Ep59 "Do you visualize like I do?"

How do brains picture things internally, and how might you and I imagine differently? How have recent discoveries completely changed the debate and the way we understand internal experience? What does this have to do with Disney's Fantasia, or Pixar's aphantasia? Strap in for some very wild surprises today about our internal experiences, with guest Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar Studios. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
If you had to guess about the internal life, the
conscious experience of the guy who co founded Pixar, the
computer animation studio, what would you guess about what's happening
inside his head? And how do any of us picture
things internally? How do we visualize? These sound like simple questions,

(00:25):
but strap in for some very wild surprises today about
our internal experiences. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in
these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe

(00:46):
to uncover the most surprising secrets about our lives. Today's
episode is about visual imagery. Now, I'm not talking about
vision when something is in front of us and photons

(01:08):
are bouncing off it and hitting our eyes and our
brains are doing the analysis. Instead, I'm talking about when
you're sitting there, let's say, listening to a podcast and
the speaker says, hey, imagine watching a bluebird landing on
a tree branch in the spring. Imagine the bird looks around,

(01:28):
moving its head curiously, and then it flaps its wings
for a moment, then it hops to a different spot,
then it flies away. Now, there's no blue bird. Instead,
your brain is taking everything it's ever learned about bluebirds
in the past and generating internal visual imagery, all in

(01:49):
the pitch blackness of your skull. How does that work?
And how did recent discoveries here completely change the debate
in psychology and neuroscience and the way we understand internal experience.
So let's start in nineteen thirty eight, when an animator

(02:10):
named Walt Disney was trying to reboot the popularity of
his little rodent character named Mickey Mouse. So after years
of work, he ended up making a feature length animated
film set to classical music, and he called this Fantasia. Now,
a project of this size combining visuals and music, this

(02:32):
had never been attempted before, and it ended up becoming
one of the most successful films in history. Now. Of
the millions of young children who gaped it Fantasia over
the next decades, one was especially taken by the magic
of animation and the possibilities for how this could evolve.
This was a boy named ed Catmol and he grew

(02:55):
up into a world in which transistors were shrinking in
the power of computer was growing, and all this was
lighting up new pathways in his imagination. This young man
would go on to create new methods to represent three
dimensional objects mathematically, and after his PhD, he would co

(03:15):
found a studio for making animated films with computers. This
studio was called Pixar after twenty seven feature films. Ed
had contributed more to our visual world than almost anyone
in his generation, but there were certain things that he
couldn't do. For example, his friend asked him to visualize

(03:39):
a sphere in front of him, and Ed just couldn't
do that. Now, was this some sort of rare brain
disease or what was going on here? So to understand this,
I'm going to zoom out to the question, the critical
question for today, which is how do any of us
picture a sphere in our heads? What does it mean

(03:59):
to visualize something? So I'd like you to imagine an
ant crawling on a red and white tablecloth towards a
jar of purple jelly. Now, what exactly is happening in
your brain? What is your experience? Are you seeing this
like a movie or is it just a concept about
ants and tablecloths and jelly? But it's not really like

(04:21):
seeing Well, this is one of those questions that might
seem simple, but it led to decades of debate and
experiment among researchers, and this debate came to a head
in the nineteen seventies in the psychology literature. People were
asking what is visual imagery? How is visual information stored?
Do we actually see the ant like the way you

(04:42):
would experience vision, like watching a movie, or is something
else going on? One side of the debate argued that
information about visual objects was stored in a symbolic language
like format, the way you would store data on a computer,
and on the other side of the debate, the idea
was that you're actually running your visual cortex and seeing

(05:04):
the thing. Essentially, it's the same experience as seeing something real.
This debate was really spearheaded by two luminarias in the field.
One was Xenon Folician, who said, you're just manipulating symbols
in your head, you're not actually seeing the thing, and
the other was Stephen Coslin, who said, no, it's actually

(05:24):
like a vision. You're running the same machinery. You're having
a visual experience. And they both did experiments back and forth.
Felician said, look, you're insane. It's not stored like a picture,
and Costlin said, no, you're insane. It's not stored like
a proposition, You're actually seeing it. And it was very
difficult to come to a conclusion. Each argued for what

(05:45):
he felt was true, and both were smart, so why
couldn't they come to an agreement? So who was right? Well,
you can answer this yourself. Think about how people actually visualize.
I'm going to walk you through an exercise and then
I'll tell you the answer of how humans actually visualize,

(06:06):
and I guarantee that you will not get the right answer.
So imagine this picture in your head, the rising sun.
Think about the picture that comes before your mind's eye.
Imagine the sun rising above the horizon into a hazy sky.
And now picture that the sky clears and surrounds the

