thought, well, okay, that's curious. It's understandable. And the
Speaker 3: terminology that's frequently used is one of a deficiency.
Speaker 4: It's like the mind blind eye.
Speaker 3: Which is a phrase that's frequently used when people write about.
Speaker 1: It, A blind mind's eye, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, blind mind's eye. So uh. And I never really
Speaker 4: liked the term because.
Speaker 3: I didn't feel like I had a blind mind's eye.
Speaker 3: I didn't feel deficient in that way. It was just
Speaker 3: like I had a different set of skills. So the
Speaker 3: negative terminology wasn't helpful to them. And it was like
Speaker 3: a curious thing where people felt like they were deficient
Speaker 3: when actually the quality of their work wasn't was extraordinarily good.
Speaker 1: Let me make sure I understand the story, though, was
Speaker 1: that Glenn felt that way before he understood what a
Speaker 1: fantasia was. I mean, the reason I ask is because
Speaker 1: most people assume that everyone else's reality is the same
Speaker 1: as theirs on the inside. Did he have a sense
Speaker 1: in some way that he was different even before he
Speaker 1: understood about a fantasia?
Speaker 3: Well, he did know that he couldn't visualize before all
Speaker 3: this took place, So I think in some people's cases,
Speaker 3: I would say this is true with others too. And
Speaker 3: some of the others who were storyboard artists at Disney
Speaker 3: said they knew that the others could work faster than
Speaker 3: they could, and they felt deficient in their ability to
Speaker 3: operate at that speed, but they didn't say anything. In
Speaker 3: Glenn's case, he said that he he knew that he
Speaker 3: couldn't visualize because he'd had this discussion with his mentor
Speaker 3: about it, but it wasn't until after the result came
Speaker 3: out that he said that he felt realated. Initially, he
Speaker 3: didn't say that he thought there was any problems. So
Speaker 3: there's a little bit of something inside of people saying, oh,
Speaker 3: maybe there's something wrong with me because I can't do it.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 1: That was Ed catmull, the founder of Pixar Films. He
Speaker 1: is a fantasic and you can hear my full interview
Speaker 1: with him on episode fifty nine. Anyway, so many people
Speaker 1: contacted me about this that I decided it was time
Speaker 1: to do a second episode on this topic with a
Speaker 1: deeper dive into the science. So I called a friend
Speaker 1: and colleague of mine, Joel Pearson, a professor of cognitive
Speaker 1: neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Speaker 1: Now you may remember I had Joel on the show
Speaker 1: a little while ago to talk about the science and
Speaker 1: psychology of intuition, as in what it is, when to
Speaker 1: trust it, when not to trust it. But I had
Speaker 1: him back now to speak more about a fantasia and
Speaker 1: hyper fantasia and all of the studies that his lab
Speaker 1: has done on this So here's my interview with Joel Pearson. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Joel tell us what is a fantasia.
Speaker 2: Well, it's the name to describe a complete lack of
Speaker 2: visual imagery. Now we can dig a little bit deeper
Speaker 2: and talk about imagery in the other senses, but primarily
Speaker 2: it refers to people that either acquired or lost their
Speaker 2: visual imagery or were born without any visual imagery.
Speaker 1: And what percentage of population are we looking at? That
Speaker 1: has a fantastic Yeah.
Speaker 2: Kind of a controversial question. So it seems to be
Speaker 2: between say two percent and four percent, give or take.
Speaker 2: I think it's probably more like five to seven percent.
Speaker 2: Because a lot of people I talk to who have
Speaker 2: it or discover that imagery exists, they never realized imagery
Speaker 2: actually exists. They always thought it was a metaphor and
Speaker 2: the mind's eye was simply a metaphor. So they're shocked.
Speaker 2: And so I think the way people measure it with
Speaker 2: questionnaires is actually under undermeasuring the total number. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: I think it's a little bit higher. Sounds right.
Speaker 1: So you know, back in two thousand and seven, I
Speaker 1: did this paper where we did brain imagery and show
Speaker 1: that we could correlate what someone's subjective report is on
Speaker 1: the vividness of visual imergy questionnaire to their brain imaging.
Speaker 1: But you've done something even cooler and simpler than brain imaging,
Speaker 1: which is pupil ametory. So tell us explain to us
Speaker 1: what that's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a paper. So we've been on this quest
Speaker 2: to try and have objective measurements of visual imagery. And
Speaker 2: the pupil measure was simply we get par dispants into
Speaker 2: the lab and they have to imagine bright objects or
Speaker 2: dark objects. Right, So if you look at a bright
Speaker 2: object or a dark object, we actually use at triangle.
