May 10, 2016 • 55 mins
Mental images play an important role in our daily experience of reality, from thoughts of the past to daydreams, fantasies and entire worlds of the imagination. Just what's happening when we see through the mind's eye and what on Earth is it like for individuals who experience aphantasia and experience no visual imagination at all? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from House Stop
work dot Com. Okay, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
today's episode, concerns the mind's eye, concerns mental imagery, and
(00:23):
so we decided that the best way to kick off
this episode is to take you on a little guided
mental journey. YEA, so close your eyes unless you're driving
or doing something that requires your eyes to be open,
and in that case, don't close your eyes if you
If you are able to close your eyes, close your
eyes if not. Just imagine you're eight years old and
you're walking along a beach with your mother, your barefoot.
(00:48):
The tide is coming in, and you see trails of
footprints leading back and forth along the beach where other
people have walked the same path today. But the waves
are coming higher and higher and slowly smoothing all those
footprints away. But then you look up at your mother
and you notice something strange. She's wearing armor, a steel
(01:08):
chest plate and a visored helm with chainmail drooping across
her arms and legs, rustling lightly as she walks across
the front of her chest plate is a painted figure.
It's Foghorn, Leghorn. She raises the visor on her helm
and smiles at you. A mosquito hovers in front of
her face, and she flails one arm to knock it away,
(01:31):
and you both laugh. But then you notice something else.
Your mother has a piece of metal dangling from her
hip opposite you. It's a long sword. She puts one
hand on the hilt and says, don't worry, only a
bit of insurance in case he shows up. A wave
of seawater rolls up over your feet, washing dry sand
(01:52):
from between your toes, and you ask who. Then there's
a faint rumbling under your feet. It's not just the
tickling of the waves. The ground is shaking, and about
two out in the water, a dark shape begins to
rise up from the waves. At first it's just a green,
black lump, but then the huge glaring eyes, the cavernous mouth,
(02:16):
climbing higher and higher as it approaches. It's Godzilla. Not
the friendly Godzilla who defends Earth against all the heel monsters.
This is the angry Godzilla who breathes beams of radiation
and crushes ten story buildings with a single swipe. Your
mother puts an arm across your chest. She draws her
long sword and says stand back. This could get serious,
(02:41):
And with the flip of a switch, her hover boots engage,
her feet lift off the ground, and then she's rocketing
towards the head of the monster to defend the realms
of humankind. Alright, so, uh, we we try to draw
in a few different types of of imagery. There are
a few different types of memory memories. Right. We wanted
to have sort of generic landscape that would be easy
(03:04):
for a lot of people to picture, like a beach.
Most people have some kind of image, generically of what
a beach looks like. We also wanted something familiar. Usually
they say to picture a relative or familiar family member.
So hopefully you've got an image of a mother or
family figure there. But then also some pop culture images. Right,
most people hopefully know what Godzilla looks like. If you don't,
(03:24):
you gotta go back and watch the original Godzilla from
the fifties and right, uh, and then uh and then
fall horn like horn and personal favorite of mine. You know.
One of the interesting things with this exercise is to
think back on it and think back of the specifics
and ask yourself questions like who did I have a
more vivid memory of what I looked like as a child,
(03:48):
what my mother looked like, what Godzilla looked like, and
in these details are not necessarily telling of your relationship
with your mother versus your relationship with Godzilla. But but
but it it kind of raises our awareness of the
vast spectrum of visual stimuli that are informing our our
inner vision of the world. Yeah, and this is a
(04:10):
strange thing because the only person who can experience your
mental imagery is you. You can sort of describe your
mental imagery to other people, but nobody can take a
look at it to see what it is you're picturing
in your mind. So this is something that you largely
have to deal with entirely on your own, and you
don't know how similar or how different your own process
(04:31):
of mental imagery is to that of other people unless
you really put your heads together and start talking about
your mental images and detail and trying to figure out
if their differences. It's not a standard thing that people do,
really right, because even to describe it, if I describe
my mental images to you, they become your mental images.
Like it's in a way I'm kind of panting off
the blueprints, and then you build a different building. It's
(04:53):
the same building, but a different building. And likewise, maybe
you paint, maybe you write, and some other artistic medium,
you create music to try and convey these images in
your head, but you're still but you're still then limited
by your artist artistic ability and then under people's interpretations
of those works of art. You know, I already realized.
I didn't think about this when I was writing this,
(05:14):
but I did already see a contradiction in what I
told people to imagine the original angry Godzilla. But then
I also said green black, right, Well, Godzilla in color
is sort of greenish black, but the original angry Godzilla
black and white. He's just you know, you look at
him and he just looks like this charred monster. You know.
(05:34):
So this is a this is already a mental confabulation
on my part. I'm imagining a Godzilla that never existed
anywhere in reality. But anyway, so most of you were
with us there on that journey. You were to some
extent able to picture some of the things we were
talking about. You could see in your mind's eye the beach,
the armor, your mother, the sword, the fog Horn, Leghorn,
(05:57):
the Godzilla. But there are some people who probably couldn't
see any of that. They were there with us, they
were understanding the concepts, they were able to follow the plot,
whatever plot there was, and they could probably recount a
list of the events that happened in the little scene
we just described, but they couldn't see any of it
(06:19):
in their imagination. And this is the concept we're gonna
be talking about today. One study has found that this
might be about up to one in fifty people who
have this kind of experience where they just don't create
pictures inside their mind the way most people do. Uh
And this condition now hasn't come to be known as
(06:40):
a fantasia or the blindness of the mind's I So,
the American biotech leader Craig Venter, you know about him, right.
He's famous for being a leader in the quest of
sequence the human genome, and he's famous for creating a
synthetic organisms. Uh So, he has actually described that he
has an unusual way of thinking, a way of thinking
(07:02):
that's essentially purely conceptual, like we've been describing, without any
mental imagery. Venter says, quote, it's like having a computer
store the information, but you don't have a screen attached
to the computer. He's describing his own mind. I don't know.
I I have trouble understanding what that would be like.
(07:25):
But maybe maybe to understand it better, we should first
look at some facts about what the mind's eye itself
is before we get into the blindness of the mind's eye.
What's going on when you create pictures in your head. Well,
of course we're talking about mental imagery here, but also
there's some other sensations thrown in as well. It all
amounts to a quasi perceptional experience that occurs in the
(07:48):
absence of the appropriate external stimuli. Um. So, I can
close my eyes, I can see a deceased loved one's face.
I can hear their voice. I can imagine myself standing
on the shore of a distant ocean, past ocean, or
even some future sure that I haven't even walked on yet.
I mean, this, this is the kind of thing that
I mean, most of us take for granted. We can,
(08:09):
we use it, we employ it every day. Um Well,
I mean, as I did with the Angry Godzilla and color,
you can picture things you've never actually seen, right, Yeah,
you can? Yeah, there are things. If you're like me,
I feel there are things in books. For instance, no
one has ever painted a picture of this character or
this scene. Uh, and yet you have a very crystal
(08:30):
clear vision, Like I have a better visual memory of
some things that have occurred in books than things that
have occurred in real life. You know. Oh yeah, yeah,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Uh Is isn't
it so weird to finally see a book you've read
but it's never been illustrated or made into a film
or anything finally made visual by someone else? It's always
(08:51):
people always have the same reaction. That's not what I thought.
So and so looked, like, let's know what it looks like. Yeah. Now,
the things we perceive in the mind's eye, they're they're
products of memory. They're constructed from specific or varied memories.
They may be accurate, they may be amalgams of diverse influences. Really,
this runs the gamut from something you saw yesterday that
you near perfectly remember, to have you know, a vague
(09:13):
site from your childhood that you at least think you remember,
to an envisioned future scene in your own life, something
you dreamt, something you daydreamed, landscape, be viewed from the
imagined walls of a fictional world, or your own creation
of a of an author's creation. It's just like pretty
much any time we are envisioning something, any time we
are closing our eyes or even with our eyes open
(09:35):
are imagining something, we are seeing something in our mind
that is, of course the mind's eye, uh, doing its thing. Yeah.
And I think this has always been a very interesting
avenue for philosophy to investigate, because it is something that
we recognized was sort of strange about the human experience
(09:55):
before we had neuroscience or psychology or or any of
these scientific ways of investigating it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
because because it it obviously plays such a central role
in the way we navigate the world and the way
we think about time and a world of movable objects. Right. Um.
And so yeah, we've been as long as we've had philosophers,
(10:17):
as long as we've had people among us with with
time to you know, look up from their labors and
think about the human condition, we've been thinking about the
mind's eye. Um. On the podcast here, we've talked about
the method of loki before the the ancient Greek technique
in which person utilizes spatial memory to memorize nonspatial information. Uh. Look,
(10:40):
that kind of plays into into some of this. That
involves a certain amount of a reflection on what's on
how we're using the mind's eye. You know. I I've
tried to use the method of LOCAI and I have
not been very good at it. Yeah, I wonder if
I'm just not doing it right, like I when I'm
able to to really get it set in my mind
as help me remember. By the way, this is so
(11:02):
a quick version of it is, if you need to
make a list of digits of numbers to remember, you're
not going to remember those digits. So instead you imagine
your house being full of odd characters that each embody
one of the digits in that number sequence, and then
you can remember by picturing the room and where all
(11:22):
of the odd characters were in the room, and then
you just remember what digit they correspond to or something
like that. Yeah. Like a very simplified version of this
that I have employed frequently in the past. It's kind
of like a um uh you know, often called the
memory palace because it's an imagined place that you fill
with these examples. But oftentimes I only have room in
(11:44):
my mind for one example, and that is, uh, that's
when I am a swimming lapse and I want to
remember what number lap I'm on, because if I forget
the lap number, then I'm going to make myself revert
to the to the lower number. So if I if
I don't know for sure I'm on four, I'm gonna
do three. And I don't want to keep doing one
less than I want to do because I'm gonna wear
(12:06):
myself out right. But I'm also busy swimming. I'm having
a hard time necessarily remembering which lap I am currently on.
So instead of trying to remember four, as easy as
that would seem, I find it easier to just force
myself to think of, say, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
like think of think of that, and that'll stick in
my head just a little better as I'm you know,
(12:27):
vigorously of swimming these laps um, you know, So it'll
just be some sort of visual association with just a
single digit. I don't know, I don't know if anybody
else out there has has done something of that that
that nature, but that is kind of a simplified um, good, creamy,
what's what's your visual image. For eight, I can't think
of anything for eight. Oh, for eight, I think of
(12:51):
Alan robe Gerlays the Voyeur, where you have a character
who keeps making figure eights out of rope. Yeah, so
I think of him setting by the shore, um, not
quite contemplating horrible things and making little figure eights. That's
a good thing to have in your mind here at
the gym or the y m c A guess wherever
you swim laps. So one of the important things when
(13:13):
when thinking about the memory Palace and then ultimately thinking
about memory and the mind's eye, is just to to
refresh here a little bit about human memory itself. Human
memory is not just like a tape, real rolling in
the brain that we just oh, let's go back and
look and see what happened yesterday. Human memory in multiple ways.
