January 7, 2026 • 33 mins
What's happening in your brain when you're being imaginative? And can it affect your mental health? Jorge talks to two neuroscientists to imagine the possibilities.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio. I'm horehitch Ham, and today we're tackling the
science of imagination. What is imagination, how does it work
(00:20):
in the brain, and do some people really have more
imagination than others. We're going to talk to two neuroscientists
about this, one of whom has a new theory about
how your brain splits between imagination and reality and how
it can affect your mental health. So close your eyes,
imagine yourself in a nice, beautiful beach, and relax as
(00:41):
we think up new thoughts about the science of imagination. Enjoy.
Hey everyone, Today we're going to start our discussion on
imagination by talking about people who can't use their imagination.
Believe it or not, there is a characteristic of some
(01:03):
people called a fantasia, in which they are unable to
or have a hard time picking up images or imagining things.
It's actually more common than you think. To tell us
about it, here's my friend, Professor Dwayne Godwin, the neuroscientists
and the co author of the book out of your mind. Well,
(01:23):
thank you doctor Godwin for joining you.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Y it's nice to be here, or hey, good to
see you again.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Did you ever imagine you'd be on my show so much?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I sit around visualizing it.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
And you get could salts.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, it's an interesting feeling. It's a mixture of terror
and excitement.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
We'll leave it at interesting. That's what we can say. Okay,
you said there are people who are not as good
or can't sometimes even use their imaginations. What do we
know about that? When did we first learn about that?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Well, we know this from way back. This is something
that was described before anyone scanned brains. Plato compared memory
and imagery to impressions in a block of wax, and
even he had observations that people had different abilities to
do that. He called it fantasia, just like the Disney movie.
(02:14):
Oh yeah, because it's sort of phantom images. Right, So
what would be the absence of that That would be
called by scientists a fantasia. So that's a lifelong absence
or near absence of voluntary visual imaging.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yes, some people are just not able to imagine visual images.
If I asked you to picture in your head and
apple and to imagine that it's red and has a
shiny coat in it with beads of water on its skin.
Most of you could do it, but some experts estimate
about two to four percent of the population simply can't
do it. And this was first explored in the late
(02:53):
eighteen hundreds by a somewhat controversial figure in science.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
The first person actually study it was a person who's
kind of problematic in the history of science. His name
was Galton, and this is a fellow who came up
with a lot of modern statistics and notions of hypothesis
testing and those sorts of things. But we also have
to acknowledge that he had some troubling ideas about eugenics.
(03:20):
So one thing he did do though, he did one
of the first studies. He mailed a questionnaire to a
group of people, i think at a boys' school where
he asked them to rate how clearly they could picture
an ordinary scene like your breakfast table. And so the
replies spanned from, you know, people who had zero ability
to do that to those that could reflect and recall
(03:43):
just about everything that was at the table.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Meaning that he found that some people were really good
at imagining their breakfast stable, and some people were just like,
I don't see anything.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Really bad at it. And then he sort of characterized
it in terms of the proportions of people. So let's
describe how tall people are, and so you might send
out a survey, Please measure yourself and tell me how
tall you are. Well, then you would come up with something.
It would be sort of a normal distribution bell shaped
curve that people see in statistics, right, And so he
was doing a similar thing, but doing it towards these
(04:15):
mental images. And so if you think about the bell
shaped curve, some have zero ability to visualize or imagine
and others have an advanced, almost photographic capacity to relate
the items that were at their breakfast table. And then
most of the people were sort of in the middle.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
I see, you found there was sort of a range
of people. It wasn't like some people could, some people couldn't,
some people were better, some people were okay, and some
people were worse at it.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, that's the idea.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Now you might be wondering, is this all self reported surveys?
People could be biased or they could just be making
stuff up ironically about not being able to imagine things.
How do we know there are people who really can't
visualize things? Well, modern science has actually answered this question.