(06:29):
sun with blueness. Now picture clouds, A storm comes, there
are flashes of lightning, and now a rainbow appears. Now
what I want you to consider is how vividly you
pictured that. How vivid is your mental picture on a
scale from one to five, where one is pictureless and

(06:51):
five is akin to a photo or a video. So
really think about this. The sun rising into the hazy sky,
the sky clears to blue, clouds move in lightning flashes,
finally a rainbow appears. How would you rate the vividness
of your imagery from one no picture at all to
five as clear as a movie. So whatever score you

(07:14):
came up with there, it's not the right answer about
how humans visualize the rising sun. The score you came
up with is your answer, but it's not the right
one for everyone. So returning to this question of why
Fylition and Coslin, two brilliant researchers, couldn't come to agreement,
the answer was this, they were each having a different

(07:38):
experience on the inside. So with Felician's introspection, he didn't
experience a picture and Coslin did. And here's the key.
They both operated under the assumption that everyone else was
having the same experience they were. It's a natural assumption.
And you've heard me talk on other episodes about about

(08:00):
how we each live on our own planet, the details
of our inner cosmos determined by the three pounds of
electrically screaming cells locked in our skull and constructing our reality.
We each have our own slightly different version of reality,
but we generally assume that everyone else is having the

(08:21):
same thing, and so when Felician considered how do I imagine
the ant on the tablecloth or the rising sun? He
realized that he had no real picture in his head,
and he assumed everyone else had the same experience, and
he argued for that truth in the literature. And when
Coslin saw a little movie in his head, he assumed

(08:42):
everyone else did too, and he argued for what he
believed was true for everyone. Like all of us, they
were each operating under the assumption that everyone else's internal
life was just like their own. And that's why the
scientific literature was confused for years, because we all make
these assumption that everyone experiences their internal life as we do. So,

(09:06):
as it turns out, there are major differences between people
when it comes to the vividness of their visual imagery.
Now this has been known for a while, but my
colleague Adam Zeeman put a name to this in twenty fifteen.
He thought, look, let's call your internal imagery fantasia, which
is the term that Aristotle used for the mind's I

(09:29):
think of this word like Walt Disney's fantasia, but now
with a pH instead of an F. And the important
part is Zeeman said, if a person really visualizes nothing
at all. We'll call that a fantasia. A is just
a prefix that means not so. In other words, no fantasia,
no mind's I thinking without images. And on the other

(09:52):
end of the spectrum, if a person sees like an
internal movie, he called that hyperfantasia. They're having imagery so
so vivid that it rivals real seeing. So that's the
spectrum from a fantasia to hyperfantasia. Now how do you
measure that? Well, there's this standardized test created by the

(10:12):
British psychologist David Marx. It's called the Vividness of Visual
Imagery Questionnaire, and I've linked to this on the show notes.
This questionnaire walks you through visualizing a bunch of scenarios.
For example, think of some relative or friend who you
frequently see but who is not with you at present,

(10:33):
and consider carefully the picture that comes before your mind's eye.
Imagine the exact contours of the face, the head, the shoulders,
the body. Then think about how they walk, the precise carriage,
the length of the step, think about the different colors
of some of their familiar clothes. For each scenario, you

(10:56):
try to form a mental picture, and then you rate
how vivid it is using that at five point scale,
if you don't have any visual image, you rate vividness
as one, which means no image at all. I only
know that I'm thinking of the object. You would score
a two to mean dim and vague image. You'd use
three to indicate moderately realistic and vivid. Four means realistic

(11:21):
and reasonably vivid, and you use a five to mean
perfectly realistic, as vivid as real seeing. So think about this.
What is it like for you on the spectrum from
no image to as vivid as real seeing? So try
with some of these questions. Think of the front of
a shop that you often go to. Consider the picture

(11:42):
that comes before your mind's eye, the appearance of the
shop from the opposite side of the road, a window
display including colors and shapes and details of individual items
for sale. Now imagine you enter the shop and go
to the counter or the counter assistant serves you money

(12:02):
changes hands. How vivid is your imagery? Or try this one.
Think of a country scene which involves trees, mountains, a lake.
Consider the picture that comes before your mind's eye the
contours of the landscape, the color and shape of the lake,
the color and shape of the trees. So think about

(12:26):
what your level of clarity is. Now, my lab showed
that we can actually measure this in people objectively, not
just asking them subjective questions about their experience, but measuring
them in the brain scanner. So we had people take
the vividness of visual Imagery questionnaire, and then we put
them in brain imaging fMRI and we had them do

(12:49):
some visual imagery tasks, and then we looked at the
activity in their visual cortex relative to the activity and
the rest of their brains. And the key is that
instead of averaging all the participants together like you usually
do in fMRI experiments, we analyzed each person individually and
we found that some people when they're imaging, have less

(13:12):
activity in the visual cortex, and some people have more
and everywhere in between. And when we correlate each participant
with their vividness of visual imagery score, we found that
the more clear your imagery, the more activity in your
visual cortex. In other words, your vividness of visual imagery

(13:32):
is measurable objectively. If you're someone who has rich visual imagery,
you have more activity running in your visual cortex. And
we were Jazz defined that we could objectively verify subjective report.
So let's return to the young man that I mentioned
at the beginning who watched and loved Walt Disney's Fantasia.