It's not multiple certainly not that accurate, right, because human
(13:34):
memory consists of several different types of memory that are
working in uh kind of an unequal chorus um to
create the human experience of memory that we have. So
we have sensory memory, um, you know what something feels like,
what it smells, it smells like, that sort of thing.
We have short term memory, and we have long term
term memory. We have and then we divide long term
(13:58):
memory out. We have explicit memories of consciousness, we have
implicit memories of unconsciousness. We have declarative memories of facts
and events. We have procedural memories involved that involves skills
and tasks. We have episodic memory that deals with events
and experiences, and we have semantic memory that concerns facts
and concepts. So we have all these different types of memories,
(14:19):
each one dealing with in a way certain you know,
different types of skills, different types of ways of utilizing
memory when we engage with the world. And studies have
shown in the past that, uh, if you have a
part of the brain associated with the one type of
memory is injured, sometimes you see those other types of
memory compensating. So it's like a a in a way,
(14:40):
it's like a staff. It's like a staff of different
memory drones, and they all have their jobs to do.
But if somebody is slacking, then it may fall to
another employee to uh to to you know, to step
up and and cover for their shortcomings. Yeah. I think
that's a good metaphor that the brain is more like
a workforce than a machine. If one part of a
machine and breaks, the whole machine probably isn't gonna work.
(15:02):
But if one part of a workforce is slacking or
calls in sick today, the others can often find a
way to cover for them, right, And they might cover
you know, everyone does their job a little bit differently,
so their their skill set might allow them to cover
in a slightly different way. But back to philosophers. So
philosophers have continue to argue about the minds, and we're
certainly not gonna be able to do an exhausted journey
(15:25):
through all of their their takes. But you go back
as far as Plato, for example, when Plato brought us
one of the most famous examples of this. Uh, he
utilizes mental images in his famous allegory of the Cave. Yeah,
and that's sort of the idea that the world that
we perceive is not the true reality, you know. But
Plato had this whole belief in ideal forms, you know,
(15:46):
things that were the more true version of the thing
than the thing we're familiar with. Right, there's a realm
of forms out there, and in that realm of forms,
there's such thing as a perfect chair. But in this
world that we can only build in perfect chairs that
inch maybe a little closer and closer towards that unobtainable ideal. Yeah,
And so his metaphor for explaining this was that of
(16:07):
the cave, where there are people who are chained up
in a cave and they don't even really realize that
they're in a cave, and uh, and there's an opening
to the cave through which light comes through and figures
pass in front of the opening to the cave, casting
shadows on the wall of the cave, and all we
see we're facing the back of the cave of the wall,
and we see the shadows, and we think the shadows
(16:28):
are the real things, but they're not there. They're only
the the sort of like the vague outlines of the
things that that are the true forms. If anyone out
there is watching The Path on Hulu, there's actually a
scene um in the first episode where they roll out
this this allegory and it's it's pretty entertaining, but but
(16:50):
I mean, certainly it's an it's an allegory. You can
have a lot of fun with either trying to contrast
your worldview to another individual's worldview, to try and win
someone over with your true version of reality versus there
they're you know, their illusion based understanding of reality. But
it also gets down to like what is our perception
(17:10):
of reality itself? These mental images that fill our mind
when we close our eyes, those are imperfect. But also
the mental images when we have our eyes open, we're
still just in a sense, we are still just seeing
those shadows on the walls of the cave. Yeah. So
Aristotle also referred to mental imagery and his work referred
to it as a as a fantasia with an A
(17:33):
with a P, not an APR, not the Disney movie. Uh.
And this was central to his theory of memory. Yeah,
though you know, I can see why the Disney movie
would be called that, I mean they it evokes the
concept of fantasy, even though he didn't I think directly
mean fantasy and the way we do, like somebody coming
up with a with a fantasy to escape from life. Yeah,
(17:54):
it was the idea of being able to to imagine
things in your mind. Now. Reneed I Carts also thought
a lot about mental imagery and how they form in
the mind. Uh. The view that an idea is a
quasi perceptual thing, perhaps even pictorial formed in the imagination,
and he did distinguish between images formed in the brain
(18:15):
and ideas in the mind. Because he was a duelist.
He saw uh, he saw the mind and the body
as separate. The essence of mind is thought, and the
body is an extension of it. Thoughts are not extended
in space, but the body is. Now, that's where in
philosophy you have. You have like idealism, which states that
reality is equivalent to mental images, and the mental images
(18:37):
are reality itself. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want
to take this very far, the people who believe in
hard core idealism would probably say that there is no
like that reality is merely the mental image of a
higher being or something like that. Yeah. So, as you
can see, you can really go down the deep end,
into the deep end contemplating mental imagery and what are
(18:58):
the philosophical ramifications of it. Um, there's a you know,
there's a lot, There's a great deal more we can
discuss this kind of the philosophical groundwork. I guess you
could say. Um. For instance, though in the nineteen eighties
there's a great deal of debate over the over the
connection from between mental images and language. So one side
argued that representations underlying the experience of mental imagery are
(19:21):
the same type as those used in the language. And
then there was the other camp, and they held that
that these representations served to depict, not describe objects. Okay,
so what does that mean in practice? Well, my understanding
is that basically comes down to, you know, to what
extent is mental imagery like the the the groundwork of
language itself. Um Well, like I said earlier, at times,
(19:42):
it feels like it's it's very difficult to um to
overstate the importance of mental imagery in our perceptions of reality.
Um So, just how deep does that go? Does it
underlie just about everything in cognition? Does an underlie language?
Does it underlie um, just every little detail of our experience? Yeah, well,
(20:03):
this does seem to sort of tie into us stuff
we talked about in the Tip of the Tongue episode,
where you can you can perhaps you can have the
face in your mind, you know, oh, I know this
actor's face, and you can picture it, and you can
know the actor's name well enough that if somebody said it,
you'd be like, yeah, that's it. You'd immediately recognize it.
(20:25):
But you can't make the connection but of course, in
recent years we've seen the study of mental imagery make
a more scientific transition. I think we we've started to
look at it from a neuroscientific point of view, where
people are saying, Okay, well, let's identify what brain regions
are actually being used and activated when people are in
the process of coming up with mental pictures. And one
(20:48):
of the sources we used for this episode, it was
a paper by Adams Zalman and colleagues, and and uh,
these authors identify that essentially in the brain voluntary imagery
that the mental images you come up with have been
associated in previous research with the brains frontal parietal executive
systems or of the executive control you know, the president
(21:09):
of your brain sitting there directing traffic, and with the
posterior brain regions, which you know in the back of
the brain that's often the identified with visual processing. And
together you sort of put these things, uh into a
teamwork relationship, and they are what allows you to come
up with mental pictures. That's right. And uh, we've also
(21:31):
seen studies where taking f M R I, we've done
p and we've done pet scans on individuals summoning mental images.
You know, they're asked to summon a mental image, and
then we look at the brain see what it's doing
in real time, and uh reveals that activation in brain
areas that are used in visual perception, which doesn't sound
that surprising. Uh, this is pretty cool. Visual and mental
(21:52):
imaging share roughly two thirds of the same active activated
brain regions. So there's a lot of a lot of
cross over there between the visual and mental imaging systems,
a lot of shared mechanics. Yeah, Like if, for example,
if you show somebody a picture of somebody's face and
then you ask the same test subject imagine this person's face,
(22:12):
a lot of their brain activity is going to be
roughly similar. Right. In fact, study found that when the
same task is performed in perception and then with eyes
closed using mental images, you get overlaps. So so again,
a lot of the same mechanisms, a lot of the
same brain equipment is being used, whether you're dealing with
(22:35):
just visual perception or mental perception. Of course, that's funny
because the phenomenal experience is completely different, right, Like you, uh,
somebody to somebody who has a fantasia. This might be
new information, but it's obviously not going to be new
information to most people out there. Uh, when you picture
(22:56):
something in your mind's eye, it is extremely different than
seeing it in front of you. But it's hard to
explain how it's different. Yeah, you know, Yeah, you know.
There's a there's a two thousand fIF BBC article titled
a Fantasia A Life without Mental Images by James Gallagher,
and I'll be sure to include a link to that
(23:17):
article on the landing page for this episode Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com because in addition to running
through some examples of uh, some accounts of individuals who
have this blindness of the mind's eye, which we're going
to discuss more here, there's also a quiz you can take, uh,
and it's just an eight question quiz about asking you
like the level of detail that you experience when you
(23:39):
are asked to mentally envision uh, you know someone you
see every day? Uh, A sunrise, I believe, clouds in
the sky, the clouds clearing in the sky, a thunderstorm,
the the these sort of images some of the same
kind of stuff that we ask you to summon at
the beginning of this episode. Yeah, but it doesn't just
ask you can you picture it? It asks you to
rank level of details. So, for example, it might say, picture,
(24:03):
get someone in mind, and maybe a close friend or
spouse or close family member, and picture that person, and
then on a scale of not very well at all,
too extremely well, how well can you see in your
mind's eye the contours of their face and the shape
of their body, and what color their eyes are, and
(24:23):
and so it's asking for specific details of the image
to get at the vividness of the picture in your mind.
And that suggests to me, and I think their findings
do suggest so far that it's not just an on
off switch. It's not like you can make pictures with
your mind or you can't. There seems to be a spectrum.
Some people seem to have very intense, very lucid, vivid
(24:47):
mental images. Other people have kind of hazier, blurrier or
more generic mental images. And some people have almost no
mental imagery at all, or even report having none. And
it's so at the opposite into the scale of the
main topic today. You know, we're talking about these a fantasiacs,
but there's also what's come to be known as hyper fantasia, right,
(25:09):
And these would be people who I think would experience
visions of the mind ie with just extreme lucidity is
far compared to most of us. So they're not just
vague pictures, but they have bright colors and vivid details.
So if I tell you imagine a beach, you might
picture sand and waves and maybe some umbrellas. But I
(25:30):
bet you wouldn't naturally say, Okay, I can tell you
there are seven umbrellas in the picture in my mind,
and these are the colors of stripes on the umbrellas.
But somebody might actually be able to have that level
of vividness in their mind's eye. Yeah. This idea of
a spectrum of of of mental detail and visual imagery,
(25:52):
it uh, it really makes you reanalyze just how you're
painting the picture in your head of these memories, you know,
I get. I think we both scored around the same
on this where we had kind of like typical image.
I was in the typical range. Yeah, But even even
then I was I found myself asking questions like, well,
how when I think about these people that I see
(26:13):
every day in my life and they are very important
to me, Uh, you know, what does it mean that
I don't have like just a picture perfect vision of them?
What Does it mean that when I think back on
a beach, I find my like a sunrise on a beach,
I keep thinking of, you know, images of sunrises from
paintings and films more so than actual beach sunrises that
(26:34):
I've witnessed. Do you think about the final scene of
the Warriors? Yeah, that sort of thing. Like I end
up like putting a fictional Instagram filter over all of
these these memories, and I'm not really remembering. I'm not
really summoning a mental image of a thing I actually saw.
I'm summoning this mental image that's composed of these varying elements.