(05:05):
How did they know it wasn't just subjective?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Well, if we fast forward to the modern world, people
do experiments now using brain imagery as something called binocular
rivalry priming. So that's asking people to picture a certain
pattern and it creates a stress between your two eyes
and how your two eyes encode disinformation in your brain.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Okay, this is kind of an interesting test. It's a
little debated whether it actually measures how well you can imagine.
But here's how it works. You wear special goggles and
you're shown two different images to each of your eyes.
For example, your right eye sees a red kangaroo and
your left eye sees a blue zebra. Now, normally your
(05:50):
brain freaks out a little because each of your eyes
is seeing something different, but eventually your brain makes the choice.
You either see the red kangaroo or the blue zebra.
And typically it's kind of random. Half the time you
might see the red animal and the other times you
would see the blue one. But psychologists can do something
(06:12):
called priming where you're asked to imagine a color right
before you see the two images. Someone might say to
you imagine the color red or imagine the color blue,
and for most people that's enough to tip your brain
to choose the animal of that color. If you are
imagining red, your brain will ignore the blue zebra and
(06:34):
you will see the red kangaroo. But if you're not
able to imagine images, not even colors, then this has
no effect on you, and you will randomly see the
red or blue animal. Another test for avantasia is for
you to imagine a bright light.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
There's another test as well that we know that it's
not subjective. Imagined brightness makes most people's pupils constrict a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Ah, So if.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You imagine, just imagine a bright light. If you're a
sided person and you can imagine a bright light, your
pupils will actually shut down just a little bit, right.
But people with a fantasia can't do that. Don't do that.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
There are pupils don't move at all. Yes, if I
ask you to take a second right now and imagine
seeing a really bright light shining at you, for most people,
their pupils will automatically close up a little as if
they were actually seeing a bright light. But if you're
not able to imagine visual images like that your pupils
(07:40):
would see the same. Now, there's two interesting things about
a fantasia. First, he said, there's an opposite characteristic in
some people called hyper fantasia.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
So there's something called hyper fantasia. If somebody can really
conjure very grandular mental images with high fidelity, they can
show richer scene details and stronger coupling between the frontal
control networks and visual cortex.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Meaning people who are really really imaginative hyper fantasia. They
activate more brain areas when they're imaginating than people who
are not as good at.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It, or the same areas just more strongly.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I see. We'll get more into the brain areas that
are active when you use your imagination later in the program.
But what's interesting is that this characteristic of either having
a really vivid visual imagination or not being able to
visualize things can sort of affect who you are and
what you end up doing in life.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
There has been some work to characterize how people fall
into different types of jobs based on their ability to
form these images or not. And it may surprise you
that scientists and engineers tend to be on the a
fantasia side. Really, a lot of what they do is
in the realm of mathematics and logic and not necessarily
(09:05):
in the areas related to the formation of images. So
you know, it's not a universal Yeah, Obviously, people that
are advanced in their ability to form visual images probably
are going to be more apt to go to visual
arts and you know, do things that are more creative.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Now, you might be wondering at this point, like I was,
if this means that some people are just born with
more imagination than others, and if it means you're stuck
for life to have or not have a lot of imagination.
Ask doctor Godwin this question, and he asked this with
two points. The first is that you thinks imagination is
(09:43):
something you can learn to do better. Now, do you
think this is something that is learned or some people
genetically just have a brain that's more imaginative than others.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
I think it's probably both. I would say that, you know,
you certainly to the table with a certain genetic disposition
to be able to do something like that. But I
could also imagine that we can with practice improve our
ability to imagine things. You know, For example, in the
exercise that we started with, I asked you to imagine
(10:15):
an apple, Well, what if I asked you to imagine
two apples or three apples. You know, in a way,
you can sort of see how you could build your
mental muscle, so to speak, and your ability to imagine
by undertaking certain exercises that would lead you to create
these images more effectively.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I see.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
So I'm not saying this as a scientist necessarily. I'm
just saying that there are a few things that we
can't improve with practice, and I can imagine that mental
imagery would be something that could be improved if you
have the capacity to do it at all.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
And the second answer to this question is that, apparently
there are many different kinds of imagination. Being able to
imagine images is just one of them. For example, there's
the ability to imagine sounds and songs and voices. Some
people can do that really well, like musicians and composers,
and some people can't. Not being able to do that
(11:12):
is called an aurelia. But it goes even deeper than that.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
The other interesting thing about this is just because you
can't do this doesn't mean you don't have an imagination.