(13:54):
This was Ed Catmoll. He loved animated films as a
child and wanted at some point more than anything to
go into the world of animated filmmaking, but there was
no clear path for that. So he ended up getting
his doctorate in computer science and in nineteen seventy eight
he developed new three D computer graphics techniques involving how

(14:16):
to describe any arbitrary surface as little patches. This is
called the Catmull Clark surface subdivision, and later he would
win an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for this, and
Ed was involved in all the stuff that followed from that,
including particle effects and ray tracing and everything about how
light bounces off objects and where you get reflections and shadows.

(14:38):
And he and his colleagues made the computer program render Man,
which allowed them making a very complex scenes, and collectively
this is what made computer graphics realistic. So in the
nineteen seventies he got together with his friends and colleagues
and they collectively had the ambition to make the world's
first computer animated film, and things took a while, but

(15:01):
then George Lucas got interested and took on the team,
and then in nineteen eighty six, Pixar spun off as
an independent company with Ed as the president. They got
their investment money from Steve Jobs, who joined the board
of directors as chairman, and they made this stunning two
minute short film called Luxo Junior, which starred two desk lamps,

(15:26):
one large and one small. You may have seen the
short film, and if you haven't, you should. The large
lamp looks on while the smaller, younger lamp has a
great time playing with a ball until it accidentally deflates it.
And by the way, this film is from Whence Pixar
got its mascot. So Pixar went on to great acclaim

(15:47):
and success, starting with Toy Story in nineteen ninety five,
which was the first fully computer animated feature film, and
Ed eventually became president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. So
here's a guy who led the world in the realm
of gorgeous computer animated film. So imagine his surprise when

(16:09):
he learned about a fantasia, because he immediately understood that
his mind's eye was blind ed. Is a fantasic. He
doesn't visualize anything, and this makes no sense, right, How
could the guy who runs Pixar and produced the visuals
for our generation? How could he be a fantasic? So

(16:33):
Ed and I have been in touch for a while
on this topic. So I called him up to talk
with him today about a fantasia and Art ed, when
did you first realize that your brain was different from

(16:56):
other people's.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
Well, not that I ever thought it was like anybody else's,
but there was a curious thing that took place when
I was having dinner with a friend of mine who
was involved in visual meditation, and since I meditate, I
wanted to have him teach me how to do that.
So he said, well, it's simple. Just sit down and

(17:21):
then close your eyes and visualize a ball in front
of you. Really simple.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
So went home. I tried it.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
I couldn't visualize a ball in front of me. So well,
I was weird for a week. I kept trying. Now,
when I went back to him, he said, oh, that's okay,
some people can't do it, But now my curiosity is peaked.
So I went to the person who was the production
designer Ralph Eggleston for Toy Story and several of the

(17:52):
Pixar movies. And I said, if you close your eyes,
can you see things? He said, of course I can.
And there's some people here who can do it so well.
They can open their eyes and trace what they see. Okay,
now it's interesting to me. Now, what's interesting about it

(18:12):
was that the surfaces that are used in the movies today.
We're from Jurassic Park, Toy Story movies, but almost everything
you see in the movies was based on a patch,
a way of making a surface that I conceived back
when I was at the University of Utah.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
It's like forty five years ago.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
And I remember very well the process in which I
did it, and that was I knew what the problem was.
I would write things on the whiteboard that's trying to
solve a problem about how to make a new kind
of surface, and then I would feel the problem go
down into my brain or subconscious It felt like it

(18:57):
was going down, and I stood in front of the
whiteboard and I rocked back and forth for twenty to
thirty minutes, this several times, and I knew something was
going on.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
I had no conscious access to it.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
And then something would bubble to the surface and I
would draw on the whiteboard and interact with it. And
when I would run into a problem, which I usually did,
back down, I would go this was a very real feeling,
but for all I knew, that's what other people did too.
So now I'm surprised because I came up with this

(19:34):
new way of making surfaces, but I didn't do it
with math, and I didn't do it with visualization. So
then I started to ask people that pixar, because I
would have weekly lunches with random people, can.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
You just flesh out what the problem was.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
At the time when I was starting, there were two
ways of making surfaces, one of them which was with polygons,
and the other one was with patches.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
These were called beast blind patches.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
They had a lot of flexibility and you could bend
them in certain ways and then you would stitch a
surface together with these four sided patches and they would
come together with four.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
Corners from the different patches.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
Now, because I had made an image of my hand
it was one of the first things I did with polygons,
I knew there was an inherent problem, and that is
stitching together four sided things where they come together at
the corner with each one has problems if you do
a hand or something simple like if you take a cube.