Speaker 2: So if you look at the bright triangle, your pupil
Speaker 2: can strict right bright light. When you look at the
Speaker 2: dark thing, it relaxes and opens up. And it turns
Speaker 2: out if you have someone imagine the same shapes a
Speaker 2: light or a dark triangle, the pupil would do a
Speaker 2: similar thing. Right. So simply by imagining a bright light
Speaker 2: it contracts, which is pretty cool in itself, right, And
Speaker 2: it turns out you do that in the normal population, let's say,
Speaker 2: to people's typical imagery. You get this effect, then you
Speaker 2: can be got people with a fantasia into the lab
Speaker 2: and we didn't see the effects, so their eyes, their
Speaker 2: pupils don't constrict, right, And then the question is, well
Speaker 2: are they are they faking it? They just don't want
Speaker 2: to do it because they think they have a fantasia. Right,
Speaker 2: it's some sort of a psychological thing. We have this
Speaker 2: other condition where we have rather than just one triangle,
Speaker 2: we have two or three or four triangles. And you
Speaker 2: see this set size effect which seems to be linked
Speaker 2: with the sort of cognitive and mental effort. So unpack
Speaker 2: the set size effects. Yeah, so when there's more triangles,
Speaker 2: you see a more of a general dilation independent of
Speaker 2: the bright or dark condition, right, And that just seems
Speaker 2: to be like people are trying harder with more triangles.
Speaker 2: And the cool thing is you see this set size
Speaker 2: effect in both groups, in people with imagery and people
Speaker 2: without imagery, people with a fantasia. So suggest they are
Speaker 2: trying as hard as they can, or they're trying pretty
Speaker 2: hard because it's set size effects there, but there's no
Speaker 2: difference in the luminance or the brightness of the shapes.
Speaker 2: So they're trying, but something's just not happening in their brain.
Speaker 2: It's not happening in visual cortex. Whatever is driving that
Speaker 2: pupil response is not there, so and is.
Speaker 1: It a clear enough effect that you can just ask
Speaker 1: somebody when they tell you that there are fantastic you
Speaker 1: can see, hey picture?
Speaker 2: Can you do it that way? In ser I don't
Speaker 2: know if you can do it right now? Like what's
Speaker 2: your pupil You probably did lots of trials under the
Speaker 2: right conditions. I think it'd be cool to try and
Speaker 2: you know, have a phone test of that where you
Speaker 2: could just test that in anyone any time. But yeah,
Speaker 2: the data was pretty clear and it correlated with other
Speaker 2: measures of visual imagery we have in the lab. So
Speaker 2: it's nice to see the different techniques that have come together.
Speaker 1: You and I know lots and lots of people with
Speaker 1: a fantasia who are terrifically successful in their careers. For example,
Speaker 1: we both are friends with Ed Catmoll, who I interviewed
Speaker 1: in a previous episode. And there's you know, this very
Speaker 1: famous software engineer who's a fantasic and nonetheless did all
Speaker 1: the UI for the for Mozilla. One of the engineers
Speaker 1: at my company, Neo Censury, is a fantasic can yet
Speaker 1: he's a terrifically creative engineer. So you've studied the issue
Speaker 1: about what are the strategies that people of the East
Speaker 1: Fantasia are using?
Speaker 2: Tell us about that. Yes, so it depends what we're
Speaker 2: talking about. We're talking about so working memory, so holding
Speaker 2: information in short term memory and visual information. People with
Speaker 2: imagery or people with no imagery have different strategies. So
Speaker 2: I have imagery, and if I have to remember, you know,
Speaker 2: like how many coups you have in front of me,
Speaker 2: I'm going to basically imagine those cups while I'm trying
Speaker 2: to hold it in memory. And that's my mnemonic strategy
Speaker 2: to use a technical word. People without imagery won't do that.
Speaker 2: They have to use and it's not just one other strategy.
Speaker 2: It seems to be a bunch of different strategies. So
Speaker 2: they'll use words, geometry, locations in space. So there's a
Speaker 2: range of different compensatory mechanisms or strategies if you like.
Speaker 2: And they've been practicing most of the people have been
Speaker 2: practicing those strategies their whole life, right, so they're very
Speaker 2: good at it. So if you just look at the
Speaker 2: performance data, it can look exactly the same in some
Speaker 2: of these memory tests, these short term working memory tests,
Speaker 2: and then we see this sort of strategy difference across
Speaker 2: the board in other things we've measured as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's funny because you and I both in
Speaker 1: several other researchers around the planet figured when we first
Speaker 1: learned about a fantasia, figured, oh, we can just do
Speaker 1: some simple tests on this, and we were surprised that
Speaker 1: on many tests you can't really find a performance difference.
Speaker 1: And it's precisely because of this, right, because people figure
Speaker 1: out other strategies to get buy in the world. And
Speaker 1: I mentioned to you the other day my hypothesis about
Speaker 1: why really good artists and animators like a Pixar, maybe
Speaker 1: why why a fantasics are more likely to become good artists.
Speaker 2: This is just the dumb hypothesis.