I think that's an important thing to stay because there
might be someone out there saying, wow, what are you saying.
Are you saying that because I can't create a mental image,
I don't have an imagination. No, I'm not saying that
at all. So I'll give you one example of that.
(11:36):
So in our book that you and I wrote together,
we have the story of Helen Keller.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Helen Keller, if you're not familiar, lived around the beginning
of the twentieth century. She lost her ability to see
or hear at a very young age. She was both
blind and deaf, and yet she became a world famous author, advocate,
and speaker.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
No one would argue that Helen Keller, who was an
advanced scholar, did not have an imagination, because she had
to be able to imagine the world as a result
of the tactle sensations that she had and her ability
to sense vibrations and intellectually, she had very complex ideas
that she was able to express even through her challenges.
(12:23):
She had to have had some means of constructing a
version of the world that she could work with.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I see, sometimes we think that imagination is only imagining images, songs,
or sounds, but actually imagination maybe goes deeper and can
include concepts and ideas and different representations of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, I think there are many ways, even emotions.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
That sets us up for our next segment when we
come back, we're going to talk to another cognitive scientist
who has a general theory of imagination and how it
relates to everything from how we come up with ideas
to how it helps us make meaning out of life,
and how it even affects our mental health. So stay
with us, we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're
(13:24):
talking about the signs of imagination, and so far we've
learned that not everyone can imagine the same way. There
are people with the characteristic of having incredibly vivid imaginations,
and there are people who can't visualize images, or can't
imagine sounds or voices or music. Just imagine what it
would be like to be someone like that, to not
(13:46):
be able to picture something in your brain, or not
be able to hum a tune in your head. Their
way of processing the world is very different from others. Now,
what's interesting is that I just asked you to imagine
what it would be like to be such a person,
and we actually thought about it for a second. You
used your imagination. In other words, imagination is not just
(14:07):
visualizing images or hearing sounds in your brain. It's also
the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, which
makes sense of all these different flavors of imagination. I
reached out to another contractive scientists, doctor Jessica Andrews Hannah,
a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Arizona.
According to doctor Andrews Hannah, imagination is basically the default
(14:30):
mode that your brain operates it. Well, thank you, doctor
Andrews Hannah for joining us.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
I'm happy to be here, thanks for reaching out.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Awesome. So, as you might know, I'm someone who makes
his living using his imagination, but I've never thought about
what it is, or how it works or what's happening
in my brain. So maybe to start us off, can
you tell us what is imaginating? Like, how do you
define what it is?
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, that's a great question, particularly because different fields of
stuffy actually take a slightly different approach. So there, for example,
is a field of imagination research focusing on our ability
to engage in creative thought. This idea that I can
imagine something new and novel that maybe has a particular use,
(15:18):
you know, that might solve a problem. Right, that's very
different than other kinds of imagination that have been talked
about in terms of I can see something an image
in my head. You know, I'm imagining that I was
at my tenth birthday party, and I can see it
clearly as if I'm mentally time traveling to the past,
(15:38):
and almost as if I'm there right. So those flavors
of imagination are really highlighting the discrepant ways that people
might talk about in psychology and neuroscience.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Here, doctor ANDREWS. Hana is saying that defining imagination is
tricky because we used to try to describe lots of
things we do with our brain, from coming up with
new ideas, to picturing images or sounds in our heads,
to imagining what someone else might be thinking. If you
think about it, even remembering a memory from your past
(16:11):
uses your imagination. You are conjuring up impressions that aren't
really there. And planning for the future is also using
your imagination. When you're thinking ahead, you're thinking about and
envisioning events or scenarios that haven't happened yet. So one
way to think about imagination is that it's everything your
brain does when it's not engaging with woods around you. Basically,
(16:35):
imagination is synonymous with your inner life.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
So the nice thing about adopting this broad cond of
dictionary definition of imagination is that it's encompassing all the
different flavors and facets, and it's kind of highlighting that
what they all have in common is this ability to
dissociate a bit from our external world and turn our
(17:00):
thoughts and attention inward.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
I see to sort of like have internal experiences that
are not directly coming from the outside, and those can
be things in the past, things we project into the future,
or even things that maybe don't exist right now. Exactly interesting,
So it's sort of related to your inner life. Exactly
what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (17:22):
What is inner life? Our inner mental life includes things
like our memories, our past experiences, our plans, are kind
of wondering about what if, our daydreams, and mind wandering.
