Burned from the Mind’s Eye, Part 2

From the VHS horrors of “The Ring” and claims of psychic photography to cutting edge research into neuro technology, humanity continues to wrestle with the notion of the mind’s eye. In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert and Joe dive into the mystifying world of the mental image.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with part
two of our discussion of psychic photography, the press of

(00:23):
the Mind's Eye. That's right. We kicked off last episode
talking about the ring in which a psychically gifted, disturbed
little girl is able to use her the power of
her mind to burn images into things, including into the
the film of a VHS tape, sure, but also into

(00:45):
all kinds of surfaces. Right. Yeah, But but she's most
famous for her her video work is the video artist. Yeah,
she's a video artist, true artist and true artistrington. Yeah,
so that's where we started off. But we used then
to get into this idea of photography of uh, this
this alleged psychic power by which certain individuals were able

(01:09):
to use the powers of their mind, uh to either
you know, focused mental images into say, undeveloped camera film,
or make it so they could like point a camera
at their own forehead and take a picture of the
interior imaging of their mind. Things of that nature. Yeah,
The idea was that somehow mental imagery, you know, things

(01:32):
that you are picturing in your brain could be projected
out onto the world without being translated through you know,
you putting them into language or you sketching with a hand. Um.
And so I was wondering if you try to take
this idea seriously and say, okay, if this really did work,
how would it work. I was having trouble coming across

(01:54):
anything that seemed all that plausible to me. Uh, you know,
I found one article with somebody's talking about how, well,
maybe consciousness is like an electromagnetic field. I'm not sure
if I buy that. But even if you did buy
the consciousness as an electromagnetic field, how exactly would that
translate into you thinking about an image physically pressing the

(02:15):
image onto a thing outside your brain, Because there's no
reason to think that the electromagnetic field would be like
a two dimensional image that's the same as the thing
you're picturing. Yeah, and then, I mean there's so many
problems with it's almost difficult to roll out individual problems,
like what would be the evolved necessity of doing that?
You know why, it would have to just be like

(02:37):
an accidental byproduct or something, you know, random mutation. Uh,
and then would there be a survival advantage to having
that mutation? And it gets it gets really sticky, really fast. Yeah,
And I think it highlights a kind of like shallow
understanding of what mental image re is. So yeah, and
then specifically what photography is concerning those examples of the

(03:00):
thoughtography that we discussed in the last episode. Yes, exactly.
So I thought maybe we should start today by thinking
about what is the physical reality of an image in
the mind's eye when you okay, so stopping, you picture something,
you picture Garfield Garfield in mind? What is happening in
your brain when you picture Garfield? Like, is there some

(03:25):
two dimensional grid of brain cells that's like a screen
where colors fill in like pixels on a computer screen
and they form Garfield. It seems kind of implausible, but
you know, entertained that for a second, if there were
a way for a mental image to be projected into
a physical space, what would be the physical nature of

(03:46):
the original signal in the brain, and how would it
be transferred to the physical form without being interpreted through
the body. So I was looking at a couple of
papers on the subject of like research and thought about
mental imagery, and one one of the ones I was
looking at was called Unpicturing a Candle The Prehistory of
Imagery Science, and this was published in Frontiers and Psychology

(04:08):
by Matthew mckissics, Susan Aldworth, Fiona McPherson, John Onion's, Crawford Winlove,
and Adam Zema, and this a lot of names. Uh
In and the authors here focus on the history of
scholarship and philosophy concerning visual imagination before modern neuroscience, but
they also cover some modern neuroscience with a specific focus

(04:32):
on the idea of imagining a concrete object, for example,
picturing a candle. And so the authors explored the history
and so for example, they start by looking at like
Plato and Aristotle, and they point out that Plato actually
did not hold a very high regard for the importance
of mental imagination. Uh Like for Plato, mental imagery is

(04:54):
a copy of a copy. It is a sort of
imperfect fac simile of an object in the world, which
is already merely an imperfect copy of a perfect divine form.
That we're getting into the idea of the realm of forms.
Uh the idea that a chair, that there's a perfect
version of a chair that exists in the realm of forms.

(05:15):
The chair we can build is an imperfect interpretation of that.
But then the but then his view is because I'm
more likely to think of it the other way, like
I'm thinking, then, oh, well, the version of the chair
in our mind, that's the realm of forms. But he's saying, no,
that's that's even another level removed from the realm of forms.
It's an imperfect version of the imperfect chair that is

(05:37):
in itself an imperfect version of the ideal chair. Absolutely,
your mental image of a pineapple is a flawed copy
of some actual pineapple, which is an imperfect realization of
eternal pineapple nous. Yeah, and I and I think I
think he is correct here, because, as we stayed in
the last episode, we often we often a tribute a

(05:57):
lot of detail and accuracy to our total images when
they're when it's really not there. It's it's often a
lot more obscure and unfinished than we give it credit. Yeah,
I mean, I almost wouldn't think about it in terms
of accuracy, but in terms and maybe this is more
specific to the way my brain works, but I think
about it even in terms of completeness, like that, when

(06:20):
I have a mental image of something, it's not the
same as looking at the thing, because I'm not I'm
only vaguely grasping the totality of the image. When I'm
mentally picture something, it's not like it's just not like
looking at a fixed version of the image. It's kind
of like a hazy scanning of different little elements of

(06:41):
the image that I can picture in a moment against
a field of a general impression of the larger image.
Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah, I believe. An example
that's often used here is that of a bicycle. If
I say, hey, imagine a bicycle. Easy done. I'm imagining
a bicycle right now. But if we go to the
next step and say that bicycle you're imagining, describe for

(07:01):
me the functionality of its, of the of the wheels
and the gears and the pedals and everything explained to
me how that works? Oh yeah. This goes back to
our illusion of explanatory depth episodes where everybody can picture
a bicycle, but can you draw a bicycle? And it
turns out it's just try it. You might end up
laughing really hard at yourself because you think you can