Speaker 1: But I figure, if you're a kid in you're hyperfantagic,
Speaker 1: and someone says, draw the horse, you know, you sort
Speaker 1: of know what a horse looks like, and you draw
Speaker 1: with there. But if you're a fantasic, you really have
Speaker 1: to stare at the model and you have to figure
Speaker 1: out what the heck's out there, and you have a
Speaker 1: dialogue with the page and you get more practice. That
Speaker 1: way is the hypothesis, and That's why, even though it
Speaker 1: seems like a surprise at first that Pixar found that
Speaker 1: it had so many a fantagic animators there, maybe it's
Speaker 1: not such a surprise because they were learning different strategies
Speaker 1: in life and ended up becoming better artists that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the exactly And what is it, Glenn
Speaker 2: Keane that's his name. Yeah, the animator at picks out
Speaker 2: when you see you've seen the footage of him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but he embodies the motions the movements of his character,
Speaker 2: and he's like jumping around. If you're watching the video,
Speaker 2: I'm still moving around on the chair, right, And so
Speaker 2: he has to almost feel in his body, I think
Speaker 2: before he draws it. So I've sat down with people
Speaker 2: with with a fantasia and said, you know, draw an apple.
Speaker 2: When they to draw a beautiful, perfect, almost perfect apple, right,
Speaker 2: I say, well, how do you know what you're going
Speaker 2: to draw before the pen touched the paper? And he
Speaker 2: was like, I don't really. As I'm drawing it, I
Speaker 2: know I know what an apple looks like. I know
Speaker 2: it looks like an apple. So I just keep drawing, right,
Speaker 2: which is different to how I draw an apple. But again,
Speaker 2: the strategy probably the brain mechanisms are different there, but
Speaker 2: you still get a very similar outcome.
Speaker 1: Also, you found that people can be perfectly good at
Speaker 1: facial recognition and yet they are a fantastic one. They're
Speaker 1: trying to picture a face internally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a So, this is thing called procep
Speaker 2: pagnosia where people have just trouble recognizing just faces, right,
Speaker 2: nothing else that no perceptions normal comes to a face.
Speaker 2: Show them a picture of Brad Pitt. They're like, I
Speaker 2: don't know. They could use the hair or the clothes, right,
Speaker 2: and that's perceptual. Now, we've found a few cases of
Speaker 2: people that have what looks like pro so pagnosia, but
Speaker 2: only in their imagery, which is pretty wild. Right, So
Speaker 2: they have I don't know, proce pagnosia, A fantasia. I've
Speaker 2: got a good name for this, and I've just started
Speaker 2: studying this. But yeah, they don't seem to be able
Speaker 2: to imagine human faces. And when you ask can, they
Speaker 2: say they've got a dog or something, and you say,
Speaker 2: can you imagine the dog's face? They say, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: no problem, it's just the human face, which is super specific.
Speaker 2: Right now, should also at this point say that a
Speaker 2: fantasia is not just purely visual. When the studies we've
Speaker 2: done it goes there can be full multisensory a fantasia,
Speaker 2: so no mind's ear, no minds smell or taste, none
Speaker 2: of the senses. In the studies we've done, people this
Speaker 2: seem to have Most people have pure visual a fantasia
Speaker 2: or multisensory. The other sort of subtypes of the pure
Speaker 2: auditory a fantasia are very very rare.
Speaker 1: And so let's describe what auditory fantasia would be. So
Speaker 1: you say, okay, picture of betas like symphony. The person says,
Speaker 1: I just have no idea or you know a picture.
Speaker 1: I had the Happy Birthday song in your head. Do
Speaker 1: you hear it? Somebody who is hyper fantasia in that
Speaker 1: way it says, oh, yeah, it's like a symphony. I'm
Speaker 1: hearing the thing, but other people don't hear it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's like, can't get the e worms the
Speaker 2: name for these songs that gets these annoying songs they
Speaker 2: get stuck in our head right so that they have
Speaker 2: no mind's ear. If you're like, they can't now, I
Speaker 2: should say that. In the studies we've done a lot
Speaker 2: of the publicity around a fantasia is around pure visual
Speaker 2: a fantasia, so there's always a bias there. When we're
Speaker 2: collecting data in our database international database, a lot of
Speaker 2: those have reached out to us because they've heard about again,
Speaker 2: pure visual imagery, so there could be a bias there
Speaker 2: in selecting the participants as well.
Speaker 1: So my impression, but you've got data on this which
Speaker 1: I want to ask you. My impression has been that
Speaker 1: it's actually a dice toss on anything. Like somebody might
Speaker 1: have visual a fantasia, but they've got perfectly good ability
Speaker 1: to imagine the auditory, but not so good at imagining
Speaker 1: let's say, how their muscles would feel if they were
Speaker 1: going up twenty flights of stairs, But they're perfectly good
Speaker 1: at at smell fantasia.
Speaker 2: And it's just each one.