So in that sense, people can refer to this as
perceptually decoupled cognition or internal menation or imagination.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Essentially, what doctor Andrew s Heina is saying is that
if you think about it, whatever you're not interacting with
or paying attention to the things that are happening around you,
you're basically living inside your head, and to do that,
you need to make stuff up, and that requires imagination.
In other words, we all use our imaginations all the time.
(18:06):
There's no such thing as a person who doesn't have imagination. Next,
I wanted to know how this all works in your brain.
So then, what is happening in the brain or what
does psychologists and neuroscientists understand about what's happening in the
brain when we use our imagination.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, it has most closely been linked to a network
of brain regions that have collectively been referred to as
the default mode network. And so this is a very
interesting set of brain regions that was discovered fairly accidentally
in the neuroscience literature twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
You said it was sort of discovered accidentally. What does
that mean.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting reflection of the early
field of cognitive neuroscience in psychology, where in the early
nineties we're able to put a person in an MRI
scanner and kind of record what parts of the brain
were engaged when people were thinking or seeing. So the
experiments that were done early on mostly involved visual stimuli
(19:13):
or maybe auditory stimuli. Cognitive tasks involving our attention to
our external.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
World, like how do we react to things exactly?
Speaker 3 (19:21):
How do we react, how do we see, how do
we hear, et cetera. And as we know as scientists,
you know, if we're going to be measuring the effect
associated with an experimental condition, we need to be able
to reference it to a control condition.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Okay, here's how scientists discovered the brain areas related to imagination.
When we first started scanning brains in an fMRI machine,
scientists were mostly interested in how the brain reacted to
and acted on things in the outside world, but as
a control to have something to compare to, they would
ask test subjects to just sit there and do nothing.
(20:04):
The scientists thought that's what they were getting. They thought
they were getting signals from the brain when it wasn't
doing anything. And this went on for years and years.
But then one day someone realized, wait a minute, maybe
the brain is not doing nothing.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And it wasn't until about the late nineteen nineties that
enough experiments had been conducted that researchers could start to
look at similarities across the studies. Right, And what professor
named Marcus Rachel discovered is that there also seemed to
be a consistent set of brain regions that are more
(20:40):
engaged when we're passively sitting there. And what researchers kind
of started to realize is that our mind doesn't shut off.
It's that your attention is turning inward. And it turns
out when you ask people what was going through your mind,
people would say, well, in fact, I was thinking about
my past, I was planning my future. I was thinking
(21:03):
about what I would do after the experiment is over.