(20:49):
Just think about a cube. It's got six sides, and
it's got these four sided squares, but they come together
with three edges at a point, not four. Even if
for something as simple as a cube, four sided things
coming together with four at a corner doesn't work.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
Since we were now in the early.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Stages, I wanted a patch where you didn't need to
have three come together at a corner. You had more flexibility,
very important. So I came up with a way of
doing that, and I proved that it worked once I
figured out how to do it. Mentally, I proved that
it worked using high school geometry. So I then went

(21:36):
to a professor with this idea, and I.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Showed it to him.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
Was eighteen page lung proof, and I looked at it
briefly and he said, ed, what is this and he
tossed it back of me. Wasn't critical to my thesis,
so I set it to the side. And then after
I graduated, then Jim Clark we came up with paper

(22:04):
which then described it.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Let me just get it straight from the audience. So
it is how do you represent surfaces on a computer
and then you can do things like bounce light off
that and take care of color and stuff like that. Yes.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yes, this is basically the underlying patches that you piece together.
And when you've got those pieces together, then there's a
separate question of how you put texture on them and
lighting and so forth. This is really the definition of
the surface. It's a geometric problem.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
And this is what all animated films came to use
in the future. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yes, and so I and a couple of others received
an Academy award because of this way of making services.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Now tie this back to your inability to picture the
sphere while meditating.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
So, knowing that this took place, I went to these
lunches and I just talked about it with people and
I would say, Okay, if you close your eyes, can
you visualize something? How good are you at it? And
what I was finding was that their ability to visualize

(23:18):
among this random group of eight people at the table
was all over the place. In fact, in one of them,
the only person who couldn't or would report of they
couldn't visualize was an artist and everybody else who is
not an artist could visualize. So at this point it's
like this is getting stranger and stranger, and I was

(23:41):
wondering if there was if there wasn't even a strong
correlation or any correlation between what they did and their
ability to visualize.

Speaker 3 (23:51):
Now, at this point, I.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Don't know about authentation, never heard of it. It's purely
this curious phenomenon about the way people think.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
The way they visualize, the visualize.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yes, the next big step in terms of making it
a very strange phenomenon was that I had a dinner
with Glenn Keene. Glenn Keen is one of the best
hand drawn animators of all time.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
He did The Little Mermaid and what else.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, so basically he was the primary animator on those
course of films. So his Little Mermaid, Beauting, the Beast, Aladdin,
so the main characters they and they were done by Klan.
I mean, they were rather great animators too, but like,
this was the guy that was the best, and if

(24:44):
you watch him draw, it's pretty stunning. So I had
dinner with him and I explained the topic to him
and he just said, oh, I can't visualize either.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
I've never been able to visualize.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
In fact, I got into an argument with my mentor
at Disney, and his mentor was one of these the
famous nine Old Men of Disney who did the fields
from a long time ago.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Glenn really could draw, and the mentor knew this.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
The mentor at one point said visualize it, and Glenn said, well,
I can't, and the mentor said, well, of course you can.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
You're an anime.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
So they had this argument about whether or not he
could visualize it is no, he really couldn't, so and
at this point is this.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Is really weird.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
And then the next step was that, as my daughter
pointed out, this article in the New York Times about
Adam Zieman's work at Exeter in London.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
The article.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Actually had a mistake in what it said, because it
wasn't what Adam had said. But what it reported in
the New York Times article was that there was somebody
who had a brain tumor and then they removed it.
But after this process he was no longer able to visualize,
and therefore they have found the center of visualization in

(26:11):
the brain. It turns out this isn't what happened at all,
but because that was what was reported, then I wrote
to Adam and said I can't visualize, Glenn Keith can't visualize,
and neither one of us have ever had a brain tumor.
So he then wrote back and he explained that the

(26:36):
article was wrong. But that's when I learned about the test,
the VIVIQUE.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Which stands for the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yes, I had that test, and I thought, oh, well,
this is cool because I have two studios, because I
was over both Pixar and Disney Animation, and we kept
the two studios fairly separate so they would have different
ways of thinking about things. And I thought, well, what

(27:07):
I will do is is I will give the test
to the people at the studios, but I also asked
them to answer some other questions, and in particular is
what was their job?