You know. One thing I read when we were doing
(26:56):
our research for this episode was a first person essay
that I came across the software designer Blake Ross, who
was involved in Mozilla Firefox on Facebook, and he's also
done some screenwriting, and he found out after reading an
article I think in either in the New York Times
or in Discover magazine by Carl Zimmer about a fantasia
that he he had this experience, and he also was
(27:19):
just shocked to find out that other people weren't like him.
His discovery was that, oh, I never realized other people
could see pictures in their minds. His whole life, he
thought when people said stuff like picture this, they were
just being metaphorical. He didn't realize other people could actually
hold these pictures in their brains. And in this essay
(27:40):
he starts he recounts how when he found out about this,
he was asking all his friends, what's it like to
picture something in your mind? And asking all these questions
I've never really thought to ask myself about my process
of mental imagery that we're very interesting, like he was
asking his friends, Okay, when you see a picture in
your mind, like you picture a beach, is it still?
Is it a still photograph? Or is it more like
(28:01):
video where things are moving? And that distinction just hit
me like a wrecking ball. I was like, I don't know.
When I picture something in my mind, I can make
it move consciously if I need to. But when I
just picture a beach, it is almost neither still nor moving.
It is it exists in super position between these two things.
(28:24):
It's kept for me, I guess when I think about it,
it's kind of like the old music video for What
Was It? Where the people go into the painting or
into the drawing on take on Me. Yeah, yeah, I
feel like my my mental imagery is kind of like
the take on Me video. It's stuff is moving, but
it's all kind of station are as. Well. Yeah, well,
I mean, I certainly can imagine something moving on purpose,
(28:47):
But when I just picture a thing and I don't
imagine it moving on purpose, I don't think it's still
but it's not moving either. It's very strange. It reminds
me of two of the experience of reading a book,
especially a book that is set more or less in
the real world, And at times I'll find myself stopping
and thinking about, like, oh, I'm picturing this in this
(29:09):
living room from that I that I visited or lived
in at some point in my life, Like that, for
some reason, is the living room that my brain is
drawing in for this setting where I'm picturing this character. Sometimes,
you know, sometimes the character just is that character and
that and there's not really like a firm mental image
in your head exactly what they look like. Other times
(29:30):
you can't shake their um their appearance as being that
of someone you know or or you know a character
actor from a movie, etcetera. But I do find myself
like analyzing, like where are all these elements coming from Like,
some of them are obviously coming from the author. The
author is providing the blueprint, the author is providing the scaffolding.
(29:53):
But then that scaffolding is kind of like magnetically drawing
in elements from my own visual memory. Yeah, definitely, I
know exactly what you're talking about. There. Uh. An interesting
thing about fiction that that Blake Ross says in his
first person essay about this is he He reports that,
so he's always read books, you know, he's enjoyed fiction,
and he's written fiction. But when he writes fiction, he
(30:14):
has almost no visual description because he just doesn't picture
things in his head. And when he reads, he skips
visual description. He just kind of jumps over it. That's
not it has no meaning to him. Really. Huh, yeah,
it's it's it's fascinating. Okay, now it's time to take
a quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when
we come back, more on the mind's eye and a fantasia.
(30:43):
All right, So, just how common is a fantasia? Um,
it's a difficult question because this is something that hasn't
really been uh in the public mind set. It hasn't
been out there. It hasn't been something you could a
pamphle it on until very recently. There was one interesting
study on this from before it had a name. Before this,
a fantasia term came out that was studying sort of
(31:05):
the lack of generative power and mental imagery. And that
that was in two thousand nine, right, study by Fall, yeah,
Bill Fall, psychologists. And what did it find? He found
that between two point one percent and two point seven
percent of participants in his study claimed to have no
visual imagination. So that's where we got that number up
(31:27):
at the beginning that it might be around one in
fifty of you who just didn't see any pictures when
you were following along in the story with us. Yeah, Now,
of course we have to that that number is not
coming from like a you know, large scale study, so
the results aren't really fully supported, but it gives us
sort of at least a ballpark. I think, yeah, it's
(31:48):
something to work with. But but a lot of this
recent research has popped up because of an interesting I'm
about to use a great word here, synergy between between
actual medical research and some writing in the popular press. Actually,
I think like Carl Zimmer's articles had something to do
with people coming out of the woodwork to say, Hey,
(32:09):
now I have this experience of a fantasia. I can't
make mental pictures. But it started with the research of
Adam Zaman, right. Yeah, he's a professor of cognitive and
behavioral neurology of the University of Exeter and Medical School,
and along with co authors uh Um MICHELLEA. De Wira,
and Surio Della Sala, they coined the term a fantasia
(32:32):
in their two thousand fifteen paper Lives Without Imagery congenital
a Fantasia that was published in the journal Cortex. Now,
people had, as we said, previously described things along these
lines like it had always been kind of noted that, well,
there's some people out there who say that they can't
create any mental pictures. But nobody really looked very deeply
into this, and I think some of the earth I
(32:55):
think the earliest example that the office we were looking
at were able to draw on was just the nineteenth century. Now,
this condition and the condition had in these earlier works
of condition had previously been referred to as a defective
revisualization or visual ear reminiscence. What a great word, ear reminiscence.
Somebody was trying to make us say that, yeah, sorry,
(33:16):
not gonna work. It's a fantasia. Uh. And there are
skeptics actually out there who say that that what we're
talking about here does not exist at all. I think
that's fascinating because how would you prove them wrong? Yeah?
And why why would you make that argument? I don't know. Well,
I mean, arguing about the existence of somebody else's internal experience.
I mean, that's just it's crazy. Yeah, I mean it
(33:38):
almost seems seems like you'd have to be making the
counter argument of saying, oh, you don't have any fantasia,
You just have a lazy mind, right, your imagination is
just a bit stunted. But I can understand why people
might be tempted to this direction because I, as I
we've said before, I think you probably would agree with this.
I can't imagine what this is like. Yeah, I have
(33:59):
no ability to you whatsoever, to put myself in a
position of not being able to make mental pictures that
I don't even understand what that means really, Right, It's
kind of like if most of us are more or
less the same computer hardware with differing software. You know,
we can talk all day about I don't understand how
your software works, and this is how my software works.
(34:20):
But here we're talking about essentially a difference in hardware. Um.
I don't know if that analogy completely holds up, but
essentially this is something a little more, uh, you know,
base level is different and and how do we even
begin to describe that to each other? Yeah? So Zaman
first started studying this, I think in two thousand ten, right,
because of the story of this. So there was a
(34:45):
patient who reported having contracted, like acquired a fantasia after
a medical procedure, right, right, So there was a sixty
five year old man who had coronary angioplasty and that's
where they So if you have pockage in one of
your arteries or something like that, they'll open up one
of your arteries and stick a catheter in it, and
(35:06):
somewhere along your body wherever the blockage is occurring, they'll
inflate a small balloon or something inside your artery to
widen it, essentially and allow easier passage of blood. It's
not the kind of thing that you would initially imagine
altering your brain functioning. Yeah, and it's generally not considered
a major surgical procedure. It's like it's you. I think
you're typically left awake for it. They don't even necessarily
(35:28):
put you under, though they might need to give you
some drugs to calm you down. But yeah, it's this
is this is not like a gigantic big deal. So
it's coronary angioplasty. And after the procedure, this patient was
unable to form mental pictures and he had not had
this problem before, and so yeah, and that's where this
(35:48):
study comes in. And afterwards, after there were some pieces
published about this, Zaman started to hear from people who said, Hey,
I have this condition. And not only do I have it,
I didn't get it from I didn't have an angioplastic
or any you know, injury or or surgery. I've always
had it. This is just how I am. So Zaman
(36:10):
and his co author's day they looked at twenty one
of these self reporting cases and then they discovered most
of these individuals um kind of discovered their condition, their
own condition in their twenties when through conversations or or readings,
they found a discrepancy between how other people described the
(36:30):
use of the mind's eye and their own experiences. Can
you imagine. I just have a hard time imagining how
you get that far in life without realizing. Now, this
is another thing that's addressed yet again in that that
essay I mentioned by Blake Ross where he just talks
about how whenever he heard people using the language of
the mind's eye were talking about, you know, picturing something,
(36:51):
imagining something, he thought it was all metaphorical. He thought
they were just talking about conceptually meditating on the idea
of a beach or something. So you're sitting there thinking
about the concepts of sand and water and sunshine and umbrellas.
But he didn't realize that other people were literally seeing
(37:11):
something in their mind. Yeah. I mean, it's like we
said earlier, when one when you have all these different
types of memory, and if one is taking you know,
a back seat, the other ones are going to compensate.
So it's not like if you have a fantasia, you're
not gonna be able to function in society at all.
It seems like quite the contrary. Uh, individuals find a
way to function. They find they just end up utilizing
(37:33):
these different modes of memory. Okay, but of these twenty
one self reporting cases, what did Zamon find about them? Well,
so I found that nineteen of the twenty one were male.
And it's worth noting that this might have more to
do with the readership of Discover magazine. This is not
a randomized, self selective right. This is where people would
(37:53):
have read that Carl Zimmer article and they were the
ones who said, hey, so yeah, I just might have
to do with the male readership Discover. On the to hand,
they found it. Five of the twenty one reported that
it affected relatives as well. This is something I've read
of people's experiences online. Some of them say, one of
my parents has this. Yeah, so this leads us to
believe it might be hereditary. And then ten of the
(38:15):
twenty one said, uh, said that all all versions of
the imagery were affected. Now, now, like I alluded to earlier,
this does seem to me, based on what I've read
so far, to be sort of a um it's not
necessarily an all or nothing. It's sort of a spectrum condition.
Because one of the things that these people reported is
(38:37):
that it's not like they've never ever in their entire
live seni mental image. They just generally don't see them.
Like some of them sometimes reported that they might have
had very brief involuntary mental images like they they might involuntarily,
quote flash an image of somebody's face. But it's just
(38:58):
that this is rare and they can't do it on command. Right,
It's something that just might occur during while they're awake.