I was bored, and so I was coming up with
a story or something. Those are all often very spontaneous
forms of imagination.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Meaning we don't just use our imagination when we're trying
to imagine things. It's almost like our default mode is
to use our imagination.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
What neuroscientists found was that the brain sort of has
to modes to it. One is the active mode when
we're doing things and interacting with the world, and the
other is the default mode, which is when we let
our minds wander and daydream. And to wander and daydream
you need imagination.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
So there is a researcher Nancy Andreasen, and around that
time she published a study in which she coined the
acronym rest and rest in her paper, stands for episodic
silent thought, as it's a resting state, right, isn't it
a lack of cognition? You're actually engaged in quite a
(22:09):
lot of cognition. That's what we default to when we're
otherwise not occupied with, you know, other things.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
That's like the ultimate academic ninja move, Like you come
up with an acronym that means the opposite of what
it's it's supposed to be.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
That's like multiple levels of you know.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Okay, so what is this network? Like, what are these
brain regions? Okay, As it turns out, there are brain
regions that we can associate with this day dreaming, mind
wandering imagination mode of the brain.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Well, first of all, this default mode network as a
whole takes up about twenty percent of the whole brain,
so it's actually a very large network of brain regions
that are really a representation in all four lobes of
the brain and the cerebellum. Actually, there's a lot of
cortical real state dedicated to our ability to engage in imagination,
(23:04):
and a lot of these regions are on the surface
of the brain or the cortex, but they also include
a subcortical representation regions, you know, like the part of
the basal ganglia and the hippocampus, which we know is
important for learning and memory. But also there's projections to
the parietal lobe. There's other projections to other parts of
(23:28):
the brain as well, the temporal lobe, the frontal cortex,
the frontal lobe as well. And there's an incredible amount
of individual variability, Like the position in my brain might
be slightly different than its position in your brain, so
our brain representation of imagination that might also relate to
(23:48):
the idiosyncratic nature of our thoughts.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
In other words, you can see slight differences in this
brain network between different people, which maybe explains why we
each have such a unique imagination and way of thinking. Now,
is it the case that when we're imagining things as
opposed to processing outside sensory things that I see in here,
(24:13):
totally different areas light up? Do I have an imaginative
brain and an external brain?
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Yeah? I think the field really hasn't settled on an
answer there. You know, is it the case that we are,
in one moment of time, for example, simultaneously attending inward
and externally or are we maybe very rapidly flipping, and
then our brain is like changing in very fast, dynamic ways.
(24:40):
That's a whole other, very very interesting area that we
don't really know hardly at all about.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Okay, when we come back, we're going to explore the
dark side of the signs of imagination and how using
imagination the wrong way can affect your mental health. Stay
with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back. We're talking
(25:13):
about the science of imagination, and we learned some scientists
see basically everything we do that's not interacting with the
outside world as an act of imagination. You use your
imagination to have thoughts and recall memories and plan for
the future, and to think about how other people are feeling.
And we talked about how imagination happens in the brain.
(25:36):
According to scientists, when you imagine things, your frontal lobes
basically ask the sensory parts of your brain to replay
sensations and images and sounds. This is why you have
the sense of experiencing what you imagine. But that signal
from the frontal lobes is weaker, which is why that
(25:56):
sense is not as strong as the feeling of experience
and seeing what's real. Your brain is somehow able to
tell the difference between imagining something and actually living it.
At least that's what's supposed to have it.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
We also rely on regions in the hippocampus and other
regions that might be interfacing with our primary sensory networks
in our brain that actually may distinguish between what's imagined
and what is reality in the here and now. And
then then we get into kind of questions regarding hallucination.
That process can get mixed up in people who are
(26:35):
hallucinating with a certain psychoses schizophrenia, for example, people don't
know whether they're hallucinating or not. They would actually think
that hallucination's auditory, visual, etc. Are real, Right, So there's
lots of clinical relevance.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
And that brings us to the dark side of imagination. Yes,
and people with schizophrenia or people who are drugs, the
line between imagination and reality can get blurred. You can
literally be sort of trapped in your imagination. But according
to doctor Andrews Hannah, this is something that can happen
to all of us in our daily lives and it
(27:10):
can affect our mental health. Doctor Andrews Hannah has a
theory that there are two kinds of imagination in your brain.
One is called your mind's eye, which is the ability
to think up images, in memories and sounds. Think of
it as your ability to play a movie in your head.
The other kind of imagination, she calls your mind's mind,
(27:32):
which is when you use your imagination to essentially worry.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
So often people will be rehashing past experiences at a
very high level and extrapolating and overgeneralizing. You know, I
had a negative interaction with a colleague, What does this
mean about my future? What does it mean about me
as a person? Why do I always act this way?