Speaker 3 (27:23):
But what did they do?

Speaker 2 (27:24):
And then with my daughter, who also can visualize, we
gathered the data from I think six hundred people filled
it out to look for a correlation between the ability
to visualize on what their job was, what they actually.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
Did, and what was it you learned.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
The people who had, I would say statistically better ability
to visualize were the storyboard artists who are conceiving of
the story and making drawings all the time of what
the story might be. But they weren't a lot higher.

(28:04):
They were just like statistically higher. But in that group
where people who had the hyper fantasia, and one of them,
for instance, would conceive of a film while driving home
because he had a forty five minutes an hour commute
every day, and he would play appropriate music for the

(28:25):
thing he was working on, and while he was driving,
he would basically build this scene in his head, and
when he was done with it, he could play it
backwards and forwards in his head and stop on a
frame and drop. It's hard to know about the quality

(28:46):
of the images because storyboard artists only need to make
the images good enough to convey the story part point
and then they move on to the next one.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
So he was at the hyperfantasia.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
But every one of them said that when they did
this process, whether it's driving or walking, but they typically
did move around, and they always did it with their
eyes open while they're building up this visualization of what
they're doing. There were also these storyboard artists who were
extremely good who had a fantasia, and they actually worked

(29:22):
a little bit slower, but their drawings looked better, probably
because they were trying to convey something through the quality
of drawings. It wasn't until I brought this up to
them that they then talked about it with each other.
So there were people that are working together for fifteen
years and had no idea about this difference. The people

(29:46):
with a Fantasia were a little more likely to think, oh,
I'm not as fast as they are, I'm not as good,
but they never said anything. But the drawings actually looked
better and the quality of the stories was just as good.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
But they knew there was a difference.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Okay, so let's zoom in on the artisan animators with
a Fantasia. So you mentioned earlier that the way Glenn
Keene draws is extraordinary. We've both seen him draw. How
would you describe that?

Speaker 2 (30:16):
What we could see, and he would describe it this way,
is that he had something in him but he could
only get it out by sketching. His hand would just move,
and what you see are these rough drawings. Sometimes the
rough drawings were so rough at the early stages that

(30:37):
you didn't know where it was going until he worked
it out. But then after a few sketches, his drawings
would turn into rather remarkable pieces of artwork.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
So he's having a dialogue with the page. But what
else when you watch him draw, If you're watching him
while he's drawing, let's say, on a computer screen, what
do you observe?

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Well, the thing which actually he didn't know at the
time because people didn't normally point a camera at him.
He was advising the other animators, but he never really
was interested or tried to use a computer animation. But

(31:19):
they all knew that he was had this incredible skill.
So he would dravo on the screen. His preference was
paper with a certain kind of pencil. It was actually remarkable.
He was completely obsessive about the kind of pencil and
the paper that he had. But he could draw on
the screen, and he did with his way of doing it.

(31:41):
And at this point somebody had an iPhone and they
just pointed at him while he was doing it, and
his body was acting out the emotions that he was doing,
so he was, you know, making those kind of faces,
and he wasn't aware of. What he was aware of

(32:01):
is that after a day of drawing, he was exhausted.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
So for the audio audience, let me explain so, so, right,
if he is drawing a character that's surprised, his whole
body takes on an air of surprise, and his facial
expression is one of great surprise as he's drawing.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
Or if he's drawing a character that's angry or laughing
or something, his whole body and face take that on
that character as he's drawing. And this is what we
call embodied cognition. Somehow he's understanding the character by adopting
that character's emotions in the moment, as opposed to simply

(32:43):
visualizing in his head and then jotting down what he
is visualizing.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yes, whatever is in his head is coming out in
his body and in his drawings. It's amazing to watch,
and it was amazing people to watch how I would
do this. And the reason I related to this was
that when I was doing the surface work that I

(33:10):
was very aware that it was somewhere else in my
body that this was taking place, and I could only
get it out by drawing it on the whiteboard. And
then I was interacting at a level with it on
the whiteboard, seeing if it worked, and if it didn't,
I'd make modifications, and if if the modifications didn't work,

(33:33):
then it would go back into this place where I
no longer had conscious access to it, but I knew
I was working on so I would not disturb it.
That's why I rocked back and forth, because if I
went and did something else, then I would actually disturb
a process that I was aware of, but I couldn't

(33:55):
control other than protecting it. When we were at Lucasfilm,
we were trying to solve a whole number of problems
based on the fact that we knew that technology was
increasing at an exponential rate. So the fact that we
had such an incredible group of talent at Lucasfilm and