It might occur during dreams some of them. This is
another thing, the interesting variation on dream experience. Some report
that they don't have dreams at all or don't remember
having them if they do have them, and some report
that they do have dreams and can experience visual content
(39:20):
and dreams, but just can't do it while they're awake
or on command. Yeah. Zeman is a big believer that
this is essentially a variant of neuropsychological functioning and kind
of like synesthesia in a sense, and again kind of
on on a spectrum as well. So, so again, don't
think of it as a uh you know, as a
as a as a brain injury. Don't think of it
(39:41):
as a as as an ailment. It is just a different, uh,
a different way that the mental chorus is coming together
to receive reality. Yeah. Another thing that I thought was
interesting is, uh, so we've been talking about images being
visual as in like what you know, light, photons, and
the eyes. But this does seem to extend to varying
(40:03):
degrees to other senses as well. Right, some of the
people who report that they have a fantasia for visual
images also can't imagine the feelings of other senses, if
you know what I mean. And then some report that
they sort of can, again, making it seem like a
kind of spectrum issue, like can you hear a piece
of music that you're not currently listening to? Yeah? Yeah,
(40:27):
that's that's That's another good one. I certainly can. Like
one of the ones I wanted to think was the
Star Wars theme. I can just play the whole Star
Wars theme in my mind from beginning to end. Yeah,
And certainly we've all experienced earworms, so that's kind of
a variant of that now. Um. Also in this uh
the Zaman paper, they said of the individuals, a number
(40:47):
of them reported modest effects on their relationships, which I
guess one can imagine if you and your um, your
significant other are ultimately engaging with mental imagery and drastically
different ways. And also, fourteen of the twenty one participants
reported difficulties with autobiographical memory. So here's a quick quote
from the paper. The same number identified h compensatory strengths
(41:10):
in verbal, mathematical, and logical domains. They their successful performance
in a task that would normally elicit imagery count how
many windows there are in your house or apartment, etcetera,
was achieved by drawing on what participants described as knowledge, memory,
and sub visual models. Yeah, this is interesting. So this
again gets back into the idea that you end up
just utilizing different modes of memory the workforce of the brain. Yeah, right,
(41:34):
because I can't imagine. So if somebody said how many
windows are there in your house? I would do that
with a picture. I would picture my house and sort
of picture walking around the sides of my house and
seeing how many windows are there. But they can do
this without the picture. It's not like they're unable to
do it. So there's something else kicking in. Must be
conceptual facts logged about the house. Okay, so we need
(41:57):
to take one more quick break and then we'll be
right back with more or a fantasia. Now that BBC
paper that we mentioned earlier by James Gallagher. In that paper,
Gallagher spoke with one Neil kin Mure of Lancaster. Uh,
this is a self reporting individual with blindness in the
(42:19):
mind's eye, and he provided some interesting insight on the condition.
So I have just a couple of quotes here from
that that piece that I found were interesting. He said, quote,
my stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep,
and he explained what he meant. I tried to do it,
and I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences. There
was nothing to count. No, that's uh, that's that's an
(42:41):
interesting because I guess that might be one of the
earliest examples of of here mentally mentally imagined this. Like
with my own uh son, I had a similar situation.
Like I distinctly remember the first time I told him
to close his eyes and encouraged him to imagine an
elephant because he was really obsessed with with elephants at
the time. And um, I saw the delight on his
(43:03):
face as he imagined the elephant. Um. But you know,
after doing this research, I realized, well, there's equally a
possibility that we wouldn't be able to see the elephant,
and you know, there wouldn't be anything we're go wrong
with him if he couldn't see it. In the BBC
piece um the the The interviewed individual, Neil kim Miller,
also said that he had a terrible memory, but he
(43:23):
was good with facts and and then there's an additional quote.
This is the hardest thing to describe what happens in
my head when I think about things. When I think
about my fiancee, there is no image, but I am
definitely thinking about her. I know today she has her
hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not
describing an image I am looking at I'm remembering features
(43:44):
about her. That's the strangest thing, and maybe that is
a source of some regret. Yeah, I mean, this is
the thing because typically these people report that they it's
not like they can't they don't know what somebody looks like, right.
They's not like that scene in like Hannibal where they
show face blindness as just seeing people with like smooth
skin over their face. Yeah. What's that condition called a
congenital prosopagnosia? Is that it where you you have a
(44:07):
born condition where you just can't recognize faces people. You
see people who are familiar to you, but you just
they just don't look like anybody, uh you know, whoever
that is and and it's not like that you, or
at least not for everybody. Like we said, there seems
to be a wide variation in how this applies to
people's lives. But I haven't read that it's like that
for most people. It seems like they report, yeah, they
(44:28):
recognize people. Once they see a picture of of a
close family member or of the president or whoever it is,
they know who it is. They just can't make the
picture without looking at it. It's almost kind of like
we talked about in the P versus NP episode, like
the kinds of problems that once a solution is presented,
you can easily check to see if it's correct, but
(44:50):
you can't come up with a solution and a reasonable
amount of time by yourself. Uh. It sounds like a
version of that. You can't make the picture, but when
somebody shows you the picture you can say, oh, yeah,
that's it. Yeah definitely. But anyway, I I just find
this condition really fascinating. And so if you yourself are
somebody who thinks you may be experiencing a fantasia, or
(45:12):
if you just want to learn more about it, one
interesting resource I think would be to go and look
at some of the message boards online that have recently
been created by people who claimed to have this experience,
because there's one I found that was a fant dot asia. Nice. Yeah,
but it's it's just like a forum online people talking
(45:35):
about their experiences. Uh, and it seems to be a
lot of people having this kind of uh, this awakening
kind of experience. They're like, oh, man, I didn't even
realize that this was what was causing all this confusion
between me and other people all these years, or I
didn't realize I was the I wasn't the only one
who was like this, or you know, people really seem
(45:57):
to be having a lot of fun coming together with
a community of other people who have the same issue. Well,
like it reminds one of the whole you know, the
old example of hey, what if when I think of
purple and you think of purple? What if we what
if we're each seeing different colors? But there's never a
way to prove that out. But but this is kind
of like a case where what it's kind of like
(46:17):
if you were one day able to say, oh, yeah,
the purple I see is different from the purple these
people see. I'm gonna I'm gonna go hang out now
with individuals who see purple the way I see. People
never understood what the deal with Barney was, but now
I get it. Uh No. But so I have all
these questions about a fantasia, like what it means, and
(46:38):
again just emphasize it does seem like we haven't nailed
down that there's a specific cause and a very specific
effect yet, because there seemed to be a range of
different ways this manifests in people's minds. It's associated with
different things. Some people dream, some people don't. Some people
have memory problems, some people don't. Um. But one of
the things I was wondering about was can fantasiacs hallucinate? Yeah?
(47:03):
So what if an a fantasiac takes a drug that
often causes visual hallucinations? Do they see anything different? Yeah?
Are they just going to get the non visual hallucinatory effects? Uh?
Or is it going to sort of ignite a type
of visual imagery that isn't normally there sort of heighten
the flashes that some of the you know, the the
(47:24):
the occasional flashes that some of these individuals experience. Yeah,
And so I looked this up actually on the on
the forum boards, and they had actually addressed it. So
one member of a message board said they typed a
question that struck me as intriguing. This person said they
were confused. Essentially, they said, how is hallucinating different from
seeing things in your mind? Again, that question is hard
(47:48):
to answer, but to somebody who has, uh, you know,
a mind's eye, it's very clearly different. I don't feel
like I'm hallucinating when I imagine something, but try to
describe the difference. Well, you're seeing something in your mind
that's not there. Okay, that sounds like hallucination, but yeah,
but then it's also yeah, then it's also just like
(48:08):
seeing Yeah. So yeah, we come back again to the
cave and we're all still lined up staring at the
play of shadows on the wall. Yeah. Some of us
maybe just have a slightly different view of the shadows
and others. Okay, Robert, I've got a question for you. Okay,
hit me. Do you think you could try to simulate
(48:32):
this in you're in your own mind? Like? Could you try?
I know you it would be impossible for us to
really fully be able to do it, But can you
try to go through a standard day to day process
something you would do all the time without using any
mental pictures. I was trying this morning, and I couldn't
do it. Just trying. Yeah, trying not to think of
(48:54):
mental images immediately calls to mind mental images. It's like,
you know, telling somebody like, think of a rhinoceros wearing
a jet pack. You just did it. Uh. And even
it works in the in the general sense, just saying,
try not to think of mental images, and immediately my
mind is filled with rhinoceroses and jet packs. Yeah. I mean,
if anything, I have to try and keep from daydreaming
(49:17):
and keep from or keep from you know, pummeling myself
with with different mental images. Uh, and and actually focus
in on a task, you know. Yeah. I mean the
way this really seems like it would come through is like,
how does if you can't have mental images, how do
you have fantasies about things you would like to do?
So you imagine, you know, your boss makes you furious
(49:37):
and you wish you could punch him in the nose.
You wouldn't actually do it, but you at least have
that image for a moment, right. Uh. I think that's
probably a nearly universal experience for people, and of having
thought of it. But what happens if you can't have
that image in your mind, do you do you think
about it conceptually? It's like I I just thinking about
(49:58):
the concept of punching my boss in the face. Well,
and then also even if like I was just thinking
to myself, like, what are some of the times when
I'm actually able to to not, you know, mentally imagine
anything and have these mental visualizations in my mind, I think, well, okay,
maybe when I'm doing yoga because I'm able to sort
of shut out a lot of stuff. I'm able to
shut off the default mode network to a large extent.
(50:20):
But even then, if I'm focusing on a pose, I
am also focusing on a mental image of what I
must look like in that pose, which may or may
not have match up to how I'm actually doing the pose.
So what is it like then to engage in a
in a physical activity like that with a fantasia? I mean,
(50:45):
I mean, obviously you can do it, but it just
kind of drives home just how much mental visualizations, um,
how big a role they play and just everything we do. Okay,
another question fiction writing. This is something again from the
from the Blake cross Piece. So he's he is, He's
done some screenwriting, and he describes his process for fiction
(51:07):
writing without having mental images, which he described in terms
of words and parts of speech. I thought this was interesting.
So he said, like, when I'm imagining something, I imagine
a noun, the word, and then I imagine a verb
that follows it, the word um. And so there's something
very different about his process for writing than I would have.
(51:28):
So when I'm imagining a scene, there's there's translation going on.
I think of a picture, and then I have to
put the picture into words. But could it be possible
that this allows people to do creative writing without any translation.
The original creative thing that's happening is words. That's interesting. Yeah,
(51:49):
Like they're not having They're not in that situation that
I mentioned earlier, where as an artist or a creator
of any kind, you are stuck trying to translate the
mental image into who something another person can share in.
Like you said, there's no translation going there. Well, it
makes me wonder if the maybe the ultimate form of
direct written communication with almost nothing lost in between, would
(52:14):
be an a fantasiac writing to another a fantasiac somebody,
because there you're not translating it into pictures on both
sides or on either side. I will say that something
that does remind me of is like in my own
writing process. There there's definitely the point where I have
an image in my mind or seen in my mind,
(52:34):
characters in my mind, and I'm trying to bring that
to life on the page. But then if I'll get
into these situations where I'm writing and in a way
what I'm writing is coming before the mental image, so
I kind of create the point. Not to say it's
it's a fantasia at all, but I'm kind of writing
before the mental visualization. I'm kind of reading what I've
(52:57):
writen I've written and an experienced it more or less
in real time as a reader would. Oh yeah, well,
I bet you've had the experience I know I have
of writing something before you get the picture, and then
getting the picture and then going back and revising what
you've written based on the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
This so this is yeah, the writing is definitely a
(53:17):
fascinating area to think about, this because it is this
sort of it's the mental image, but in this stripping
down of the mental image, the translating it into into
another form. Uh yeah, yeah, well it's fascinating to be
coming into this topic and it's such an interesting time
for it, you know, when when it seems we're on
the cusp of a lot of new learning about what
(53:39):
this condition is, how many people have it, what it's
like for them, and Hey, if you out there actually
experience this, if you have some level of a fantasia
or you're toward that end of the mental image re spectrum,
I think it would be great to hear about your experience,
if you want to write in and tell us what
it's like. Yeah, and if you're on the other end
of the spectrum, if you're a hyper visualizer, let us
(54:02):
know about that as well. Uh. In the meantime, head
on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership. That is where you will find
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We are blow the Mind on both of those. We
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(54:24):
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at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Dot com not my boy,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from House Stop
work dot Com. Okay, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
today's episode, concerns the mind's eye, concerns mental imagery, and
(00:23):
so we decided that the best way to kick off
this episode is to take you on a little guided
mental journey. YEA, so close your eyes unless you're driving
or doing something that requires your eyes to be open,
and in that case, don't close your eyes if you
If you are able to close your eyes, close your
eyes if not. Just imagine you're eight years old and
you're walking along a beach with your mother, your barefoot.