(07:23):
draw a bicycle, but there's a decent chance you can't.
You don't know where the bars go, which wheel connects
to what? You just don't know, even though you think
you can picture it right now. So again, Plato, I
think was definitely onto something here. I think Plato hit
this one out of the park. Yeah. But Aristotle, to
the contrary, he thought that not only was mental image

(07:46):
rey important, he thought that you literally could not think
without it. They quote him saying, the soul never thinks
without a phantasma, and the phantasma is like some kind
of mental image, which I'm sure this would come as
news to our many listeners who tell us about their
experiences with a fantasia, meaning that they say they don't

(08:06):
have the ability to form mental images, they can't picture
something in their heads. And yet you know, we've got
no reason to disbelieve them on that. And at the
same time, they seem perfectly capable of thinking. So it
seems perfectly clear to me that mental imagery is not
necessary for thought, right, it is necessary for choosing the
form of the destroyer should gozer Uh, the traveler appear

(08:30):
to you. I have been think back at that scene
and Ghostbusters. Uh, that's how they choose the stay puff
marshmallow man form. But you have all of the Ghostbusters
had had a fantasia, then the the Destroyer would not
have been able to manifest. I think you said that
in the original episode. Probably did. I haven't thought about
it since then. But that's great unless goes Are the

(08:50):
Destroyer is even more nefarious than we imagine, and he
can also manifest in the shape of something that you
put together through say words or whatever. Maybe, but I
kind of like the idea that it's being an interdimensional entity.
It's it's limited, and it really like it. It cannot
venture into this form unless there is a clear visual

(09:13):
image that it can draw from. Like that has to
be the uh, the the foothold for it to climb
back in and begin destroying. Well, to tie it back
to psychic photography, actually this is what the case of
goes Are taking the form you imagine would be exactly
like thoughtography. It would be the case of mental imagery
being manifested as a physical object in the world. Yeah,

(09:34):
but but it would also it would make more sense
that a god can read your mind, then your mind
can blast a photo, blast an image onto some undeveloped film,
I agree. Uh. So picking up again with the history
of mental imagery, Uh, Descartes had thoughts about visual imagination,
apparently placed it on par with the senses as manifestations

(09:58):
of the body would. Of course, in descartess view, that
makes them fallible, because of course they can always be mistaken,
unlike in his view pure logical deduction. If you were
call like the fight between Descartes and the the empiricists.
You know, the empiricists thought that the senses should be primary,
but deckart thought, no, you can't ever fully trust the senses.
You've got to go on just like pure logical proofs.

(10:21):
I'm not quite sure why, for some reason that that
seems like a funny belief looking back on it now.
Of course, later mental imagery became the domain of psychology. Uh.
And of course you know that that would be treated
in different ways depending on the different schools of psychology.
One thing that I think is interesting in the history
of psychology is the behaviorist school, of course, not being
interested in mental imagery because it's not an outwardly measurable behavior.

(10:45):
So J. B. Watson apparently referred to mental imagery as
quote motor habits in the larynx, which I think is
a behaviorist way of saying something you only know about
because people talk about it. I am continually fascinated by
thinking about behaviorism because we occasionally hear from people. Uh,

(11:06):
We've gotten a couple of listener emails over the years,
people responding to topics from a behaviorist point of view,
essentially not crediting anything that's about the inner experiences or
consciousness of people. It's only you know, the psychology can
only be about outwardly measured behaviors. Yeah, it's a statement
like that. Then it makes me wonder if J. V.

(11:26):
Watson was perhaps perhaps had a fantasia. You know, I
mean this idea because we this lines up with what
we've heard from a lot of people who's claimed to
have a fantasia. And they'll say, oh, yeah, I heard
people talking about picturing something in their mind when they
read a book, and I thought they were just being
you know, it was just figurative, you know, they weren't
saying that they actually saw something in their head. Like

(11:47):
it's it seems like it is difficult to imagine the
mental image if you have no frame of reference for it,
you know, uh, yeah, except I would say that for Watson,
it's not just mental imagery. It's all internal mental phenomena.
I mean, it's everything that's not outward behavior. So it
wouldn't be just I think he would probably think that
mental imagery is not the only thing. That's just a

(12:09):
motor habit in the larynx. That uh that I don't know, imagination, that,
like anything inside your head, is a motor habit in
the larynx. Do you think Ether would have changed his
mind at all? I don't know. Then again, maybe I'm
not being fair. I don't want to put words in
Watson's mouth, but uh, yeah, So I think we don't
need to feel bound by the behaviorist view of this thing,

(12:31):
and we can entertain the idea of mental imagery. You
experience it, other people say they experience it. You've got
no reason to disbelieve them. So I think humans probably
have mental imagery. But but long in history, it has
clearly been assumed that there is some kind of physical representation,
space and perceiver within the brain for mental imagery. Uh.

(12:55):
And one thing I'm thinking about that I came across
while preparing for this episode is an illustration by the
sixteenth seventeenth century English physician and occultist Robert Flood spelled
f l U d D kind of like Elmer Flood
Flood with an L flood, also like Randall Flag. Oh yeah,
that's true. Maybe this is one of the incarnations of

(13:16):
the Man from the Desert. But anyway, and one of
Robert Flood's tracks he illustrated the eye of imagination or
the oculus imagination onus, which was this third eye inside
the brain which getting it wrong and backwards in multiple ways,
projected mental images onto some kind of screen or representation

(13:38):
space in the back or like in the back of
the head or behind the head, where mental images would
take form after being projected by this third eye. And now,
of course we know that the eye does not project
a beam of seeing, but receives incoming light. So even yeah,
I think we're we're confused in more ways than one here. Yeah, Like,
if there really were a tiny viewing screen inside the

(14:01):
brain and an eye to see it, it would be
too dark to watch the movie, right right, So that
would be a problem. But but yeah, I mean, like,
I think third eye views are are popular throughout history.
People kind of think there's an observer in the observer right,
and and granted, we do have a pennial gland, which
is essentially an atrophied photo receptor with some connections to

(14:24):
the parietal eye of reptiles. But but it produces uh, melotonin,
a serotonin derived hormone, and is not involved in the
generation of mental images, or at least I don't think
there's any evidence, and not that I've ever seen. Uh.
This is funny because I was reading that deck Hart
believed that the penneal gland was the point of interaction
between the body and the immaterial soul. Did you know this, um?