Speaker 1: It is felt to me is sort of a random
Speaker 1: toss of those. But have you found clustering that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the multisensory across the board is the
Speaker 2: largest group really that and pure visual but that's probably
Speaker 2: a bias.
Speaker 1: And by that you mean someone who has a fantasia
Speaker 1: across all the sensors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is pretty if you think about it, just
Speaker 2: per second and something that always struck me. What is
Speaker 2: the equivalent in perception. There's no like natural occurring multisensory blindness, right,
Speaker 2: So spatial neglect or something might be the closest thing
Speaker 2: to that, but that's not blindness. So that's an interesting
Speaker 2: way that that a fantasial imagery differs from perception. Right
Speaker 2: You just the chances of being blind and having no
Speaker 2: taste and being deaf and through all the senses is
Speaker 2: I don't know the probabilities are, but it's I've never
Speaker 2: come across someone like that, right, right, right, I don't
Speaker 2: know if it exists even.
Speaker 1: It would certainly be very unlucky to have that, that's right.
Speaker 1: But of course it makes sense because you've got all
Speaker 1: these windows on the world that pick up on different
Speaker 1: energy sources, whether photons are compression waves or mixtures and molecules.
Speaker 1: And then but imagery is you know, this this multicolor
Speaker 1: theater that you're putting together on the inside in the Dora,
Speaker 1: in this hurricane of electrical spikes, we're putting together a
Speaker 1: model of the world. So if there's some problem in that,
Speaker 1: in you know, maybe it's a form of consciousness. Essentially,
Speaker 1: that says, okay, here's how he puts this together to
Speaker 1: make this theatrical play. Yeah, that's a really interesting clue
Speaker 1: into what's going on there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nicely put. You should write a book.
Speaker 1: David, So okay, But do you also find people like
Speaker 1: I did, where it's you know, it's one and not
Speaker 1: the other, and they're probably good at hearing but not
Speaker 1: at the visualized.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the hearing is less common, but there is, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there is auditory a fantasia, and then there's a sort
Speaker 2: of a sub this question as this, where that people
Speaker 2: will be able to get to have a song in
Speaker 2: their mind, but they won't be able to have they
Speaker 2: won't have the voice in their mind right, so they're
Speaker 2: inner monologue. It's in a dialogue thing. Like there's a
Speaker 2: lot of people when they read a book, they'll hear
Speaker 2: a voice, some version of their own voice sort of
Speaker 2: saying the words in their mind. And some people won't
Speaker 2: have that, but they'll still be able to you know,
Speaker 2: sing a song or listen to music in their minds. E.
Speaker 2: So that's another, you know, even more specific category. You
Speaker 2: know what this all reminds me of?
Speaker 1: So Okay, In my book Incognito, I wrote about this
Speaker 1: team of rivals framework, which is you've got all these
Speaker 1: neural networks that are all doing different things, and you've
Speaker 1: evolved lots of these over the you know, yawns, and
Speaker 1: so you know, all these different ways of doing things.
Speaker 1: So one of the classes I teach her at Stanford
Speaker 1: is literature in the Brain.
Speaker 2: And one of the questions with literature is if you
Speaker 2: just read some passage.
Speaker 1: From Hemingway, are you inside the character or are you
Speaker 1: watching as though watching a movie seeing the characters there?
Speaker 1: And so I really queried the students on this very carefully,
Speaker 1: and what it seems is that we're doing both. We
Speaker 1: do both, and we kind of switch back and forth.
Speaker 1: If you force someone to answer, they'll do one or
Speaker 1: the other.
Speaker 2: Interesting way, independent of how the first person second, how
Speaker 2: the book's written exactly.
Speaker 1: It's just some Hemingway asks scene where it's like some
Speaker 1: guy's talking and doing something. The question is are you
Speaker 1: the guy or are you watching the guy? Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it certainly seems like bounce back and forth pretty seamlessly there.
Speaker 1: So this all comes back to this point you were
Speaker 1: making about all the different strategies that people have to
Speaker 1: solve whatever kind of problem, and maybe visualizing something is
Speaker 1: just one of you know, eight different ways that you
Speaker 1: can get through any problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you mentioned books there. I think it's interesting.
Speaker 2: So there are some studies going on at the moment
Speaker 2: looking at how much people with a fantasia enjoy reading fiction,
Speaker 2: for example, because a lot of on the online discussions,
Speaker 2: there's a huge amount of people saying I find fiction boring,
Speaker 2: I don't get into it. And we've run a study
Speaker 2: where we had people come into the lab and read
Speaker 2: these scary stories. Right, they're swimming and the something bumps
Speaker 2: their foot and they see a dark shadow and then
Speaker 2: a fin comes past them, and it kind of builds
Speaker 2: and builds until the shark attacks. And when you have
Speaker 2: someone with imagery read that in a dark room with
Speaker 2: one of those skin conductance things on their finger, right,
Speaker 2: measuring these slight changes in sweat, you see this nice
Speaker 2: increase in their sort of their sweat and their heart
Speaker 2: rate goes up and things like that. People with a
Speaker 2: fantas not so much. Pretty much flat lines, right, So
Speaker 2: just so all the doing is reading the words on
Speaker 2: a screen, so that sort of from that those data
Speaker 2: you could sort of put the story together that, yeah,
Speaker 2: then they're not gonna be as emotionally engaged when they're
Speaker 2: reading fiction. Oh, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: And I assume it's the same if they're listening to
Speaker 1: an audiobook.