(00:48):
The tide is coming in, and you see trails of
footprints leading back and forth along the beach where other
people have walked the same path today. But the waves
are coming higher and higher and slowly smoothing all those
footprints away. But then you look up at your mother
and you notice something strange. She's wearing armor, a steel
(01:08):
chest plate and a visored helm with chainmail drooping across
her arms and legs, rustling lightly as she walks across
the front of her chest plate is a painted figure.
It's Foghorn, Leghorn. She raises the visor on her helm
and smiles at you. A mosquito hovers in front of
her face, and she flails one arm to knock it away,
(01:31):
and you both laugh. But then you notice something else.
Your mother has a piece of metal dangling from her
hip opposite you. It's a long sword. She puts one
hand on the hilt and says, don't worry, only a
bit of insurance in case he shows up. A wave
of seawater rolls up over your feet, washing dry sand
(01:52):
from between your toes, and you ask who. Then there's
a faint rumbling under your feet. It's not just the
tickling of the waves. The ground is shaking, and about
two out in the water, a dark shape begins to
rise up from the waves. At first it's just a green,
black lump, but then the huge glaring eyes, the cavernous mouth,
(02:16):
climbing higher and higher as it approaches. It's Godzilla. Not
the friendly Godzilla who defends Earth against all the heel monsters.
This is the angry Godzilla who breathes beams of radiation
and crushes ten story buildings with a single swipe. Your
mother puts an arm across your chest. She draws her
long sword and says stand back. This could get serious,
(02:41):
And with the flip of a switch, her hover boots engage,
her feet lift off the ground, and then she's rocketing
towards the head of the monster to defend the realms
of humankind. Alright, so, uh, we we try to draw
in a few different types of of imagery. There are
a few different types of memory memories. Right. We wanted
to have sort of generic landscape that would be easy
(03:04):
for a lot of people to picture, like a beach.
Most people have some kind of image, generically of what
a beach looks like. We also wanted something familiar. Usually
they say to picture a relative or familiar family member.
So hopefully you've got an image of a mother or
family figure there. But then also some pop culture images. Right,
most people hopefully know what Godzilla looks like. If you don't,
(03:24):
you gotta go back and watch the original Godzilla from
the fifties and right, uh, and then uh and then
fall horn like horn and personal favorite of mine. You know.
One of the interesting things with this exercise is to
think back on it and think back of the specifics
and ask yourself questions like who did I have a
more vivid memory of what I looked like as a child,
(03:48):
what my mother looked like, what Godzilla looked like, and
in these details are not necessarily telling of your relationship
with your mother versus your relationship with Godzilla. But but
but it it kind of raises our awareness of the
vast spectrum of visual stimuli that are informing our our
inner vision of the world. Yeah, and this is a
(04:10):
strange thing because the only person who can experience your
mental imagery is you. You can sort of describe your
mental imagery to other people, but nobody can take a
look at it to see what it is you're picturing
in your mind. So this is something that you largely
have to deal with entirely on your own, and you
don't know how similar or how different your own process
(04:31):
of mental imagery is to that of other people unless
you really put your heads together and start talking about
your mental images and detail and trying to figure out
if their differences. It's not a standard thing that people do,
really right, because even to describe it, if I describe
my mental images to you, they become your mental images.
Like it's in a way I'm kind of panting off
the blueprints, and then you build a different building. It's
(04:53):
the same building, but a different building. And likewise, maybe
you paint, maybe you write, and some other artistic medium,
you create music to try and convey these images in
your head, but you're still but you're still then limited
by your artist artistic ability and then under people's interpretations
of those works of art. You know, I already realized.
I didn't think about this when I was writing this,
(05:14):
but I did already see a contradiction in what I
told people to imagine the original angry Godzilla. But then
I also said green black, right, Well, Godzilla in color
is sort of greenish black, but the original angry Godzilla
black and white. He's just you know, you look at
him and he just looks like this charred monster. You know.
(05:34):
So this is a this is already a mental confabulation
on my part. I'm imagining a Godzilla that never existed
anywhere in reality. But anyway, so most of you were
with us there on that journey. You were to some
extent able to picture some of the things we were
talking about. You could see in your mind's eye the beach,
the armor, your mother, the sword, the fog Horn, Leghorn,
(05:57):
the Godzilla. But there are some people who probably couldn't
see any of that. They were there with us, they
were understanding the concepts, they were able to follow the plot,
whatever plot there was, and they could probably recount a
list of the events that happened in the little scene
we just described, but they couldn't see any of it
(06:19):
in their imagination. And this is the concept we're gonna
be talking about today. One study has found that this
might be about up to one in fifty people who
have this kind of experience where they just don't create
pictures inside their mind the way most people do. Uh
And this condition now hasn't come to be known as
(06:40):
a fantasia or the blindness of the mind's I So,
the American biotech leader Craig Venter, you know about him, right.
He's famous for being a leader in the quest of
sequence the human genome, and he's famous for creating a
synthetic organisms. Uh So, he has actually described that he
has an unusual way of thinking, a way of thinking
(07:02):
that's essentially purely conceptual, like we've been describing, without any
mental imagery. Venter says, quote, it's like having a computer
store the information, but you don't have a screen attached
to the computer. He's describing his own mind. I don't know.
I I have trouble understanding what that would be like.
(07:25):
But maybe maybe to understand it better, we should first
look at some facts about what the mind's eye itself
is before we get into the blindness of the mind's eye.
What's going on when you create pictures in your head. Well,
of course we're talking about mental imagery here, but also
there's some other sensations thrown in as well. It all
amounts to a quasi perceptional experience that occurs in the
(07:48):
absence of the appropriate external stimuli. Um. So, I can
close my eyes, I can see a deceased loved one's face.
I can hear their voice. I can imagine myself standing
on the shore of a distant ocean, past ocean, or
even some future sure that I haven't even walked on yet.
I mean, this, this is the kind of thing that
I mean, most of us take for granted. We can,
(08:09):
we use it, we employ it every day. Um Well,
I mean, as I did with the Angry Godzilla and color,
you can picture things you've never actually seen, right, Yeah,
you can? Yeah, there are things. If you're like me,
I feel there are things in books. For instance, no
one has ever painted a picture of this character or
this scene. Uh, and yet you have a very crystal
(08:30):
clear vision, Like I have a better visual memory of
some things that have occurred in books than things that
have occurred in real life. You know. Oh yeah, yeah,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Uh Is isn't
it so weird to finally see a book you've read
but it's never been illustrated or made into a film
or anything finally made visual by someone else? It's always
(08:51):
people always have the same reaction. That's not what I thought.
So and so looked, like, let's know what it looks like. Yeah. Now,
the things we perceive in the mind's eye, they're they're
products of memory. They're constructed from specific or varied memories.
They may be accurate, they may be amalgams of diverse influences. Really,
this runs the gamut from something you saw yesterday that
you near perfectly remember, to have you know, a vague
(09:13):
site from your childhood that you at least think you remember,
to an envisioned future scene in your own life, something
you dreamt, something you daydreamed, landscape, be viewed from the
imagined walls of a fictional world, or your own creation
of a of an author's creation. It's just like pretty
much any time we are envisioning something, any time we
are closing our eyes or even with our eyes open
(09:35):
are imagining something, we are seeing something in our mind
that is, of course the mind's eye, uh, doing its thing. Yeah.
And I think this has always been a very interesting
avenue for philosophy to investigate, because it is something that
we recognized was sort of strange about the human experience
(09:55):
before we had neuroscience or psychology or or any of
these scientific ways of investigating it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
because because it it obviously plays such a central role
in the way we navigate the world and the way
we think about time and a world of movable objects. Right. Um.
And so yeah, we've been as long as we've had philosophers,
(10:17):
as long as we've had people among us with with
time to you know, look up from their labors and
think about the human condition, we've been thinking about the
mind's eye. Um. On the podcast here, we've talked about
the method of loki before the the ancient Greek technique
in which person utilizes spatial memory to memorize nonspatial information. Uh. Look,
(10:40):
that kind of plays into into some of this. That
involves a certain amount of a reflection on what's on
how we're using the mind's eye. You know. I I've
tried to use the method of LOCAI and I have
not been very good at it. Yeah, I wonder if
I'm just not doing it right, like I when I'm
able to to really get it set in my mind
as help me remember. By the way, this is so
(11:02):
a quick version of it is, if you need to
make a list of digits of numbers to remember, you're
not going to remember those digits. So instead you imagine
your house being full of odd characters that each embody
one of the digits in that number sequence, and then
you can remember by picturing the room and where all
(11:22):
of the odd characters were in the room, and then
you just remember what digit they correspond to or something
like that. Yeah. Like a very simplified version of this
that I have employed frequently in the past. It's kind
of like a um uh you know, often called the
memory palace because it's an imagined place that you fill
with these examples. But oftentimes I only have room in
(11:44):
my mind for one example, and that is, uh, that's
when I am a swimming lapse and I want to
remember what number lap I'm on, because if I forget
the lap number, then I'm going to make myself revert
to the to the lower number. So if I if
I don't know for sure I'm on four, I'm gonna
do three. And I don't want to keep doing one
less than I want to do because I'm gonna wear
(12:06):
myself out right. But I'm also busy swimming. I'm having
a hard time necessarily remembering which lap I am currently on.
So instead of trying to remember four, as easy as
that would seem, I find it easier to just force
myself to think of, say, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
like think of think of that, and that'll stick in
my head just a little better as I'm you know,
(12:27):
vigorously of swimming these laps um, you know, So it'll
just be some sort of visual association with just a
single digit. I don't know, I don't know if anybody
else out there has has done something of that that
that nature, but that is kind of a simplified um, good, creamy,
what's what's your visual image. For eight, I can't think
of anything for eight. Oh, for eight, I think of
(12:51):
Alan robe Gerlays the Voyeur, where you have a character
who keeps making figure eights out of rope. Yeah, so
I think of him setting by the shore, um, not
quite contemplating horrible things and making little figure eights. That's
a good thing to have in your mind here at
the gym or the y m c A guess wherever
you swim laps. So one of the important things when
(13:13):
when thinking about the memory Palace and then ultimately thinking
about memory and the mind's eye, is just to to
refresh here a little bit about human memory itself. Human
memory is not just like a tape, real rolling in
the brain that we just oh, let's go back and
look and see what happened yesterday. Human memory in multiple ways.
It's not multiple certainly not that accurate, right, because human
(13:34):
memory consists of several different types of memory that are
working in uh kind of an unequal chorus um to
create the human experience of memory that we have. So
we have sensory memory, um, you know what something feels like,
what it smells, it smells like, that sort of thing.