(14:49):
May We did. We did episode on the pineal gland
way back in the day, so it's possible I came
across this. Yeah, But I'm thinking back to this idea
of having, yeah, a viewer inside the viewer like an
in internal I inside the brain for mental imagery. And
there are reasons I think that there are problems with
this because if in order to see mental images we

(15:11):
have to project them physically somewhere inside the brain, what
is the part of the brain that is looking at
the image? Is it another brain with eyes inside the brain? Uh?
Incognitive philosophy, this is sometimes called the homunculous theory. That's
a you know, a name of ridicule for it, like
the idea that there has to be somebody inside your

(15:32):
brain to see what your brain is seeing or thinking. Right,
as with like the homunculous ideas and human reproduction where
there's a tiny little version of you inside of a
sperm cell. Yes, and like the homunculous idea of of reproduction,
it's an infinite regress, right, because if there's a little
eyes and a brain inside your head in order to
see what you're thinking, then that brain must have little

(15:54):
eyes and a brain inside that brain to see what
that brain is thinking about. And it goes on forever.
And another version of this extended to total brain function
is what Daniel Dennett calls the Cartesian theater. Again, this
is something he's he's ridiculing. Basically, it's uh imagining or
implicitly assuming that the brain has some sort of little

(16:15):
pilot inside who witnesses all of our sense data and
controls our reactions um. And again it's basically a reductive
ad absurdam because it leads to this infinite regress. Who's
seeing the images inside the brain and the homunculus or
the pilot or the Cartesian theater must be another smaller one.
So I don't think it can be that inside the brain,
mental images are seen the same way our eyes see

(16:38):
things in the world. So what actually is happening in
the brain when you're asked to imagine a concrete image.
Maybe we should take a break and then explore that
when we come back. Yes, everyone think of a bicycle
during this commercial break. Than alright, we're back, and hopefully
you stall that bicycle floating around inside your mind. We

(16:59):
should give them something more interesting to picture concretely, something
with details. Picture a demogorgan. The demogorgan is good. Yeah,
it's just interesting how many like fabled unreal entities are
good things to focus your mind on. And I think
it perhaps it's because there are there are combinations, they're

(17:21):
they're hybrids with different elements. So you you're you're, you
know what, You're kind of thinking of a list and
compiling that list into this single mental image and ultimately
gives you something to focus on, right, But the details
are provided to you. Whereas the bicycle, you're just saying bicycle,
we're not saying, imagine a contraption with two wheels, and

(17:43):
there's etcetera. Two wheels and nine tentacles and three baboon heads. Yes, yes,
and in one hand the sun and in the other
hand the moon. Okay, Now, when you do picture the demogorgan,
what is actually happening in your brain? Has modern neuroscience
discovered any answers to this question? Actually the answer is yes,
we do know a decent amount. We don't know everything.

(18:05):
We know a decent amount about what happens in the brain.
When you picture mental imagery. Um, So, brain cells in
the temporal lobe, and this is the temporal lobes are
at the bottom and sides of the brain, sort of
around the ears. They become activated. And previous research has
shown that the temporal lobes are involved in attributing and

(18:26):
storing information about the visual characteristics of objects. So normally,
like when you see something, uh, information might there might
be activity in the temporal lobes that seems to be
creating associations with the thing you're looking at. Right, like
the foam on the walls in our studio. They look

(18:47):
like tiny pyramids. So I can look at one of those,
and then I can I can't help but imagine a
great pyramid. Yes, and So what's happening there when you're
using your eyes is probably that lights coming through the eyes,
signals are asking from your optic nerve, from your retina's
tear optic nerve, and uh, they're ending up in the
visual processing areas in the back of your head, and

(19:08):
that's known as the occipital cortex, the back of the head,
and then that start signals that cascade out to other
brain regions. Where you form those associations probably has a
lot to do with your temporal lobes. But when you're
asked to picture something concrete, like I say, picture the
Great Pyramids of Giza, uh, we seem to be starting
with activity that involves visual memory. So there's stuff going

(19:32):
on in the temporal lobes, and the excitation of these
cells then triggers activity in the visual cortices of the
occipital lobe. Again that's the very back of the head.
And of course this is the same part of the
brain that receives and begins to process visual information received
by the retina transmitted by the optic nerve when you
normally see something. And the authors of this paper I

(19:52):
mentioned earlier, they they point out that when you conjure
mental imagery. It's not exactly, but it's sort of roughly
an invert of the process of seeing with the eyes. Basically,
it's similar cascades going in opposite directions. And it also,
i would say, seems to suggest that if it were
possible to project an image from ted serious head onto film,

(20:14):
if anything, he should have been holding the gizmo and
the camera on the back of his head rather than
the forehead. Because it seems like the activity is going
from a sort of beginning with uh, with executive function.
Of course, that's uh, you know, intentionally causing the memories.
Then there's memory stuff in the temporal lobes, and then
it's going to the occipital lobe in the back of

(20:35):
the head. I'll see, if you'd only known that, it
would have worked every time. Now, why do you need
executive function in the front of the brain as well? Well?
Apparently that's involved in intentionally trying to call up and
hold mental images. So like conscious management of what's happening
in the brain tends to be thought that that's executive function.