Et cetera. Right, that's the process of rumination.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Doctor Andrews. Hannah thinks need both kinds of imagination, your
ability to play it moving in your head and your
ability to rehash and ruminate on experiences, but that you
can get into trouble, mental trouble if those two get
out of balance.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Often people will kind of get stuck on negative past
experiences and have a hard time pulling themselves away from
those negative self focused thoughts. And the therapies psychotherapies that
often work well for folks are therapies that train people
to think in more of a concrete, detailed self separating way.
(28:38):
For example, and mindfulness therapies, you are trained to bring
mindful attention to your thoughts and experiences and really kind
of be aware of all the details, all the emotions,
the censory details, both in your external world but also
in your inner world. And that process of bringing detail
(28:59):
to a thought actually has this kind of side effect
of helping you distance yourself from a thought, to be
able to know that I'm having a negative thought right now,
but if it is not defining who I am, this is
a thought that will go away.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Meaning like some of you get stuck in your mind's mind,
and to help you get out of that, it helps
to engage your minds.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Uh, is that the idea, Yes, that is exactly the idea.
We need to have this healthy balance, engaging in bold.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
So it's good to have an imagination. It's basically how
we think about everything in the world. But it can
also trap you and you can lose balance. And according
to Sector Andrew's Hanna, it's getting harder and harder to
find this kind of balance in our lives.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
It's super important. I think there are so many societal
implications now, particularly because of the accessibility of digital devices
that we really don't as a society preserve time, create
time for just letting our minds wander, which we're not
going to do when we're scrolling on TikTok or whatever
it is, right, is really important for mental health, but
(30:13):
also having kids seeing kids develop, right, children develop where
you know, my kids will go over to their friend's
house and all their friends will be on smartphones and TikTok.
I think observing trying to raise kids in a society
that is sort of built to in many ways do
everything it can to prevent people from engaging in imagination,
(30:37):
even at a young age. Right, we buy a toy
and you know, there's like one way to use a toy.
You don't have to use your imagination anymore. You just
follow the instructions.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
There's so many spaces where I think from a very
early age, we're not fostering the development of imagination from
a young age. And that is so critical because if
we can help children be okay with being bored, right,
boredom is a good state because then you will turn
and use your imagination to get out of that boredom
and to kind of be okay with sitting alone with
(31:09):
your thoughts, then that will make you very resilient, particularly
for mental health challenges. That when life becomes very stressful,
you can turn inward to help improve our well being
rather than make it worse.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, meaning like it seems to we're moving towards a
society that leaves less time to use our imagination.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
Yeah, for sure, less opportunity from a very young age,
but also especially in Western societies, less opportunity in the workforce.
You know, we're very success driven. We have to put
in eighty hour work week, you know, to mean that
we're successful. That is not good for all of the
restorative benefits of being alone with our thoughts. We can
(31:51):
actually get much of our best work done during those moments. Yeah,
because we're using our imagination. But I also have to
also remind myself because if I'm walking from one building
to another, what am I going to do? I'm gonna,
you know, get on my email and try to address
a few emails during that two minute a period of time.
So it's not like, you know, I sort of know
(32:12):
what's good for you, but it's very hard implementing this well.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
In my own Well. Thank you so much, Dictor Andrews
Hanna for joining us.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Thank you very much. This is really fun.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well, thank you doctor Godwin, Thank you. I never imagined
this will go so well.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
I had a vision, my awesome.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Well imagine that we reached the end of the episode.
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See
you next time You've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
of iHeartRadio, writing and produced by me or Hey cham
pndited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio
(32:52):
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on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio. I'm horehitch Ham, and today we're tackling the
science of imagination. What is imagination, how does it work
(00:20):
in the brain, and do some people really have more
imagination than others. We're going to talk to two neuroscientists
about this, one of whom has a new theory about
how your brain splits between imagination and reality and how
it can affect your mental health. So close your eyes,
imagine yourself in a nice, beautiful beach, and relax as
(00:41):
we think up new thoughts about the science of imagination. Enjoy.