We have short term memory, and we have long term
term memory. We have and then we divide long term
(13:58):
memory out. We have explicit memories of consciousness, we have
implicit memories of unconsciousness. We have declarative memories of facts
and events. We have procedural memories involved that involves skills
and tasks. We have episodic memory that deals with events
and experiences, and we have semantic memory that concerns facts
and concepts. So we have all these different types of memories,
(14:19):
each one dealing with in a way certain you know,
different types of skills, different types of ways of utilizing
memory when we engage with the world. And studies have
shown in the past that, uh, if you have a
part of the brain associated with the one type of
memory is injured, sometimes you see those other types of
memory compensating. So it's like a a in a way,
(14:40):
it's like a staff. It's like a staff of different
memory drones, and they all have their jobs to do.
But if somebody is slacking, then it may fall to
another employee to uh to to you know, to step
up and and cover for their shortcomings. Yeah. I think
that's a good metaphor that the brain is more like
a workforce than a machine. If one part of a
machine and breaks, the whole machine probably isn't gonna work.
(15:02):
But if one part of a workforce is slacking or
calls in sick today, the others can often find a
way to cover for them, right, And they might cover
you know, everyone does their job a little bit differently,
so their their skill set might allow them to cover
in a slightly different way. But back to philosophers. So
philosophers have continue to argue about the minds, and we're
certainly not gonna be able to do an exhausted journey
(15:25):
through all of their their takes. But you go back
as far as Plato, for example, when Plato brought us
one of the most famous examples of this. Uh, he
utilizes mental images in his famous allegory of the Cave. Yeah,
and that's sort of the idea that the world that
we perceive is not the true reality, you know. But
Plato had this whole belief in ideal forms, you know,
(15:46):
things that were the more true version of the thing
than the thing we're familiar with. Right, there's a realm
of forms out there, and in that realm of forms,
there's such thing as a perfect chair. But in this
world that we can only build in perfect chairs that
inch maybe a little closer and closer towards that unobtainable ideal. Yeah,
And so his metaphor for explaining this was that of
(16:07):
the cave, where there are people who are chained up
in a cave and they don't even really realize that
they're in a cave, and uh, and there's an opening
to the cave through which light comes through and figures
pass in front of the opening to the cave, casting
shadows on the wall of the cave, and all we
see we're facing the back of the cave of the wall,
and we see the shadows, and we think the shadows
(16:28):
are the real things, but they're not there. They're only
the the sort of like the vague outlines of the
things that that are the true forms. If anyone out
there is watching The Path on Hulu, there's actually a
scene um in the first episode where they roll out
this this allegory and it's it's pretty entertaining, but but
(16:50):
I mean, certainly it's an it's an allegory. You can
have a lot of fun with either trying to contrast
your worldview to another individual's worldview, to try and win
someone over with your true version of reality versus there
they're you know, their illusion based understanding of reality. But
it also gets down to like what is our perception
(17:10):
of reality itself? These mental images that fill our mind
when we close our eyes, those are imperfect. But also
the mental images when we have our eyes open, we're
still just in a sense, we are still just seeing
those shadows on the walls of the cave. Yeah. So
Aristotle also referred to mental imagery and his work referred
to it as a as a fantasia with an A
(17:33):
with a P, not an APR, not the Disney movie. Uh.
And this was central to his theory of memory. Yeah,
though you know, I can see why the Disney movie
would be called that, I mean they it evokes the
concept of fantasy, even though he didn't I think directly
mean fantasy and the way we do, like somebody coming
up with a with a fantasy to escape from life. Yeah,
(17:54):
it was the idea of being able to to imagine
things in your mind. Now. Reneed I Carts also thought
a lot about mental imagery and how they form in
the mind. Uh. The view that an idea is a
quasi perceptual thing, perhaps even pictorial formed in the imagination,
and he did distinguish between images formed in the brain
(18:15):
and ideas in the mind. Because he was a duelist.
He saw uh, he saw the mind and the body
as separate. The essence of mind is thought, and the
body is an extension of it. Thoughts are not extended
in space, but the body is. Now, that's where in
philosophy you have. You have like idealism, which states that
reality is equivalent to mental images, and the mental images
(18:37):
are reality itself. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want
to take this very far, the people who believe in
hard core idealism would probably say that there is no
like that reality is merely the mental image of a
higher being or something like that. Yeah. So, as you
can see, you can really go down the deep end,
into the deep end contemplating mental imagery and what are
(18:58):
the philosophical ramifications of it. Um, there's a you know,
there's a lot, There's a great deal more we can
discuss this kind of the philosophical groundwork. I guess you
could say. Um. For instance, though in the nineteen eighties
there's a great deal of debate over the over the
connection from between mental images and language. So one side
argued that representations underlying the experience of mental imagery are
(19:21):
the same type as those used in the language. And
then there was the other camp, and they held that
that these representations served to depict, not describe objects. Okay,
so what does that mean in practice? Well, my understanding
is that basically comes down to, you know, to what
extent is mental imagery like the the the groundwork of
language itself. Um Well, like I said earlier, at times,
(19:42):
it feels like it's it's very difficult to um to
overstate the importance of mental imagery in our perceptions of reality.
Um So, just how deep does that go? Does it
underlie just about everything in cognition? Does an underlie language?
Does it underlie um, just every little detail of our experience? Yeah, well,
(20:03):
this does seem to sort of tie into us stuff
we talked about in the Tip of the Tongue episode,
where you can you can perhaps you can have the
face in your mind, you know, oh, I know this
actor's face, and you can picture it, and you can
know the actor's name well enough that if somebody said it,
you'd be like, yeah, that's it. You'd immediately recognize it.
(20:25):
But you can't make the connection but of course, in
recent years we've seen the study of mental imagery make
a more scientific transition. I think we we've started to
look at it from a neuroscientific point of view, where
people are saying, Okay, well, let's identify what brain regions
are actually being used and activated when people are in
the process of coming up with mental pictures. And one
(20:48):
of the sources we used for this episode, it was
a paper by Adams Zalman and colleagues, and and uh,
these authors identify that essentially in the brain voluntary imagery
that the mental images you come up with have been
associated in previous research with the brains frontal parietal executive
systems or of the executive control you know, the president
(21:09):
of your brain sitting there directing traffic, and with the
posterior brain regions, which you know in the back of
the brain that's often the identified with visual processing. And
together you sort of put these things, uh into a
teamwork relationship, and they are what allows you to come
up with mental pictures. That's right. And uh, we've also
(21:31):
seen studies where taking f M R I, we've done
p and we've done pet scans on individuals summoning mental images.
You know, they're asked to summon a mental image, and
then we look at the brain see what it's doing
in real time, and uh reveals that activation in brain
areas that are used in visual perception, which doesn't sound
that surprising. Uh, this is pretty cool. Visual and mental
(21:52):
imaging share roughly two thirds of the same active activated
brain regions. So there's a lot of a lot of
cross over there between the visual and mental imaging systems,
a lot of shared mechanics. Yeah, Like if, for example,
if you show somebody a picture of somebody's face and
then you ask the same test subject imagine this person's face,
(22:12):
a lot of their brain activity is going to be
roughly similar. Right. In fact, study found that when the
same task is performed in perception and then with eyes
closed using mental images, you get overlaps. So so again,
a lot of the same mechanisms, a lot of the
same brain equipment is being used, whether you're dealing with
(22:35):
just visual perception or mental perception. Of course, that's funny
because the phenomenal experience is completely different, right, Like you, uh,
somebody to somebody who has a fantasia. This might be
new information, but it's obviously not going to be new
information to most people out there. Uh, when you picture
(22:56):
something in your mind's eye, it is extremely different than
seeing it in front of you. But it's hard to
explain how it's different. Yeah, you know, Yeah, you know.
There's a there's a two thousand fIF BBC article titled
a Fantasia A Life without Mental Images by James Gallagher,
and I'll be sure to include a link to that
(23:17):
article on the landing page for this episode Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com because in addition to running
through some examples of uh, some accounts of individuals who
have this blindness of the mind's eye, which we're going
to discuss more here, there's also a quiz you can take, uh,
and it's just an eight question quiz about asking you
like the level of detail that you experience when you
(23:39):
are asked to mentally envision uh, you know someone you
see every day? Uh, A sunrise, I believe, clouds in
the sky, the clouds clearing in the sky, a thunderstorm,
the the these sort of images some of the same
kind of stuff that we ask you to summon at
the beginning of this episode. Yeah, but it doesn't just
ask you can you picture it? It asks you to
rank level of details. So, for example, it might say, picture,
(24:03):
get someone in mind, and maybe a close friend or
spouse or close family member, and picture that person, and
then on a scale of not very well at all,
too extremely well, how well can you see in your
mind's eye the contours of their face and the shape
of their body, and what color their eyes are, and
(24:23):
and so it's asking for specific details of the image
to get at the vividness of the picture in your mind.
And that suggests to me, and I think their findings
do suggest so far that it's not just an on
off switch. It's not like you can make pictures with
your mind or you can't. There seems to be a spectrum.
Some people seem to have very intense, very lucid, vivid
(24:47):
mental images. Other people have kind of hazier, blurrier or
more generic mental images. And some people have almost no
mental imagery at all, or even report having none. And
it's so at the opposite into the scale of the
main topic today. You know, we're talking about these a fantasiacs,
but there's also what's come to be known as hyper fantasia, right,
(25:09):
And these would be people who I think would experience
visions of the mind ie with just extreme lucidity is
far compared to most of us. So they're not just
vague pictures, but they have bright colors and vivid details.
So if I tell you imagine a beach, you might
picture sand and waves and maybe some umbrellas. But I
(25:30):
bet you wouldn't naturally say, Okay, I can tell you
there are seven umbrellas in the picture in my mind,
and these are the colors of stripes on the umbrellas.
But somebody might actually be able to have that level
of vividness in their mind's eye. Yeah. This idea of
a spectrum of of of mental detail and visual imagery,
(25:52):
it uh, it really makes you reanalyze just how you're
painting the picture in your head of these memories, you know,
I get. I think we both scored around the same
on this where we had kind of like typical image.
I was in the typical range. Yeah, But even even
then I was I found myself asking questions like, well,
how when I think about these people that I see
(26:13):
every day in my life and they are very important
to me, Uh, you know, what does it mean that
I don't have like just a picture perfect vision of them?
What Does it mean that when I think back on
a beach, I find my like a sunrise on a beach,
I keep thinking of, you know, images of sunrises from
paintings and films more so than actual beach sunrises that
(26:34):
I've witnessed. Do you think about the final scene of
the Warriors? Yeah, that sort of thing. Like I end
up like putting a fictional Instagram filter over all of
these these memories, and I'm not really remembering. I'm not
really summoning a mental image of a thing I actually saw.
I'm summoning this mental image that's composed of these varying elements.
You know. One thing I read when we were doing
(26:56):
our research for this episode was a first person essay
that I came across the software designer Blake Ross, who
was involved in Mozilla Firefox on Facebook, and he's also
done some screenwriting, and he found out after reading an
article I think in either in the New York Times
or in Discover magazine by Carl Zimmer about a fantasia
that he he had this experience, and he also was
(27:19):
just shocked to find out that other people weren't like him.