(20:55):
It's deliberate thinking and maintenance of attention, and that entails
activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain,
so stuff up front and to the front and sides. UH.
And mental imagery may also involve executive function because it
requires the suppression of incoming imagery from the eyes or

(21:16):
at least the diversion of visual processing resources from quote
signals based on light entering the eyes right now too,
images generated from memory. It's crazy to think about the
and I'm thinking about it in this terms because we're
also researching an episode that has to do with driving
and the what's going on in your mind when you

(21:36):
drive an automobile? And isn't it crazy that we can
engage in the cognitively demanding job of say, driving a
speeding automobile down an interstate, watching what all the cars
are doing, and you know, reading an occasional sign, looking
out for speed traps, all of these things that we're doing,

(21:57):
and at the same time, we might have an audio
book playing that is filling our head with like with
a you know, a rich visual world, and we're entertaining
both of these at the same time. I would say
that that is while I accept that we can handle
those things both, at the same time, I would say
it is not without costs to UH. To either one,

(22:19):
Like I would say that you probably have a more
rich experience of the book and mental image reassociated with
the book if you were not driving, and you'd probably
be better at driving if you were not listening to
the book, because there is actually a competition for resources
going on. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I mean, of course
that I think a lot of us tend to to

(22:40):
read in environments where there are other distractions. Maybe not
as cognitively demanding as piloting an automobile, but but still,
this would be an interesting one to get some feedback
from listeners, because I know that we have a number
of listeners who who are on the road a lot
and listen listen to us on the road and listen
to to other bits of audio as well. Yeah, that's
a good point. Please only listen to our podcast if

(23:02):
if it is safe to do so. It's don't devote
too much mental resources to us if if you're piloting
a dangerous vehicle. But then again, even if you're not
listening to a podcast or an audio book, oh yeah,
your mind's want, your mind's gonna wander, And then I
mean it's not even going to necessarily be a situation
where you're consciously choosing things to imagine. You know, you're

(23:23):
gonna you're gonna be subject to the visual summonings of
the default mode network, where uh, you know, mental images
from the past or the physy future are going to
you know, venture into your mind like Victorian ghosts. But
speaking of ghosts, I mean, I do think it's a
little bit spooky that once I read this, this does
in fact seem true to me. I just had never

(23:44):
really thought of it this way, that when you mentally
picture something, you're you are intentionally using your brain. You're
performing some kind of internal brain resources management with the
executive function mostly in your frontal lobe. I think to say,
turn down resolution on incoming mental visual imagery and devote
some of those resources to mental imagery. And if you

(24:08):
if you practice it right now, I think you'll probably
notice the same thing. Just like, look at something and
then try to picture something mentally, and you'll notice that
you're looking kind of gets downgraded in like quality and
and arrested. Are Are you feeling this? Yeah? I mean,
but this is also kind of the uh it kind
of goes both ways, right, Like both cannot have have

(24:31):
complete dominance at the same time, so you might be
able to to dim the thermis that you're staring at
by allowing mental images to you know, to to to
be summoned into your mind. But on the same level,
if you feel um haunted by various visual imagery ghosts,
you know, the visualizations that are in some way troubling

(24:53):
or traumatic, uh, you know, one of the exercises is
to focus your awareness on something, uh that that is
a physically doesn't be at the ambient environment or a
specific object. I think that that would probably absolutely work,
at least based on what I've read, that you can
that you can greatly lessen the power of mental imagery
just by using your senses. Yeah, Like it reminds me

(25:15):
of meditation practices. Like, certainly they are closed eye meditation practices,
which in that environment, you're really opening it up to
the visual way of seeing, you know, uh, to the
mental image alone. But there are plenty of open eye
practices where you know, the instructor will say, you know,
pick something in the room, doesn't matter what it is.
It can be an electrical socket, but stare at that

(25:35):
electrical socket. Stare long and hard at that electrical socket,
and that becomes kind of the you know, the visual
mantra that will force out the other the other ghosts. Yeah.
I like this metaphor for thinking about it, that there's
this war in your brain, this war for control of
the resources in your brain, and one of them is

(25:56):
things in your immediate surroundings, your sense, perceptions, and the
other things conjured by the void, which could be good,
things could be bad, things could be useful, things could
be debilitating things. I mean, it's just what comes up
out out of you know, either the intentional use of
mental imagery by the executive part of your brain or
just you know, things that are subconsciously arising from the depths.

(26:19):
And your brain has to have some kind of partitioning
system for this, this sort of visual processing, right. Uh.
It uses regions in the occipital lobe to process image
data coming from your eyes, But you also use some
of the same regions to process images generated based on
your memories or based on your imagination, which I think
involves the memories. And these two processes are just constantly

(26:42):
going on simultaneously and competing for the same neural resources.
Yet most of the time most people, uh, this is
an interesting thing. Most of the time, most people manage
not to get confused. Isn't that interesting too, Like what
kind of partitioning must be going on in the brain,
because you can picture a pineapple on the desk in

(27:02):
front of you right now, and you can picture that,
but most of the time you don't become confused and
think you're actually seeing a pineapple there. Yeah, not even
awareness is focused, you know, certainly, certainly we all have
those those situations where you walk into a room and
out of the corner of your eye you think, for
a second, there's a there's a goblin standing in the corner,
or there's a cat, or or something's out of place,

(27:25):
and then you know a second glance, you realize, oh,
it's just the way that the shadow is falling, or
it's the way that the drape is positioned, etcetera. Like
we come back to it again, Like our awareness doesn't
just do a single take. It as a double take,
and it, you know, you confirms or denies the presence
of the thing you thought was there initially, right. I
think the persistence of the stimulus is one key there

(27:48):
that like you can keep looking at something and you're
you know, your imagination will fluctuate, but the light coming
into your eyes is going to stay about the same. Yeah, um,
and some beautiful derics there that could be an eagles.
I just tried to sing some eagles, but we don't
want to get night cheese, so we're not gonna leave
it in. Uh Now, Now, it does appear that there's