(34:15):
then a Pixar is what enabled us to convince other
people like Disney that we had the ability to make
really high quality images. Incidentally, I should note that for
the three people that started with the underpinnings of Rennerman,
Lauren Carpenter and Rob Cook being the other two, they

(34:37):
both had a fantasia also right.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
I just ran into Rob Cook last week and I
asked him about this, and he was so surprised and
interested that anyone cared and was talking about this issue.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
It was one of those things like there was no
reason for us to ever talk to each other about
it or ask, So we had no idea whatsoever route
and there was only after my daughter and I we
made the presentation and we talked about it that we realized, Oh,
none of us can visualize, but what we have is

(35:10):
the underlying technology which is used to make images.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
What is your hypothesis about why many artists and animators
and why you and Cook and Carpenter were able to
come up with these stunning visual technologies without being able
to visually image in your heads.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
Our brains work in really interesting in different ways, and
we have different methods of getting it out and which
you know, this is like, it's appreciating that some people's
brain can work in a very different way and still
do something productive. And it's to value the fact that
other people do things that we can't do in different ways.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
And that's actually, that's very cool.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
I can't be like anybody else, and if I can't
be anybody like other people, and I can't be another gender,
I can't be another ethnicity, I can't be raised in
another culture. My brain doesn't work like other people's brains,
so it would be folly for me to pretend or
think that I should have those experiences instead of what

(36:22):
I have is like a faith that other people bring
something of great value, even if I can't experience experience it,
and even.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
If I don't know what it is. And for me,
this is an important thing.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
It's really to have faith that what other people bring
is of value and I shouldn't be expected to fully
understand why, just that. No, that's actually cool, and I
want to have those kind of people around me.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
I love that. Hey, I'm curious about your thoughts on
my hypothesis about this. Here's the way I started thinking
about this issue of artists. You know, between the two
of us, we know lots of artist and animators who
are a fantasic. And it's so counterintuitive at first, but
what struck me is that if you are a young

(37:09):
child and you have let's say, hyperfantasia, and the teacher says, okay,
draw a horse, you're just drawing the horse that's in
your head. But if you're the kid with a fantasia,
you really have to stare at the model and really
look at it and figure out where the lines are.
You have a dialogue with the page and with what's
in front of you. That way, and that's why I

(37:29):
think children with a fantasia can under some circumstances, become
better artists because they're having to put the work in
instead of imagining that they already know exactly what's out there,
which may or may not be such a great drawing,
it might not be accurate. What do you think of that?

Speaker 3 (37:46):
There are a couple of things.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
One of them is that I do remember when I
was in elementary school that we had another kid in
the class is you're like maybe fifth grade or something
like them, But when he drew, he was driving horses
and so forth. I was blown away as a kid
because they were at the professional level.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
I knew that I never knew what happened to this guy.
All I knew was that his abilities at that age
were remarkable. For me personally, I liked art, and I
drew a lot, you know, because I'd want to be
an animat But the thing I appreciate was I did
have to spend a lot of time observing and trying

(38:34):
to think about proportions.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
And ratios and how the backgrounds came together.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
I am very upset and irritated that when the money
gets tight in the schools, one of the first things
to go or the art programs, Well, what is art?
Art has a fundamental skill of observing. It's looking, it's
trying to see and understand. Which fields do we have

(39:02):
where it's not important to be observant. You like your
doctor to be observant, you know, and if you're an engineer,
you want to be observant. It's like in every one
of these fields. It's an important skill because people have
the misconception that art is about drawing, when really art

(39:23):
is about seeing, and we have different ways of seeing.
But developing those skills, however our brain works is actually
very important.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
Is there anything else that you want to mention?

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Well, there was one thing I was surprised at when
I went to the conference. Some of the people with
hyperfantasia said they wish they didn't have it because there
were things they would like to forget. So so, well,
that's really interesting. Actually, I've always had a crappy memory,

(39:58):
you know, I wish it were better, and trying to
make it better. I would read these techniques about the
memory palace, and it was only in retrospect that I
realized the memory palace never worked for me because they
couldn't see the damn rooms. But the fact that some
people didn't like it because they were remembering things they

(40:20):
didn't want.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
It was just very interesting.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
The other interesting thing was one of the I don't
know what through neurologists or psychologists there asked the question
of the general audience that if they were given a
pill that would reverse their abilities from hyperpantasia to aphantasia,
but the pill was irreversible, how many would take the pill?