Speaker 2: I think, so we haven't done that with the audio yet,
Speaker 2: but interesting, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1: Seems like it would be if the problem is actually
Speaker 1: visualizing what's going on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you could take a go go one
Speaker 2: step further, right and say that if you have strong
Speaker 2: imagery and you're listening to an audiobook or a podcast
Speaker 2: while you're driving, and you have these vivid imagery, right,
Speaker 2: it's gonna be way more dangerous, right, You're gonna your
Speaker 2: time to break. You're gonna have it like it's like
Speaker 2: having a high blood alcohol level. So I mean, let's
Speaker 2: be clear, we haven't tested that. It's just the HYPOTHESI
Speaker 2: but yeah, oh fascinating.
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, the thing that is it is always
Speaker 1: fascinating the most and lots of my episodes involved this
Speaker 1: is just the diversity from head to head, how how
Speaker 1: different people's realities are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you.
Speaker 1: Know, maybe there's this question driving tests in one hundred
Speaker 1: years from triving cars, but if there were, you know,
Speaker 1: when they say, okay, look we need a test you
Speaker 1: for this and if so, then we're going to make
Speaker 1: sure your car can't go close enough to the It's.
Speaker 2: On out to do a list of experiments. But I
Speaker 2: think it could be a thing or just talking on
Speaker 2: the phone. Right, you're just visualizing what the other person's saying.
Speaker 2: It's going to make a difference.
Speaker 1: Now, how does this pan out a court of law?
Speaker 1: If somebody is hyper fantasic and it has very vivid imagery,
Speaker 1: does that mean it is any more accurate?
Speaker 2: So there's some data suggests that that when your imagery
Speaker 2: is more vivid, your memories are more likely to be corrupted. Right, Wow,
Speaker 2: So you saw something yesterday and I say, then today,
Speaker 2: Then I say, oh, was there a red car there?
Speaker 2: And you try and remember back and you imagine a
Speaker 2: red card. It's very vivid. You have the original memory,
Speaker 2: red car, they're happening together. And then the next day
Speaker 2: I say, was a red car and your memory comes
Speaker 2: back and bang the red cars glued onto that into
Speaker 2: that scene. Let's say, and now you remember with a
Speaker 2: red car. Right, If your imagery is less vivid, weaker,
Speaker 2: then that probably shouldn't happen. As there's some evidence to
Speaker 2: suggest that. And we're running some studies now looking at
Speaker 2: this idea of false memory, false memories, and if they're
Speaker 2: gonna pop up more with strong imagery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so one of the other class I teach
Speaker 1: you is the brain and the law, and I always
Speaker 1: teach about I would's testimony and the difficulties there like this,
Speaker 1: But I had never considered this question of whether eyewitnesses
Speaker 1: should be tested for their position along the fantasia spectrum,
Speaker 1: so you have some sense of whether they're less likely
Speaker 1: to be accurate.
Speaker 2: And it's I think of imagery as just a format
Speaker 2: of our thoughts, right, like this is is distribution. Most
Speaker 2: people were somewhere in the middle here, this normal distribution,
Speaker 2: and each tale you think strong hype, fantasia or idaic
Speaker 2: imagery as it was called sort of a couple of
Speaker 2: decades ago. And then people with a fantasia, people say,
Speaker 2: is it a disorder? Is it a condition? What do
Speaker 2: we call it? I don't think. I don't think it's
Speaker 2: not a disorder. That's that's it's not You shouldn't diagnose it.
Speaker 2: There's no think about a cure, none of that. Right,
Speaker 2: It's part of the normal you diversity, cognitive diversity that
Speaker 2: we all know live in but like you said, it
Speaker 2: will change a range of things, and that's what we're
Speaker 2: testing now. It does change if your thoughts have a
Speaker 2: different format. It is going to change you know, a
Speaker 2: bunch of things in life. So it does change things.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things I study is you know, synesthesia,
Speaker 1: and it's the same issue where it's not a disorder
Speaker 1: some these stage just it's just.
Speaker 5: A different way to perceive reality.
Speaker 1: So tell us about alexithymia. You had mentioned to me
Speaker 1: the other day that there's a relationship here. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we ran this large so define it.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Yes, So alexithymia is this condition where people sort
Speaker 2: of have a lack of emotional response or they feel
Speaker 2: less emotion.