(28:10):
a possibility for some bleed over in the visual processing
between mental imagery and actual uh uh seeing with the eyes.
For example, this thing called the Perky effect. This is
named after the American psychologist C. W. Perky. So how
does this work? Well, uh, Perky She she would have
somebody try to visualize something like a leaf or a

(28:34):
banana while looking at a blank screen, and then meanwhile
she would project a very faint, soft focus image of
something like a leaf or a banana onto the screen
just about the threshold brightness of visual perception. And in
these experiments, Perky found that subjects would incorporate visual features

(28:57):
of the actual image that was faint projected, thinking that
these were features of their imagined image, for example, the
type of leaf or the orientation of the banana. And
there have been various attempts to replicate this finding, some
successful and some unsuccessful. So I think we're not totally
sure how robust this effect is, but I think now

(29:19):
a common assessment of what of this effect is that
what's really being detected here is the fact that using
visual imagination steals processing resources from normal visual perception, like
we were talking about earlier, So if you're trying to
imagine something, you're less likely to notice consciously that an
image is being faintly projected in front of you, even

(29:41):
though you might pick up some visual cues such as
color or shape from that image and just hold them
in mind to think they're part of your imagination, which
again is creepy. I mean, this isn't the only finding
like this that that you can like give people cues
from the outside that people come to believe or just
part of their own imagination. But I guess maybe it's

(30:02):
needless to say that after looking through all this, I
don't think there's any evidence at all that representation of
an image in the mind involves the brain building a
physical two dimensional picture of the image which could be
projected onto an external substrate like film. It's kind of
like imagining that you could save a jpeg of Garfield,

(30:24):
Say got Garfield and a jpeg and that's on an
old computer floppy disk, and then you could somehow you're
trying to project the image of Garfield physically from the
floppy disk onto a photograph or a piece of paper.
The two D pixel layout of Garfield is not found
anywhere on the disc. You know, it's broken down and

(30:46):
encoded as information which can later be read by a
program to create a copy of the same original image
on a computer screen. But the image of Garfield can't
be seen anywhere on the disc. You can't pull it
out by projecting something through it, even with the strongest microscope.
It's encoded as information that only yields the image when
decoded correctly, and as best I can tell, Imagery's works

(31:10):
a similar way. In the brain. It's somehow coded through
neuronal activity. It's it's not an image that you could
find anywhere in the brain. You've touched on one of
my big problems with David Cronenberg Scanners, which is a
movie I love. Otherwise, Uh, there's a lot to love
about crona about about scanners and not just you know,

(31:31):
people's heads exploding and Michael ironsides of you know, fabulous,
you know, psychic facial strains. But but there is this
this one section of the film where the character Cameron
Veil can cyber pathetically scan a computer hide hard drive
with his brain. Uh. And that always bugged me because

(31:51):
I'm like, Okay, it's one thing to imagine one brain
speaking to another brain, you know, even though there's you know,
there's no defined way that that would actually occur. Uh,
you know, at least in terms of like the human
mind talking to another human mind. But but it's even
a greater stretch than to imagine that he is scanning

(32:11):
a computer hard drive. Yeah, because his brain does not
it can't execute the code right. Like, in order for
the data on the hard drive to be read correctly
has to be executed somehow. There's like a decoding procedure
that yields the text or the sound files or whatever
it is he's trying to discover, and presumably his brain

(32:32):
doesn't have that decoding function within it. Yeah. Yeah, So,
and it's the same problem with this idea of photography,
that that somehow you could you could put the mental
image in your mind onto the film. That's why I
fire prefer one a great example of a far more
believable system of telepathic communication would be that used by

(32:54):
the Gelflings in the Dark Crystal and also in the
the new so far really fabulous uh Netflix of prequel series.
Oh I also started to haven't finished loving it so far.
But the the Gelflings are able to to dream fast
where they're able to uh to to like touch grasp hands,

(33:15):
and in doing so, they share their mental images mental
images of you know, their memories with each other so
that they can share an inexperience and uh, you know,
that's a version of mental image sharing that you know.
I'm not sure exactly what the you know, the biological
explanation would be for it, but it's conceivable. It's conceivable

(33:35):
that these two um you know, you know, neural systems
in the same species could link up to share information
and that would also have a that would have a
survival that would be a survival adaptation as well. Like
that's something that would be uh, you know, supported through
natural selection. Well, you can think about it as another
form of language, and we've got language to code experiences

(33:56):
and share them between each other. So you could imagine
teachers could I don't know, project electromagnetic symbols or something
to each other. You know, pulses of stuff that would
incode and decode information across brains the same way. I
don't think there's any good evidence that humans can do that,
but you could imagine a species that did do that.
Right likewise, it's and perhaps there's a science fiction surely

(34:20):
there's a science fiction or fantasy treatment of this out
there somewhere. You can imagine something with the chromatophores along
the lines of cuttlefish, or you know, an octopus being
able to take a mental image in its head and
recreated on its body. Oh, I love that that. Somebody
has surely done that before, and that would be that
would be an interesting way to do it. And of

(34:41):
course humans have a similar ability through language and uh
and and an artistic skill. We can take a mental
image and we can recreate some version of it outside
of our body in a way that that stays stationary.
But it is not uh, it is not the you know,
the art of of of telepathy or or or the

(35:05):
thoughtography or whatever. It is. It is the the the
it is the arts themselves. It is that it is
the use of language. I think that's dead on. I mean,
we're used to it, so it seems less astounding to us.
But I try to make people remember all the time
that language is like magic. I mean, the language is
the most is the most astounding, strangest thing you can.

(35:26):
You can use words, you make sounds with your mouth
to change what's in somebody else's brain. And it works.
It works almost all the time. Now, quickly, before we
go to another break, I just wanted to mention I
was looking at another paper about recent research in mental imagery,
and this is called Mental Imagery, Functional Mechanisms and Clinical Applications.