Speaker 3 (40:44):
And about half the audience raised their hands.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Now, in my case, I wish that I could see
images from the past. I think part of it is
because you don't know what it's like to experience that.
Then you could say, oh, I would like to have
that ability. You wouldn't know whether or not it would
have negative consequences that would.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
Come with it, or for that matter.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
It's one of the things I look at was that
when I took my courses, because when I went to college,
I majored in physics, I judged a teacher whether or
not they gave me an intuitive understanding.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
And there were some teachers who.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Basically were the philosophy you just follow the math, and
I would just say to myself, Oh, they're a crappy teacher.
I used to think they were crappy teachers, and there
were some that would give you an intuitive feeling, and
when I got the intuitive feeling, I would do very well.
So then I wonder, Okay, was it the fact that
I had a fantasia which made me push harder to

(41:51):
get an intuitive feeling which was not a visual one,
and that having a fantasia may have been a great advantage.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
For I'm so interested in how these things cash out
in terms of advantages, like for an artist or someone
trying to understand physics and having to work the extra
mile for it.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
So I can't go back, I said, well, and I
would like to have had all the things I had,
plus I want this other stuff because you know, it
may be the lack of certain things was actually in
create advantage for him.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
That was Ed Catmull, co founder of Pixar and one
of the many a fantasics there. As Ed mentioned, he
had posted a survey of his whole company and he
found that many of his colleagues, like Carpenter and Cook
were also a fantasiaic. And he found this was true
of many of his best artists. For example, you heard

(42:59):
us mention Glenn Keen Glenn is one of the godfathers
of animation. So a while ago I talked with Glenn
about this and here's what he told me. Quote, as
I draw, I feel like my drawing is a conversation
and it's talking to me and I'm responding to it.
So it's actually not a one way thing at all.

(43:19):
It's something that exists and I'm responding to it and
pulling it out. End quote. And when you watch Glenn,
he uses a lot of lines. He's feeling things out
as he draws. He describes it as a quest. We
were talking about a particular film and I asked him
about what he might visualize if he needed to draw

(43:41):
a scene where a girl has to jump off a
cliff into the water so she can get on to
another shore. And in his words, he said, quote, I
don't have a visual on it, but I know exactly
the whole experience of it, and I can feel it
very clearly. And when Glenn sets to work on the
page sketch and feeling with the lines, the animation comes

(44:03):
to life. I'm going to put some videos of him
working on these show notes at eagleman dot com slash podcast,
so check those out. It's really amazing to watch him
work now again. A fantasie is not just for artists.
There's a million examples. I'll just take one. There's a
famous software engineer named Blake Ross. He's the guy who

(44:23):
founded Mozilla, and he posted on facebooks and years ago
that he had just stumbled on a fantasia. On his
Facebook post, he wrote that this was quote as close
and honest to goodness revelation as I will ever live
in the flesh. He went on to write, quote, I
just learned something about you, and it is blowing my mind.

(44:45):
Here it is, you can visualize things in your mind.
I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I
can't see my father's face, or a bouncing blue ball,
my childhood bedroom, or the run I went ten minutes ago.
I thought counting sheep was a metaphor. I'm thirty years

(45:06):
old and I never knew a human could do any
of this, and it is blowing my mind. End quote.
When he had accidentally heard about a fantasia, he right
away began asking his friends what their internal experience was like,
and his friends told him they could see things like
if he asked them to imagine standing on a beach,

(45:28):
but the idea of a mental picture like that made
no sense to him. Now what's interesting is that after
his post, I saw one of his colleagues right on
Twitter quote, I'm amazed and humbled that Blake Ross got
so good at user interface design at Mozilla, given that
he has a fantasia. But this is the same thing

(45:50):
with Ed Catmull. No one would have expected that the
computer scientists who pioneered new methods for making three dimensional
surfaces that allow you to capture the proper light reflection
and so on, no one would have guessed that he
had a fantasia. But the thing I want to point
out about Blake's post was his absolute amazement in discovering

(46:12):
that other people were having a very different internal life
than he was. It is hard to believe this when
you first learn about it, And calling back to the
beginning of this episode, this is why it took so
long for the debate of how we visualize to get
resolved in the psychology literature, because we all assume that

(46:33):
everyone's experience is exactly like ours on the inside. Now,
speaking of people's internal worlds being different, one of the
classes I teach at Stanford is called literature and the brain.
And one of the things that's been fascinating to me
for years is understanding the fundamental differences between individual authors.