His discovery was that, oh, I never realized other people
could see pictures in their minds. His whole life, he
thought when people said stuff like picture this, they were
just being metaphorical. He didn't realize other people could actually
hold these pictures in their brains. And in this essay
(27:40):
he starts he recounts how when he found out about this,
he was asking all his friends, what's it like to
picture something in your mind? And asking all these questions
I've never really thought to ask myself about my process
of mental imagery that we're very interesting, like he was
asking his friends, Okay, when you see a picture in
your mind, like you picture a beach, is it still?
Is it a still photograph? Or is it more like
(28:01):
video where things are moving? And that distinction just hit
me like a wrecking ball. I was like, I don't know.
When I picture something in my mind, I can make
it move consciously if I need to. But when I
just picture a beach, it is almost neither still nor moving.
It is it exists in super position between these two things.
(28:24):
It's kept for me, I guess when I think about it,
it's kind of like the old music video for What
Was It? Where the people go into the painting or
into the drawing on take on Me. Yeah, yeah, I
feel like my my mental imagery is kind of like
the take on Me video. It's stuff is moving, but
it's all kind of station are as. Well. Yeah, well,
I mean, I certainly can imagine something moving on purpose,
(28:47):
But when I just picture a thing and I don't
imagine it moving on purpose, I don't think it's still
but it's not moving either. It's very strange. It reminds
me of two of the experience of reading a book,
especially a book that is set more or less in
the real world, And at times I'll find myself stopping
and thinking about, like, oh, I'm picturing this in this
(29:09):
living room from that I that I visited or lived
in at some point in my life, Like that, for
some reason, is the living room that my brain is
drawing in for this setting where I'm picturing this character. Sometimes,
you know, sometimes the character just is that character and
that and there's not really like a firm mental image
in your head exactly what they look like. Other times
(29:30):
you can't shake their um their appearance as being that
of someone you know or or you know a character
actor from a movie, etcetera. But I do find myself
like analyzing, like where are all these elements coming from Like,
some of them are obviously coming from the author. The
author is providing the blueprint, the author is providing the scaffolding.
(29:53):
But then that scaffolding is kind of like magnetically drawing
in elements from my own visual memory. Yeah, definitely, I
know exactly what you're talking about. There. Uh. An interesting
thing about fiction that that Blake Ross says in his
first person essay about this is he He reports that,
so he's always read books, you know, he's enjoyed fiction,
and he's written fiction. But when he writes fiction, he
(30:14):
has almost no visual description because he just doesn't picture
things in his head. And when he reads, he skips
visual description. He just kind of jumps over it. That's
not it has no meaning to him. Really. Huh, yeah,
it's it's it's fascinating. Okay, now it's time to take
a quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when
we come back, more on the mind's eye and a fantasia.
(30:43):
All right, So, just how common is a fantasia? Um,
it's a difficult question because this is something that hasn't
really been uh in the public mind set. It hasn't
been out there. It hasn't been something you could a
pamphle it on until very recently. There was one interesting
study on this from before it had a name. Before this,
a fantasia term came out that was studying sort of
(31:05):
the lack of generative power and mental imagery. And that
that was in two thousand nine, right, study by Fall, yeah,
Bill Fall, psychologists. And what did it find? He found
that between two point one percent and two point seven
percent of participants in his study claimed to have no
visual imagination. So that's where we got that number up
(31:27):
at the beginning that it might be around one in
fifty of you who just didn't see any pictures when
you were following along in the story with us. Yeah, Now,
of course we have to that that number is not
coming from like a you know, large scale study, so
the results aren't really fully supported, but it gives us
sort of at least a ballpark. I think, yeah, it's
(31:48):
something to work with. But but a lot of this
recent research has popped up because of an interesting I'm
about to use a great word here, synergy between between
actual medical research and some writing in the popular press. Actually,
I think like Carl Zimmer's articles had something to do
with people coming out of the woodwork to say, Hey,
(32:09):
now I have this experience of a fantasia. I can't
make mental pictures. But it started with the research of
Adam Zaman, right. Yeah, he's a professor of cognitive and
behavioral neurology of the University of Exeter and Medical School,
and along with co authors uh Um MICHELLEA. De Wira,
and Surio Della Sala, they coined the term a fantasia
(32:32):
in their two thousand fifteen paper Lives Without Imagery congenital
a Fantasia that was published in the journal Cortex. Now,
people had, as we said, previously described things along these
lines like it had always been kind of noted that, well,
there's some people out there who say that they can't
create any mental pictures. But nobody really looked very deeply
into this, and I think some of the earth I
(32:55):
think the earliest example that the office we were looking
at were able to draw on was just the nineteenth century. Now,
this condition and the condition had in these earlier works
of condition had previously been referred to as a defective
revisualization or visual ear reminiscence. What a great word, ear reminiscence.
Somebody was trying to make us say that, yeah, sorry,
(33:16):
not gonna work. It's a fantasia. Uh. And there are
skeptics actually out there who say that that what we're
talking about here does not exist at all. I think
that's fascinating because how would you prove them wrong? Yeah?
And why why would you make that argument? I don't know. Well,
I mean, arguing about the existence of somebody else's internal experience.
I mean, that's just it's crazy. Yeah, I mean it
(33:38):
almost seems seems like you'd have to be making the
counter argument of saying, oh, you don't have any fantasia,
You just have a lazy mind, right, your imagination is
just a bit stunted. But I can understand why people
might be tempted to this direction because I, as I
we've said before, I think you probably would agree with this.
I can't imagine what this is like. Yeah, I have
(33:59):
no ability to you whatsoever, to put myself in a
position of not being able to make mental pictures that
I don't even understand what that means really, Right, It's
kind of like if most of us are more or
less the same computer hardware with differing software. You know,
we can talk all day about I don't understand how
your software works, and this is how my software works.
(34:20):
But here we're talking about essentially a difference in hardware. Um.
I don't know if that analogy completely holds up, but
essentially this is something a little more, uh, you know,
base level is different and and how do we even
begin to describe that to each other? Yeah? So Zaman
first started studying this, I think in two thousand ten, right,
because of the story of this. So there was a
(34:45):
patient who reported having contracted, like acquired a fantasia after
a medical procedure, right, right, So there was a sixty
five year old man who had coronary angioplasty and that's
where they So if you have pockage in one of
your arteries or something like that, they'll open up one
of your arteries and stick a catheter in it, and
(35:06):
somewhere along your body wherever the blockage is occurring, they'll
inflate a small balloon or something inside your artery to
widen it, essentially and allow easier passage of blood. It's
not the kind of thing that you would initially imagine
altering your brain functioning. Yeah, and it's generally not considered
a major surgical procedure. It's like it's you. I think
you're typically left awake for it. They don't even necessarily
(35:28):
put you under, though they might need to give you
some drugs to calm you down. But yeah, it's this
is this is not like a gigantic big deal. So
it's coronary angioplasty. And after the procedure, this patient was
unable to form mental pictures and he had not had
this problem before, and so yeah, and that's where this
(35:48):
study comes in. And afterwards, after there were some pieces
published about this, Zaman started to hear from people who said, Hey,
I have this condition. And not only do I have it,
I didn't get it from I didn't have an angioplastic
or any you know, injury or or surgery. I've always
had it. This is just how I am. So Zaman
(36:10):
and his co author's day they looked at twenty one
of these self reporting cases and then they discovered most
of these individuals um kind of discovered their condition, their
own condition in their twenties when through conversations or or readings,
they found a discrepancy between how other people described the
(36:30):
use of the mind's eye and their own experiences. Can
you imagine. I just have a hard time imagining how
you get that far in life without realizing. Now, this
is another thing that's addressed yet again in that that
essay I mentioned by Blake Ross where he just talks
about how whenever he heard people using the language of
the mind's eye were talking about, you know, picturing something,
(36:51):
imagining something, he thought it was all metaphorical. He thought
they were just talking about conceptually meditating on the idea
of a beach or something. So you're sitting there thinking
about the concepts of sand and water and sunshine and umbrellas.
But he didn't realize that other people were literally seeing
(37:11):
something in their mind. Yeah. I mean, it's like we
said earlier, when one when you have all these different
types of memory, and if one is taking you know,
a back seat, the other ones are going to compensate.
So it's not like if you have a fantasia, you're
not gonna be able to function in society at all.
It seems like quite the contrary. Uh, individuals find a
way to function. They find they just end up utilizing
(37:33):
these different modes of memory. Okay, but of these twenty
one self reporting cases, what did Zamon find about them? Well,
so I found that nineteen of the twenty one were male.
And it's worth noting that this might have more to
do with the readership of Discover magazine. This is not
a randomized, self selective right. This is where people would
(37:53):
have read that Carl Zimmer article and they were the
ones who said, hey, so yeah, I just might have
to do with the male readership Discover. On the to hand,
they found it. Five of the twenty one reported that
it affected relatives as well. This is something I've read
of people's experiences online. Some of them say, one of
my parents has this. Yeah, so this leads us to
believe it might be hereditary. And then ten of the
(38:15):
twenty one said, uh, said that all all versions of
the imagery were affected. Now, now, like I alluded to earlier,
this does seem to me, based on what I've read
so far, to be sort of a um it's not
necessarily an all or nothing. It's sort of a spectrum condition.
Because one of the things that these people reported is
(38:37):
that it's not like they've never ever in their entire
live seni mental image. They just generally don't see them.
Like some of them sometimes reported that they might have
had very brief involuntary mental images like they they might involuntarily,
quote flash an image of somebody's face. But it's just
(38:58):
that this is rare and they can't do it on command. Right,
It's something that just might occur during while they're awake.