(35:46):
This is in Trends and Cognitive Sciences from Joel Pearson,
Thomas Nasloris, Emily Holmes, and Stephen Kostlin Um. And one
of the things that they said in the paper it
echoes a lot of the off we were talking about already.
But um. One thing they say that stuck with me
is that the authors conclude that the existing research suggests

(36:09):
mental imagery should be considered quote, a weak form of perception.
And that's interesting because you don't normally think about mental
imagery as perception. Normally, perception is what you know your
five senses or maybe the other senses, if you know
about the weirder ones. Um. But here they're saying, no,
it is like a form of perception. It's almost like

(36:30):
a lower resolution form of seeing. Now, why is it
a weak form of perception? Well, visual regions in the
brain show less blood flow and less excitation of neurons
during the generation of mental imagery than they do in
the actual viewing of images with the eyes, even though
you use some of the same regions for both. And

(36:51):
I also just wanted to mention some interesting questions that
the authors bring up as sort of unresolved in this review. Again,
this was from so there maybe development since then, but um,
one of the things they ask is, we know that
there are strong similarities between normal visual perception seeing with
the eyes and mental imagery. What are the major differences?

(37:12):
Another thing that I was really interested in is they
asked the question of can mental imagery be unconscious? And
if you try to understand that for a second, is
it possible to picture something without being aware that you're
picturing it? Or is mental imagery something that only occurs consciously?

(37:33):
Can you only picture something if you're aware that you're
picturing it? So? Well, what would be what would be
an example then, based on that logic of someone picturing
something without realizing they're picturing something. Well, I don't know.
I mean that that's sort of the tough question, like
is because it would be difficult to measure that. I
think it would it be like an hallucination. Well, no,

(37:54):
because you'd be presumably you'd be conscious of an hallucination.
So the idea would have to be that, you know,
you can show unconscious things going on in the brain
just by like asking people if they're aware of things,
but tracking their behaviors that realize, you know, the show
they are aware of this thing or that thing. But
it's difficult to say, can people imagine a picture of

(38:16):
something without knowing that they're picturing it? I would think,
you know, I would say the default answer would probably
be no, because it's hard to imagine what that would be.
Like you tend to think, Okay, the only times I
know that I'm picturing something or when I'm conscious of it. Well,
for that matter, is it possible to unconsciously look at
something with your visual perception? Like? I think maybe that

(38:37):
is possible, Like because if I'm but I'm looking at something,
I am looking at something, right, I mean, it seems
like it follows the same process. Well, I don't know
what about, Like, there could be some stuff along the
lines of like the Invisible Guerillas experiment that indicate that
sometimes you can see things without being aware that you're
seeing them, right or certainly we've already touched on what

(38:59):
happens if you are looking at something in the physical
world but focus focusing far more intently on something that
is just a mental image. But yeah, I mean, I
can see why it's an unanswered question, but it is
kind of it's a tricky question too. Yeah. Now, I
think what does seem pretty clear is that there can
be unconscious reasons for the generation of mental imagery. I

(39:20):
mean that this is a huge thing in mental imagery research,
is like the origins of mental imagery, for example, intrusive,
unwanted mental images. Yeah, I think that's that's that's an
example that I imagine a lot of us can relate to.
But also in terms of say meditative states, you know,
the idea of encountering an image that isn't at least

(39:41):
consciously summoned, you know, not to say that it comes
from the outside. It's still coming from sort of the
the internal contents of your your psychic library, but but
not in a way that feels um that you assembled
it hands on. And then likewise there's a domain of
hallucination and a dream. Yeah, I've got another maybe weird

(40:02):
question about mental imagery. See if this makes any sense.
Um So, the authors in these studies find strong links
between visual imagery and things like working memory. But I
wonder does the ability to recall visually recognized features of
a thing always or even usually rely on mental imagery?

(40:23):
And uh so? For example, if I ask you to
picture a character from a movie, you've seen a picture
the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal. Uh or let's see actually,
uh I think I screwed that up. Okay, No, actually, don't,
don't picture him yet. It's too late. I've done it
like twice. Okay, Well, I just want you to list
physical characteristics of the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal. Okay, Um,

(40:49):
bird like, um, sneaky, serpentine, um, splendid, decayed. I guess
I bring this up because my question is, when you
recall visual characteristics of a thing you've seen, do you
recall them exclusively by calling up a mental image of

(41:12):
the thing and examining it like you would a thing
you're looking at currently or do you have other ways
of remembering the visual characteristics of something other than by
picturing it and then examining what you're looking at in
your mind's eye. Well, with the Chamberlain, I think I
draw specifically on just visuals. Now, it would be different

(41:33):
if I was described, if it was asked to describe
a literary character in which the character is is like
initially build out of language, but that the Chamberlain is
all is all visual and does not, at least in
anything I remember, describe itself. So you know, because there
are characters that one encounters visually where that the character

(41:56):
is going to describe itself or there's gonna be some
voice to describe it, but no language attached to it.
So yeah, I would say almost purely visual. Yeah, I
noticed most of the time when I'm trying to recall
visual characteristics of something, I picture it first. But yeah,
it gets especially complicated when you're thinking about characteristics of
something that you've imagined from writing but not from seeing. Yeah,

(42:20):
Like when you asked me to think of the Chamberlain, too,
I found myself doing it in two ways, Like basically
a mental image of a scene from the film, like
where I'm seeing in my mind not only the character,
but the backdrop, the lighting, everything, and then there's kind
of a mental image of, say, the head of the creature,
as if it were in the room with me, you know.

(42:42):
So that makes me wonder too, Yeah, do we have
different different sorts of mental imagery? Mental imagery that's more
based on thinking. Maybe in a way, it's kind of
like thinking about the way we uh we think about
the past and the future, a way of thinking about
the way something was and then imagining the way something
would be, what it would be like if it were
here or if I were encountering it in the near future.