Speaker 1: And they're not very good at diagnosing themselves others.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you could say it's I once say it's
Speaker 2: towards a spectrum of autism, but it's kind of in
Speaker 2: that realm, right, and it's the some links to psychopathy.
Speaker 2: So we were testing this as part of a larger
Speaker 2: project looking at empathy, right, And so we measured empathy
Speaker 2: with questionnaires with pictures with these paradigms where you you know,
Speaker 2: here's a horrible disease, would you donate to this cause
Speaker 2: and not for profit. We had to show people videos
Speaker 2: across the board and all those things. People with imagery
Speaker 2: scored higher and with empathy than those with a fantasia
Speaker 2: and why that's the question. So we thought we original
Speaker 2: hypothesis was that with the questionnaires you see it, but
Speaker 2: once you had a video or a picture, there should
Speaker 2: be no difference because imagery shouldn't make a difference, right,
Speaker 2: But it seemed to even with the videos, So we
Speaker 2: think it's it's it's initially like, if you're being described
Speaker 2: with a scenario and you can conjure up and imagine
Speaker 2: that you have this virtuality thing coming up, you're going
Speaker 2: to feel more for that individual or whatever whoever it
Speaker 2: might be. And over the years that happens more and
Speaker 2: more and more, so overall your empathy builds and gets stronger.
Speaker 2: So it's the role of imagery in the moment, but
Speaker 2: it's also a developmental thing. So then we started testing
Speaker 2: alex A thime Yere as part of that, and that
Speaker 2: sort of is part of the experiment.
Speaker 1: And you had interviewed a memory champion with a fantasia tell,
Speaker 1: which is so surprising, right, But it's surprising because of
Speaker 1: her technique that she used.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a lady in Australia who's actually written
Speaker 2: a book on memory, and she's I think she's one.
Speaker 2: It was international or national memory competitions, right, And I
Speaker 2: think that the most common method is this memory palace, right.
Speaker 2: And this is idea that you imagine your house and
Speaker 2: you put them different memories. Let's say it's a deck
Speaker 2: of cards. You have this card here on the entrance,
Speaker 2: and then you walk in the other cards here, and
Speaker 2: you make them a bit more exciting than just a card.
Speaker 2: So you and you walk through and you remember the
Speaker 2: deck of cards in this random order. Now, she could
Speaker 2: do this without imagery, and so I asked her how
Speaker 2: does she do it? She said, well, I don't use
Speaker 2: my house or anything visual. I used a spatial layer
Speaker 2: of my neighborhood and the roads and where houses are
Speaker 2: and trees. And she has perfect or near perfect spatial layout.
Speaker 2: But the weird thing is when I think of space,
Speaker 2: I think of objects in space, and she doesn't. She
Speaker 2: has these points in space, but they're perfectly laid out.
Speaker 2: And this ties in with experiments we've run on measures
Speaker 2: of mental rotation or space questionnaires on spatial abilities and
Speaker 2: people with a fantasia score as well or sometimes better
Speaker 2: than people with imagery. So it seems to be the
Speaker 2: spatial layout of things seems almost perfectly maintained despite the
Speaker 2: object imagery not being there. Yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 1: And as you know, you know ed Catmill did all
Speaker 1: these things with patterns of how you make let's say,
Speaker 1: a hand out of little patches of space and where
Speaker 1: the light bounces off and what color of the late
Speaker 1: carriers and other stuff. A fantasic he picture it, but
Speaker 1: he understood the physical, you know, the physical sense of it, like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's the thing, and that's what's bouncing off of it.
Speaker 1: So I happen to be mostly a fantasic. I'm much
Speaker 1: closer to that end of the spectrum, and so I
Speaker 1: totally get it about this lady saying, Okay, look, if
Speaker 1: i'magining my neighborhood, I know the feeling that this is
Speaker 1: over to this side of that, that's over here and
Speaker 1: that's behind me. But I'm not picturing it particularly well.
Speaker 1: I just but I have a clear sense of three
Speaker 1: dimensional space, and.
Speaker 2: Are they points in space or are they just space existing?
Speaker 1: I feel like more it's just space existing which is
Speaker 1: what I assume Ed has as well, because he probably
Speaker 1: told you.
Speaker 4: But you know, he first started.
Speaker 1: Realizing this when he was at a friend's house who's
Speaker 1: a meditator. Said, Okay, I just picture a sphere in
Speaker 1: the air, and I just couldn't do it. And I
Speaker 1: can't do that either. It doesn't really make sense to me.
Speaker 1: But I can, of course have a sense of a sphere,
Speaker 1: like I could touch the sphere and whatever, but I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't have any particularly good picture of it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the image of it. I hear that so often this
Speaker 2: someone does a meditation cost and I say picture this
Speaker 2: pist yourself, and they're like, what do they mean? I
Speaker 2: can't do it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, my entire life.
Speaker 1: This thing about count sheep to go to sleep.
Speaker 4: I didn't understand. But can you do that?