Hey everyone, Today we're going to start our discussion on
imagination by talking about people who can't use their imagination.
Believe it or not, there is a characteristic of some
(01:03):
people called a fantasia, in which they are unable to
or have a hard time picking up images or imagining things.
It's actually more common than you think. To tell us
about it, here's my friend, Professor Dwayne Godwin, the neuroscientists
and the co author of the book out of your mind. Well,
(01:23):
thank you doctor Godwin for joining you.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Y it's nice to be here, or hey, good to
see you again.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Did you ever imagine you'd be on my show so much?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I sit around visualizing it.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
And you get could salts.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, it's an interesting feeling. It's a mixture of terror
and excitement.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
We'll leave it at interesting. That's what we can say. Okay,
you said there are people who are not as good
or can't sometimes even use their imaginations. What do we
know about that? When did we first learn about that?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Well, we know this from way back. This is something
that was described before anyone scanned brains. Plato compared memory
and imagery to impressions in a block of wax, and
even he had observations that people had different abilities to
do that. He called it fantasia, just like the Disney movie.
(02:14):
Oh yeah, because it's sort of phantom images. Right, So
what would be the absence of that That would be
called by scientists a fantasia. So that's a lifelong absence
or near absence of voluntary visual imaging.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yes, some people are just not able to imagine visual images.
If I asked you to picture in your head and
apple and to imagine that it's red and has a
shiny coat in it with beads of water on its skin.
Most of you could do it, but some experts estimate
about two to four percent of the population simply can't
do it. And this was first explored in the late
(02:53):
eighteen hundreds by a somewhat controversial figure in science.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
The first person actually study it was a person who's
kind of problematic in the history of science. His name
was Galton, and this is a fellow who came up
with a lot of modern statistics and notions of hypothesis
testing and those sorts of things. But we also have
to acknowledge that he had some troubling ideas about eugenics.
(03:20):
So one thing he did do though, he did one
of the first studies. He mailed a questionnaire to a
group of people, i think at a boys' school where
he asked them to rate how clearly they could picture
an ordinary scene like your breakfast table. And so the
replies spanned from, you know, people who had zero ability
to do that to those that could reflect and recall
(03:43):
just about everything that was at the table.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Meaning that he found that some people were really good
at imagining their breakfast stable, and some people were just like,
I don't see anything.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Really bad at it. And then he sort of characterized
it in terms of the proportions of people. So let's
describe how tall people are, and so you might send
out a survey, Please measure yourself and tell me how
tall you are. Well, then you would come up with something.
It would be sort of a normal distribution bell shaped
curve that people see in statistics, right, And so he
was doing a similar thing, but doing it towards these
(04:15):
mental images. And so if you think about the bell
shaped curve, some have zero ability to visualize or imagine
and others have an advanced, almost photographic capacity to relate
the items that were at their breakfast table. And then
most of the people were sort of in the middle.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
I see, you found there was sort of a range
of people. It wasn't like some people could, some people couldn't,
some people were better, some people were okay, and some
people were worse at it.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, that's the idea.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Now you might be wondering, is this all self reported surveys?
People could be biased or they could just be making
stuff up ironically about not being able to imagine things.
How do we know there are people who really can't
visualize things? Well, modern science has actually answered this question.
(05:05):
How did they know it wasn't just subjective?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Well, if we fast forward to the modern world, people
do experiments now using brain imagery as something called binocular
rivalry priming. So that's asking people to picture a certain
pattern and it creates a stress between your two eyes
and how your two eyes encode disinformation in your brain.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Okay, this is kind of an interesting test. It's a
little debated whether it actually measures how well you can imagine.
But here's how it works. You wear special goggles and
you're shown two different images to each of your eyes.