(43:05):
I wonder if that plays into it at all. All Right,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, but
we'll be right back. Than alright, we're back. Okay. So
we've been talking about psychic photography or thoughtography, this alleged
ability that some people have to project the contents of
their mental imagery onto film or onto objects in the

(43:27):
external world. And I think we're probably in agreement that
even though a lot of people have claimed to have
this power or claim to have demonstrated this power, this
probably is not really going on in in some ways,
the mechanism of it seems incoherent, right, and that's what
it basically, the mechanism is incoherent. So it's again like
imagining the psychics and scanners being able to read hard drives,

(43:51):
like like, this just doesn't make sense. But there are
a number of experiments that sort of would find a
way around the sincoherence we're talking about through another layer
of encoding and decoding of brain activity that that could
be learned through brain computer interfaces and machine learning. And

(44:12):
this we're getting into into the creation of a of
a technological translator. Yes exactly. It kind of the same
way that you would use language to translate the contents
of your mind's eye into something in the outside world.
A computer could potentially translate the brain activity that it
reads off of your scalp or in blood flow in

(44:34):
your brain through fm R I into something in the
outside world that could be trained to correlate with your
mental imagery. Now, I think I've got lots of questions
about how accurate and how realistic this project actually is,
but there are at least these experiments that that have
purported to get part of the way there, and they're
they're kind of freaky. I I won't lie. I want

(44:56):
to say this starts to get me a little bit worried.
I want to start with a newspiece in Science from January.
The newspiece was by Matthew Hudson and it covers the
brain computer interface work of a group of researchers including
uh Yukiyasu Kamitani, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University in Japan,
and a computer scientist named Zone ming Lieu at Purdue

(45:18):
University in the United States. And this work is focused
on it's using brain computer interfaces to directly read and
record mental imagery, which is the imagining of a picture.
So you try to imagine, like, why would anybody be
doing this? You know, what would be the supposed benefits
of a technology to read people's mental imagery. Well, we're

(45:39):
asked to imagine in this article, maybe being able to
search through a collection of digital images simply by mentally
picturing the image we want. Okay, that might be a
thing like I bet you've tried before to Google an
image that you've seen before, but you didn't know what
search terms to use and couldn't find it. Yeah, yeah,
there's I could see where that could have an application. Well,

(46:01):
granted it's not something that is really life or death.
It would be more like, Oh, I vaguely remember a
really cool advertisement for a community college on television in
the summer in my childhood, and they played a song
on it that kind of sounded like Boards of Canada.
I wonder if it was actually Boards of Canada. Like
that is a legit thing that I think about from

(46:23):
time to time, and there's no way for me to
look it up. But true enough, if a machine could
look at my mental imagery of that memory of watching
that TV spot, then it's conceivable that it could then
look into some vast database and find that footage for me. Yeah,
I'm not saying that will necessarily ever get there, but

(46:44):
that that is the kind of thing they're asking you
to imagine. Another one, this is probably more straightforward drawing
without the hands, straight from imagination too, recorded two D
media that might be interesting. I mean, I wonder if
I could open up whole other realms of visual art
for people who are not good at drawing with their hands, right,
or or for people who are disabled to some degree, right, Like,

(47:06):
I coun see that being advantageous as well, and it
can go further than that. I mean, technically you could
imagine something like this allowing people without the power of
speech you're writing to share their thoughts. Uh, you know
you can't. Maybe if you can't speak, you can't describe
your visual imagery, maybe you could share it with something
like this. But I want to say, Okay, those are
the positive versions of what we're imagining. We could explore

(47:28):
negative versions later on. And so the researchers here have
been working on computer algorithms that are trained through machine
learning to match patterns of brain activity recorded through things
like fMRI I with imagery that a subject is looking at,
and because actually looking at an image and then mentally
imagining the same image are sort of similar in the brain,

(47:50):
They're not exactly the same, but there's some similar stuff
going on. Researchers have experimented with measuring activity in the
visual processing areas of the brain with f m r
I while person looking at different images, and then using
that data about blood flow in the brain to later
guess what a person is looking at without knowing now
ideally what you would have at the end of this

(48:11):
kind of research. Multi stage process is an algorithm that
could read the activity of a person's visual processing center
and materialize an image directly on the screen that corresponds
to what the person is either looking at or imagining. UH.
And again, to whatever extent the technology will ever fully
be realized, it's still in the very early stages. Um.

(48:33):
But in the example sided in this article, I should
say that the image generation portion was not carried out
on real brains. The data acquired from human subjects was
instead used to train a deep neural network that stood
in for an actual brain while they tested their image
generating program. And to quote from Hudson's article here quote

(48:53):
the system starts with something random similar to TV static,
and slowly refines its painting over the core of two
hundred rounds. To get closer to the ideal image. The
system calculates the difference between the deep neural network activity
and the templated deep neural network activity. Those calculations cause
it to nudge one pixel this way and another pixel

(49:14):
that way until it gets closer to the ideal image. Now,
Apparently at the stage, the algorithms are not very good
at all at guessing what imagery people have in mind
when they're imagining realistic photos, but they are pretty good
at picking out when people imagine abstract shapes. And that
makes sense because I think those would be like clearer
signals in the brain probably. But yeah, there's some images

(49:37):
along with this article that are the paintings generated by
this algorithm. Uh, and then they're they're compared with the
images that originally gave rise to them, and the comparisons
are wonderfully creepy. Yeah. They look like like psychedelic entities
that have come to convey some sort of occult knowledge

(49:58):
under the listener. Like there's a there's one that's originally
a picture of an owl, and then the approximation of
it is some kind of like like primordial worm walrus
from the center of the earth. Yeah. Yeah, a red
mailbox becomes this kind of alien burning crimson pillar. So
there are some patterns it seems like they're picking up