Speaker 1: I mean, are you able to picture sheep as such?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I can?
Speaker 2: Like, right, yeah I can. Yeah, he's he's jumping over
Speaker 2: the fence or whatever. Yeah I can. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 2: it's not but let's be clear. So it's not like
Speaker 2: if I'm seeing a sheep right now. It's not that strong.
Speaker 2: But I have a conscious experience of a sheep. The
Speaker 2: color I have to kind of zoom in. If I
Speaker 2: want to get the details of the face and the eyes,
Speaker 2: I can't get the details across the whole sheep simultaneously.
Speaker 2: There's a capacity kind of issue there. But I have
Speaker 2: a conscious experience of a sheep, and I can make
Speaker 2: it move around in my mind's eye. Amazing.
Speaker 1: What have you found about creativity?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so creativity is one of these things that I
Speaker 2: get emails all the time, right, people saying I couldn't
Speaker 2: be an artist because I have a fantasia. This is
Speaker 2: the reason why I couldn't be creative, right, And so
Speaker 2: we've run experiments on this. We haven't published the data yet,
Speaker 2: but in all the there's all this sort of what
Speaker 2: we call divergent thinking tasks. Right, We've got to come
Speaker 2: up with crazy ideas for a paper clip, as many
Speaker 2: as you can say in three minutes. So we ran
Speaker 2: a hole, got a whole of data. People with a fantasia,
Speaker 2: people with imagery almost no difference, and in fact, on
Speaker 2: you know, slightly better in people with a fantasia. We
Speaker 2: ran convergent thinking tasks, the opposite where people have to
Speaker 2: converge across the board. All these different things we ran.
Speaker 2: There's no evidence that people with a fantasia should be
Speaker 2: less creative.
Speaker 1: Give us an example of conversion thinking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that might be where you so typically, so
Speaker 2: let's say you're you know, you're in a you're trying
Speaker 2: to come up with a new product or something, and
Speaker 2: a meeting at work and you come up with all
Speaker 2: these crazy ideas, one hundred different ideas. Then you've got
Speaker 2: to converge all those crazy ideas down and to say
Speaker 2: just five different things. So you've got to set will
Speaker 2: they work, Well, they won't work. So we came up
Speaker 2: with a task of trying sort of get at the
Speaker 2: essence of that. And I thought that would show a
Speaker 2: difference because I'm like, well, if you're trying and design
Speaker 2: a chair and you imagine a chair with three legs,
Speaker 2: it's going to fall over, and I'm using my imagery
Speaker 2: because I have imagery, right then then that's going to
Speaker 2: make show a difference. And it didn't. So we haven't
Speaker 2: been able to find any evidence that people with a
Speaker 2: fantasia are less creative. Again with the ways in which
Speaker 2: we measure it, and there is some data, you know,
Speaker 2: large population data saying that generally speaking, people with a
Speaker 2: fantasia are more commonly found in seat of stem science, technology,
Speaker 2: mathematical kind of jobs, and people with imagery are slightly
Speaker 2: more likely to be found in the creative industries. Again,
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's causal, but there is that
Speaker 2: trend there that people have documented as well.
Speaker 1: I'll be interested to follow those numbers and see if
Speaker 1: they hold true, because this was the surprise for Ed
Speaker 1: when he realized that so many people have picked sorry fantasic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there have been. There have been. We had
Speaker 2: an art exhibition in the UK and all the artists
Speaker 2: had a fantasia and there's visual there were sculptures, there's
Speaker 2: a conceptual, you name it, and amazing art. I thought,
Speaker 2: I don't think then there's no reason we can see
Speaker 2: or you know, or have measured yet that there should
Speaker 2: be a deficit in creativity. And tell us about episodic memory.
Speaker 2: Episodic because episodes are in your life, so childhood memories,
Speaker 2: what I did last week, what I did last year,
Speaker 2: and so the way one of the main ways of
Speaker 2: measuring this is with a type of interview. So we
Speaker 2: use a task like that where people have to sort
Speaker 2: of bring a memory to mind that was like one
Speaker 2: month ago, six months ago, one year ago, different sort
Speaker 2: of control, try and control as best we can the time.
Speaker 2: And we found that people with a fantasia come up
Speaker 2: with less details from their memory than people with imagery,
Speaker 2: and it was less vivid than a whole lot of
Speaker 2: things were different about the experience, but simply the objects
Speaker 2: in the memory they could name were less if you
Speaker 2: have a fantasia. It's not like catastrophically dramatically different. Was
Speaker 2: clearly significant, So doesn't The memories are still there, but
Speaker 2: there is a clear difference that.
Speaker 1: Doesn't surprise me at all. I have a very difficult
Speaker 1: time pulling up memories because I'm not picturing much of anything.