It might occur during dreams some of them. This is
another thing, the interesting variation on dream experience. Some report
that they don't have dreams at all or don't remember
having them if they do have them, and some report
that they do have dreams and can experience visual content
(39:20):
and dreams, but just can't do it while they're awake
or on command. Yeah. Zeman is a big believer that
this is essentially a variant of neuropsychological functioning and kind
of like synesthesia in a sense, and again kind of
on on a spectrum as well. So, so again, don't
think of it as a uh you know, as a
as a as a brain injury. Don't think of it
(39:41):
as a as as an ailment. It is just a different, uh,
a different way that the mental chorus is coming together
to receive reality. Yeah. Another thing that I thought was
interesting is, uh, so we've been talking about images being
visual as in like what you know, light, photons, and
the eyes. But this does seem to extend to varying
(40:03):
degrees to other senses as well. Right, some of the
people who report that they have a fantasia for visual
images also can't imagine the feelings of other senses, if
you know what I mean. And then some report that
they sort of can, again, making it seem like a
kind of spectrum issue, like can you hear a piece
of music that you're not currently listening to? Yeah? Yeah,
(40:27):
that's that's That's another good one. I certainly can. Like
one of the ones I wanted to think was the
Star Wars theme. I can just play the whole Star
Wars theme in my mind from beginning to end. Yeah,
And certainly we've all experienced earworms, so that's kind of
a variant of that now. Um. Also in this uh
the Zaman paper, they said of the individuals, a number
(40:47):
of them reported modest effects on their relationships, which I
guess one can imagine if you and your um, your
significant other are ultimately engaging with mental imagery and drastically
different ways. And also, fourteen of the twenty one participants
reported difficulties with autobiographical memory. So here's a quick quote
from the paper. The same number identified h compensatory strengths
(41:10):
in verbal, mathematical, and logical domains. They their successful performance
in a task that would normally elicit imagery count how
many windows there are in your house or apartment, etcetera,
was achieved by drawing on what participants described as knowledge, memory,
and sub visual models. Yeah, this is interesting. So this
again gets back into the idea that you end up
just utilizing different modes of memory the workforce of the brain. Yeah, right,
(41:34):
because I can't imagine. So if somebody said how many
windows are there in your house? I would do that
with a picture. I would picture my house and sort
of picture walking around the sides of my house and
seeing how many windows are there. But they can do
this without the picture. It's not like they're unable to
do it. So there's something else kicking in. Must be
conceptual facts logged about the house. Okay, so we need
(41:57):
to take one more quick break and then we'll be
right back with more or a fantasia. Now that BBC
paper that we mentioned earlier by James Gallagher. In that paper,
Gallagher spoke with one Neil kin Mure of Lancaster. Uh,
this is a self reporting individual with blindness in the
(42:19):
mind's eye, and he provided some interesting insight on the condition.
So I have just a couple of quotes here from
that that piece that I found were interesting. He said, quote,
my stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep,
and he explained what he meant. I tried to do it,
and I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences. There
was nothing to count. No, that's uh, that's that's an
(42:41):
interesting because I guess that might be one of the
earliest examples of of here mentally mentally imagined this. Like
with my own uh son, I had a similar situation.
Like I distinctly remember the first time I told him
to close his eyes and encouraged him to imagine an
elephant because he was really obsessed with with elephants at
the time. And um, I saw the delight on his
(43:03):
face as he imagined the elephant. Um. But you know,
after doing this research, I realized, well, there's equally a
possibility that we wouldn't be able to see the elephant,
and you know, there wouldn't be anything we're go wrong
with him if he couldn't see it. In the BBC
piece um the the The interviewed individual, Neil kim Miller,
also said that he had a terrible memory, but he
(43:23):
was good with facts and and then there's an additional quote.
This is the hardest thing to describe what happens in
my head when I think about things. When I think
about my fiancee, there is no image, but I am
definitely thinking about her. I know today she has her
hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not
describing an image I am looking at I'm remembering features
(43:44):
about her. That's the strangest thing, and maybe that is
a source of some regret. Yeah, I mean, this is
the thing because typically these people report that they it's
not like they can't they don't know what somebody looks like, right.
They's not like that scene in like Hannibal where they
show face blindness as just seeing people with like smooth
skin over their face. Yeah. What's that condition called a
congenital prosopagnosia? Is that it where you you have a
(44:07):
born condition where you just can't recognize faces people. You
see people who are familiar to you, but you just
they just don't look like anybody, uh you know, whoever
that is and and it's not like that you, or
at least not for everybody. Like we said, there seems
to be a wide variation in how this applies to
people's lives. But I haven't read that it's like that
for most people. It seems like they report, yeah, they
(44:28):
recognize people. Once they see a picture of of a
close family member or of the president or whoever it is,
they know who it is. They just can't make the
picture without looking at it. It's almost kind of like
we talked about in the P versus NP episode, like
the kinds of problems that once a solution is presented,
you can easily check to see if it's correct, but
(44:50):
you can't come up with a solution and a reasonable
amount of time by yourself. Uh. It sounds like a
version of that. You can't make the picture, but when
somebody shows you the picture you can say, oh, yeah,
that's it. Yeah definitely. But anyway, I I just find
this condition really fascinating. And so if you yourself are
somebody who thinks you may be experiencing a fantasia, or
(45:12):
if you just want to learn more about it, one
interesting resource I think would be to go and look
at some of the message boards online that have recently
been created by people who claimed to have this experience,
because there's one I found that was a fant dot asia. Nice. Yeah,
but it's it's just like a forum online people talking
(45:35):
about their experiences. Uh, and it seems to be a
lot of people having this kind of uh, this awakening
kind of experience. They're like, oh, man, I didn't even
realize that this was what was causing all this confusion
between me and other people all these years, or I
didn't realize I was the I wasn't the only one
who was like this, or you know, people really seem
(45:57):
to be having a lot of fun coming together with
a community of other people who have the same issue. Well,
like it reminds one of the whole you know, the
old example of hey, what if when I think of
purple and you think of purple? What if we what
if we're each seeing different colors? But there's never a
way to prove that out. But but this is kind
of like a case where what it's kind of like
(46:17):
if you were one day able to say, oh, yeah,
the purple I see is different from the purple these
people see. I'm gonna I'm gonna go hang out now
with individuals who see purple the way I see. People
never understood what the deal with Barney was, but now
I get it. Uh No. But so I have all
these questions about a fantasia, like what it means, and
(46:38):
again just emphasize it does seem like we haven't nailed
down that there's a specific cause and a very specific
effect yet, because there seemed to be a range of
different ways this manifests in people's minds. It's associated with
different things. Some people dream, some people don't. Some people
have memory problems, some people don't. Um. But one of
the things I was wondering about was can fantasiacs hallucinate? Yeah?
(47:03):
So what if an a fantasiac takes a drug that
often causes visual hallucinations? Do they see anything different? Yeah?
Are they just going to get the non visual hallucinatory effects? Uh?
Or is it going to sort of ignite a type
of visual imagery that isn't normally there sort of heighten
the flashes that some of the you know, the the
(47:24):
the occasional flashes that some of these individuals experience. Yeah,
And so I looked this up actually on the on
the forum boards, and they had actually addressed it. So
one member of a message board said they typed a
question that struck me as intriguing. This person said they
were confused. Essentially, they said, how is hallucinating different from
seeing things in your mind? Again, that question is hard
(47:48):
to answer, but to somebody who has, uh, you know,
a mind's eye, it's very clearly different. I don't feel
like I'm hallucinating when I imagine something, but try to
describe the difference. Well, you're seeing something in your mind
that's not there. Okay, that sounds like hallucination, but yeah,
but then it's also yeah, then it's also just like
(48:08):
seeing Yeah. So yeah, we come back again to the
cave and we're all still lined up staring at the
play of shadows on the wall. Yeah. Some of us
maybe just have a slightly different view of the shadows
and others. Okay, Robert, I've got a question for you. Okay,
hit me. Do you think you could try to simulate
(48:32):
this in you're in your own mind? Like? Could you try?
I know you it would be impossible for us to
really fully be able to do it, But can you
try to go through a standard day to day process
something you would do all the time without using any
mental pictures. I was trying this morning, and I couldn't
do it. Just trying. Yeah, trying not to think of
(48:54):
mental images immediately calls to mind mental images. It's like,
you know, telling somebody like, think of a rhinoceros wearing
a jet pack. You just did it. Uh. And even
it works in the in the general sense, just saying,
try not to think of mental images, and immediately my
mind is filled with rhinoceroses and jet packs. Yeah. I mean,
if anything, I have to try and keep from daydreaming
(49:17):
and keep from or keep from you know, pummeling myself
with with different mental images. Uh, and and actually focus
in on a task, you know. Yeah. I mean the
way this really seems like it would come through is like,
how does if you can't have mental images, how do
you have fantasies about things you would like to do?
So you imagine, you know, your boss makes you furious
(49:37):
and you wish you could punch him in the nose.
You wouldn't actually do it, but you at least have
that image for a moment, right. Uh. I think that's
probably a nearly universal experience for people, and of having
thought of it. But what happens if you can't have
that image in your mind, do you do you think
about it conceptually? It's like I I just thinking about
(49:58):
the concept of punching my boss in the face. Well,
and then also even if like I was just thinking
to myself, like, what are some of the times when
I'm actually able to to not, you know, mentally imagine
anything and have these mental visualizations in my mind, I think, well, okay,
maybe when I'm doing yoga because I'm able to sort
of shut out a lot of stuff. I'm able to
shut off the default mode network to a large extent.
(50:20):
But even then, if I'm focusing on a pose, I
am also focusing on a mental image of what I
must look like in that pose, which may or may
not have match up to how I'm actually doing the pose.
So what is it like then to engage in a
in a physical activity like that with a fantasia? I mean,
(50:45):
I mean, obviously you can do it, but it just
kind of drives home just how much mental visualizations, um,
how big a role they play and just everything we do. Okay,
another question fiction writing. This is something again from the
from the Blake cross Piece. So he's he is, He's
done some screenwriting, and he describes his process for fiction
(51:07):
writing without having mental images, which he described in terms
of words and parts of speech. I thought this was interesting.
So he said, like, when I'm imagining something, I imagine
a noun, the word, and then I imagine a verb
that follows it, the word um. And so there's something
very different about his process for writing than I would have.
(51:28):
So when I'm imagining a scene, there's there's translation going on.
I think of a picture, and then I have to
put the picture into words. But could it be possible
that this allows people to do creative writing without any translation.
The original creative thing that's happening is words. That's interesting. Yeah,
(51:49):
Like they're not having They're not in that situation that
I mentioned earlier, where as an artist or a creator
of any kind, you are stuck trying to translate the
mental image into who something another person can share in.
Like you said, there's no translation going there. Well, it
makes me wonder if the maybe the ultimate form of
direct written communication with almost nothing lost in between, would
(52:14):
be an a fantasiac writing to another a fantasiac somebody,
because there you're not translating it into pictures on both
sides or on either side. I will say that something
that does remind me of is like in my own
writing process. There there's definitely the point where I have
an image in my mind or seen in my mind,
(52:34):
characters in my mind, and I'm trying to bring that
to life on the page. But then if I'll get
into these situations where I'm writing and in a way
what I'm writing is coming before the mental image, so
I kind of create the point. Not to say it's
it's a fantasia at all, but I'm kind of writing
before the mental visualization. I'm kind of reading what I've
(52:57):
writen I've written and an experienced it more or less
in real time as a reader would. Oh yeah, well,
I bet you've had the experience I know I have
of writing something before you get the picture, and then
getting the picture and then going back and revising what
you've written based on the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
This so this is yeah, the writing is definitely a
(53:17):
fascinating area to think about, this because it is this
sort of it's the mental image, but in this stripping
down of the mental image, the translating it into into
another form. Uh yeah, yeah, well it's fascinating to be
coming into this topic and it's such an interesting time
for it, you know, when when it seems we're on
the cusp of a lot of new learning about what
(53:39):
this condition is, how many people have it, what it's
like for them, and Hey, if you out there actually
experience this, if you have some level of a fantasia
or you're toward that end of the mental image re spectrum,
I think it would be great to hear about your experience,
if you want to write in and tell us what
it's like. Yeah, and if you're on the other end
of the spectrum, if you're a hyper visualizer, let us
(54:02):
know about that as well. Uh. In the meantime, head
on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership. That is where you will find
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(54:24):
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