(46:57):
So I want to give you two very concrete examples. First,
I want you to think about the level of visual
description here in this passage from Thomas Hardy from his
novel Return of the Native Quote. The next morning, when
Thomason withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood
the may pole in the middle of the green, its

(47:18):
top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in
the night, or rather early morning, like Jack's beanstalk. She
opened the casement to get a better view of the
garlands and posies that adorned it. At the top of
the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers. Beneath
these came a milk white zone of may bloom, then

(47:41):
a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs,
then of ragged robins, daffodils, and so on till the
lowest stage was reached. That's how Thomas Hardy writes. Now
I want you to contrast that with Ernest Hemingway, who's
much less individual descriptions. Here's a passage from his novel

(48:03):
A Farewell to Arms quote. If people bring so much
courage to this world, the world has to kill them
to break them. So of course it kills them. The
world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the
broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

(48:24):
It kills the very good and the very gentle and
the very brave, impartially. If you are none of these,
you can be sure it will kill you too, but
there will be no special hurry. Okay, so here's my hypothesis.
Ernest Hemingway is the felicition of literature, and Thomas Hardy
is the costlin. In other words, I speculate that Hemingway

(48:48):
was a fantasic and Hardy was hyperfantasic. Now I have
no way to prove this, because their brains are gone,
but it seems a possibility to me that we might
be able to make some crude retrospective neural guesses by
looking at how an author writes and what kind of
details the author assumes his reader would want. Presumably Hardy

(49:12):
thinks that all readers are like him, and that everyone's
going to love this description of all those flowers, and
presumably Hemingway assumes that his readers are like him, and
that they really care zero about the visual detail. In fact,
in another spot, in a Farewell to Arms, Hemingway is
writing about the use of words in wartime, and he

(49:35):
writes abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow
or obscene, beside the concrete names of villages, the number
of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments,
and the dates. So I assert they were both writing

(49:56):
in the manner that made sense to them, and both
of them put their workout into the world, and readers
ended up buying their books, And presumably both authors think, yeah,
I know what readers want and I nailed it. They
don't necessarily realize that they're attracting only a subset of
readers to their work. They have set up bug lights

(50:18):
at different ends of the fantasia spectrum. Okay, so we've
covered a wide territory from Disney to Catmull to Hardy
to Hemingway. So let's see where we are. One of
the conclusions that has come out of the study of
a fantasia and hyperfantasia is that there's no particular disadvantage

(50:39):
to being at any part of the spectrum. There are
many ways to experience reality, and although we traditionally concentrate
on disorders and diseases, neuroscience is increasingly examining the variety
of normal human experiences. And when we look at the
great engineers and animators around us, perhaps it shouldn't be

(51:01):
surprising that some of them are a fantasic and some
are hyperfantasic and everywhere in between. The last several years
have seen a lot of discussion about diversity, but traditionally
that conversation is only skin deep. Really, there are many
many axes of diversity that we could attend to, and
I'm going to do a future episode on this about

(51:23):
the heterogeneity of internal experience across the population. Today we
talked about the spectrum of visual imagery, but there's increasing
study now in other forms of imagery. For example, there
are large individual differences in smell imagery. When you imagine

(51:43):
the scent of cinnamon, you're smelling with the mind's nose.
Some people can recreate the sensation of a smell like
take lemon pie, as though the pie is present for
other people on the other end of the spectrum. This
the mele of lemon pie is only conceptual. It's nothing
like an experience. We find the same thing with hearing.

(52:08):
When you imagine the Happy Birthday song or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,
you are hearing with the mind's ear. Some people are
great at this. It's almost like they're listening to a radio,
and other people don't hear anything on the inside. What
is your capacity to imagine the feel of silk with

(52:28):
your mind's fingers or imagine the taste of goat cheese
with your mind's tongue. Whatever your answer is, your best
friend's answer might be different. And these questions of imagery
reach beyond the senses. I can ask you to imagine
climbing up twenty flights of stairs. Now, some of you
can feel the sensation and your muscle and the movement

(52:52):
in the ache. This is called motor imagery, but for
other people they're not feeling it very much at all.
Or take something like the act of identifying your own
emotions or describing the emotions of other people. Some people
are really talented at this. Others have what's called alexithymia,
which means they're really bad at identifying describing emotions in themselves.

(53:15):
Or others, And it should be noted there are many
aspects of the human experience which, to my knowledge, have
not even yet been studied. As an example, consider the
degree to which you hear your internal voice. I don't
really hear much of anything. In contrast, some friends of
mine have what they call an internal radio. They sometimes

(53:37):
don't hear other people when those people talk, because, as
they describe it, this speaker gets drowned out by the
internal radio. We joke about this now, but it took
us years to realize that there's this fundamental difference between
our experience on the inside. So there's so much variety
from head to head, and there's been so little study

(53:59):
on this in any previous generation. Why it's because of
our strong and natural intuition that everyone experiences the world
exactly the way that we do. But we're finally at
a point with science where we have the desire and
capacity to understand the differences on the inside. So now

(54:21):
we can finally undertake the endeavor to chart and explore
the enormous variety of the eight billion planets of the
inner Cosmos. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for
more information and to find further reading and videos. Send

(54:43):
me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with
questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner
Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to
leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and this
is Inner Cosmos, The Stunt and