(50:21):
in in this version, where like some basic shapes emerge,
some color patterns seem like detectable. It seems like you
can detect when something is basically a face. But I
have questions about the ultimate potential of this technology, Like
the versions that exist today have limitations such as relying
on training and feedback, and also I wonder about the

(50:41):
rules for reading mental imagery, like how transferable are they
from one person to another? How idiosyncratic is your brain
looking at an image versus somebody else's brain looking at
the same image. It makes me think of the holophoner
from Futurama. Do you remember this sent in? It's a
mu zsical instrument that Fry attempts to learn at one point,

(51:03):
and at one point masters thanks to the the parasitic
worms living inside his gut that have made him super intelligent. Uh,
but then he pleases that ability. But anyway, it's it's this.
It's basically like a small musical instrument, like a woodwind instrument,
but it has the technologically capability to take a mental
image in your mind and project it into the air

(51:24):
for others to see. But it takes It's like, it's
notably difficult to learn and takes a lot of intense
training and concentration to even form a very vague image
in the air. And so some of the like the
initial images that Fry is able to summon using the
holophone are basically as abstract as these examples we've discussed

(51:44):
in this study. But I mean, so on one hand,
you could say, well, maybe this kind of thing will
just never get very accurate in any way that's applicable.
That's possible. But also if this technology ever does get
more accurate, can you imagine this would I mean, I'm
thinking about the way it would be incorporated into machine
learning user feedback mechanisms that serve us content on social media. Um,

(52:10):
you know, imagine a Facebook news feed that could not
only fine tune itself based on what you do with
your mouse cursor and how you scroll and what you
click on and how long you look at things, but
based on neurofeedback that allows it to detect how you're
using your visual imagination, you know, so they sell you
on the good stuff, right, draw without your hands, and

(52:30):
you get this kind of interface that that hooks up
to your brain and then it can sense patterns and
what users are picturing in their mind's eye and reaction
to media stimuli at a massive scale. Even if this
can't be used to pull images accurately directly from your brain,
just imagine what it could do based on the brain
activity correlations across populations alone. Uh. And also I'm imagining

(52:54):
if it ever did get good enough at reading brain activity,
the brain activity underlying mental imagery and turning that directly
into physical images outside the brain. What kind of crazy
cyber feedback processes could that lead to? Yeah, I mean,
anyway you shake it, it's a it's a nightmare. Yeah, yeah.

(53:15):
I really don't like the idea of machines being able
to look inside our head and do anything with our
our mental images and draw them out. I mean, that's
that's just pure dystopia juice right there. Anyway, anyway you
shake it, I mean it seems like even the positives
I have to like really construct an artificial scenario where
it's like, okay, there's been a kidnapping and we have

(53:37):
to draw the mental images out of the the only
so you know, you get into ridiculous scenarios like that, which, okay, yes,
given that very particular scenario, perhaps it would make sense.
But then you get into just basic considerations of of
privacy to like, would you ever have the right to
look inside someone's head and draw out their mental images?

(53:58):
It depends on who writes the laws, and I would
think it is the big corporation with all the lawyers
that will write the laws. And I guess looking at
the like this sort of certainly the social media examples too.
It's like, are you It depends too, are you born
into a world in which it's normal for your machines
to look inside your brain and draw from your mental images,

(54:18):
probably with some sort of an agreement. Uh, In the
same way that you know, our emails are read by machines,
but they're not actually read by people. There would be
this idea like, oh, yeah, nobody's actually watching your mental images.
It's just our algorithms are keeping track on them so
we can better serve you content. I mean, I think
that a lot of times we have overestimated our people's

(54:40):
desire for privacy and uh, Like, I just think about
how years ago if you had told people here's all
the things people will be sharing on social media and
all the kinds of uh privileges they will be allowing
these companies to have and learning about their lives and
learning about their data, people would be like, no way,

(55:01):
nobody will ever surrender that amount of you know, privacy
and autonomy about their lives and their data. But people
just gave it up so willingly. Yeah, and so many
are still seemingly fine with it. Yeah. So I wonder
if I don't know. Maybe it has to do with
something about the advertising, the marketing, how these things are
are rolled out to the public that that breaks down

(55:23):
our defenses and and has us ending up being like, ah, yeah,
you know whatever, I'll get the brain device. You know,
Jeffrey's got one. He likes it, you know. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
I I hold out hope that it would be a
you know, the bridge too far, and that that humans
would would rise up and reject it. I hope so
as well. But but I also feel like we're already

(55:44):
at that point where humans should rise up and reject
what is being presented to them, you know, certainly by
the large social media companies and um and uh. I
don't know. Some people are rising up, but we're not
quite rising up in the numbers so far. To limit
their power, protect your mental imagery instead, if you want
to have more power in sharing your mental imagery in

(56:06):
the cases where you actually do want to share it,
hone your powers of translation. That means practice becoming better
at language, better at drawing, better at art of whatever kind. Yeah,
and indeed, I don't want to end this on a
you know too you know, pessimistic note, dystopian and note is, etcetera.
Because ultimately, like what all this reveals, it's just like
just how incredible our brain's capacity for mental imagery really is.

(56:31):
Because you know, certainly these technologies that attempt to understand
and or even replicated these uh pseudoscientific or outright superstitious
ideas about what a mental image is and how it
might be you know, inflicted on the world. They all
get that, they're all circle circling the mystery and the
wonder uh that we all experience every day. It's yet

(56:51):
another case where there's a purported magical ability that is
actually maybe less fascinating than the reality that we're just
so used to of the fact that we have something
like language absolutely all right, Well, there you have it
are two part look at the mental image and various
ideas surrounding it. And I think we we crammed a

(57:13):
fair number of of horror film and other uh you know,
horror related ideas in there. So I think it's it's
firmly implanted in our October offerings. But if you're new
to the show, we do this every October. Every October
is wall to wall Halloween related content. Uh So, if
you want to you want more, you can go to

(57:34):
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(57:56):
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(58:20):
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