Speaker 1: As you know, I've done a lot of research on
Speaker 1: how we judge the passage of time, and so much
Speaker 1: of it has to do with how much footage you
Speaker 1: can bring up. So if you have a really exciting
Speaker 1: weekend and so it says, hey, how long has it
Speaker 1: been since Friday? Said, oh my god, it's been ever
Speaker 1: since I was at work on Friday. Because this, But
Speaker 1: so it makes me wonder if people with hyper fantasia
Speaker 1: feel as though they've lived longer because they've got all
Speaker 1: this memory, they all this footage, they can draw on.
Speaker 2: I think, so, have you ever done the float tank?
Speaker 4: I haven't.
Speaker 2: Ah, So that's one of the things where I completely
Speaker 2: lose track of time. But I got my thoughts. I
Speaker 2: get to these deep spirals of thoughts and this, and
Speaker 2: I'm imagining this thing. It's I'm not hallucinating because people
Speaker 2: say they hallucinate in the float tank. And then I think, well,
Speaker 2: it's probably been five minutes, and then like fifty minutes
Speaker 2: is up like that, and I completely use track of time.
Speaker 2: But I think it's a really interesting thing. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I want to do this experiment now and see if
Speaker 2: hyper fantastics have, like I feel like their life has
Speaker 2: been much longer because every time they recall things, it
Speaker 2: gets these sort of high reds images get jammed in down.
Speaker 1: So when they look for the footage of what happened
Speaker 1: since I saw you last time, well this, this, this, this, this,
Speaker 1: it's been a month there. That was my interview with
Speaker 1: Joel Pearson, and the bottom line is that there's a
Speaker 1: great deal of internal variety of experience, much more than
Speaker 1: any of us would naively expect. What we learn with
Speaker 1: time and experience and scientific study is that when you
Speaker 1: introspect about what experience is like. All you can ever
Speaker 1: do is introspect on what your experience is like. As
Speaker 1: a scientific community, we're really just at the foot of
Speaker 1: the mountain on this topic. There's so much more exploration
Speaker 1: that has to be done to understand the differences in
Speaker 1: reality from head to head. Just as one example, a
Speaker 1: new study came out about what's called and endophasia, which
Speaker 1: is a lack of internal voice. So phasia refers to language,
Speaker 1: endophasia means internal language, and an endophasia means a lack
Speaker 1: of internal language and endophasia, So it turns out you
Speaker 1: might have thought that everyone has the same degree of
Speaker 1: talking to themselves on the inside, but they don't. The
Speaker 1: loudness of your internal radio differs from head to head,
Speaker 1: And when this sort of thing gets subjected to study,
Speaker 1: you can see that people all the way at one
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum with an indophasia no internal voice,
Speaker 1: they are worse at memorizing words because presumably they're not
Speaker 1: hearing the words over and over, and they're worse at
Speaker 1: recognizing rhymes that are written on a page but not heard,
Speaker 1: because presumably if your brain is imagining how the word sound,
Speaker 1: you'll immediately pick up on rhymes, even if they're not obvious,
Speaker 1: like enough and stuff or though and foe and go Anyway.
Speaker 1: I haven't studied this population yet, but they may well
Speaker 1: be better at some other things, like without the constraints
Speaker 1: of verbal thought, they might approach certain types of problems
Speaker 1: more creatively or unconventionally. Or maybe they're privileged in certain
Speaker 1: artistic abilities where visual experiences are more prominent. I don't
Speaker 1: know yet until we study this, but that's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that one could look for. We all tackle
Speaker 1: the tasks of the world given the tools that we have.
Speaker 1: And this is a more general story, not just about
Speaker 1: our brains, but our bodies. We all have different genetic
Speaker 1: programs that unpack different bodies. Some taller, some shorter, some narrower,
Speaker 1: some wider. Some people are good sprinters and others are
Speaker 1: good marathon runners, and.
Speaker 2: On and on.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, all bodies say cool, I'll
Speaker 1: just figure out how to use the machinery of the
Speaker 1: world chairs and cars and bicycles and surfboards and pogo
Speaker 1: sticks and so on. Some people have advantages for certain things,
Speaker 1: like Kareem old Jabbar given his height for playing basketball,
Speaker 1: or Michael Phelps his wingspan for swimming. But for the
Speaker 1: rest of us, we cobble together our many different skills
Speaker 1: to manage our tasks in the world, and this is
Speaker 1: the way that we all find our way through the
Speaker 1: mental landscape. Whether you are someone who has internal visualization
Speaker 1: like a movie or instead just has concepts, you can
Speaker 1: both do art, you can develop different approaches to tackle
Speaker 1: that mountain, and more likely you even cobble together many
Speaker 1: different approaches. So when we talk about neurodiversity, it goes
Speaker 1: deeper than you think. Quite possibly, we are each a
Speaker 1: minority of one. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast
Speaker 1: for more information and to find further reading. Send me
Speaker 1: an email at podcast ask an Eagleman dot com with
Speaker 1: questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to
Speaker 1: leave comments Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this
Speaker 1: is Inner Cosmos.