For example, your right eye sees a red kangaroo and
your left eye sees a blue zebra. Now, normally your
(05:50):
brain freaks out a little because each of your eyes
is seeing something different, but eventually your brain makes the choice.
You either see the red kangaroo or the blue zebra.
And typically it's kind of random. Half the time you
might see the red animal and the other times you
would see the blue one. But psychologists can do something
(06:12):
called priming where you're asked to imagine a color right
before you see the two images. Someone might say to
you imagine the color red or imagine the color blue,
and for most people that's enough to tip your brain
to choose the animal of that color. If you are
imagining red, your brain will ignore the blue zebra and
(06:34):
you will see the red kangaroo. But if you're not
able to imagine images, not even colors, then this has
no effect on you, and you will randomly see the
red or blue animal. Another test for avantasia is for
you to imagine a bright light.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
There's another test as well that we know that it's
not subjective. Imagined brightness makes most people's pupils constrict a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Ah, So if.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You imagine, just imagine a bright light. If you're a
sided person and you can imagine a bright light, your
pupils will actually shut down just a little bit, right.
But people with a fantasia can't do that. Don't do that.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
There are pupils don't move at all. Yes, if I
ask you to take a second right now and imagine
seeing a really bright light shining at you, for most people,
their pupils will automatically close up a little as if
they were actually seeing a bright light. But if you're
not able to imagine visual images like that your pupils
(07:40):
would see the same. Now, there's two interesting things about
a fantasia. First, he said, there's an opposite characteristic in
some people called hyper fantasia.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
So there's something called hyper fantasia. If somebody can really
conjure very grandular mental images with high fidelity, they can
show richer scene details and stronger coupling between the frontal
control networks and visual cortex.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Meaning people who are really really imaginative hyper fantasia. They
activate more brain areas when they're imaginating than people who
are not as good at.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It, or the same areas just more strongly.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I see. We'll get more into the brain areas that
are active when you use your imagination later in the program.
But what's interesting is that this characteristic of either having
a really vivid visual imagination or not being able to
visualize things can sort of affect who you are and
what you end up doing in life.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
There has been some work to characterize how people fall
into different types of jobs based on their ability to
form these images or not. And it may surprise you
that scientists and engineers tend to be on the a
fantasia side. Really, a lot of what they do is
in the realm of mathematics and logic and not necessarily
(09:05):
in the areas related to the formation of images. So
you know, it's not a universal Yeah, Obviously, people that
are advanced in their ability to form visual images probably
are going to be more apt to go to visual
arts and you know, do things that are more creative.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Now, you might be wondering at this point, like I was,
if this means that some people are just born with
more imagination than others, and if it means you're stuck
for life to have or not have a lot of imagination.
Ask doctor Godwin this question, and he asked this with
two points. The first is that you thinks imagination is
(09:43):
something you can learn to do better. Now, do you
think this is something that is learned or some people
genetically just have a brain that's more imaginative than others.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
I think it's probably both. I would say that, you know,
you certainly to the table with a certain genetic disposition
to be able to do something like that. But I
could also imagine that we can with practice improve our
ability to imagine things. You know, For example, in the
exercise that we started with, I asked you to imagine
(10:15):
an apple, Well, what if I asked you to imagine
two apples or three apples. You know, in a way,
you can sort of see how you could build your
mental muscle, so to speak, and your ability to imagine
by undertaking certain exercises that would lead you to create
these images more effectively.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I see.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
So I'm not saying this as a scientist necessarily. I'm
just saying that there are a few things that we
can't improve with practice, and I can imagine that mental
imagery would be something that could be improved if you
have the capacity to do it at all.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
And the second answer to this question is that, apparently
there are many different kinds of imagination. Being able to
imagine images is just one of them. For example, there's
the ability to imagine sounds and songs and voices. Some
people can do that really well, like musicians and composers,
and some people can't. Not being able to do that
(11:12):
is called an aurelia. But it goes even deeper than that.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
The other interesting thing about this is just because you
can't do this doesn't mean you don't have an imagination.
I think that's an important thing to stay because there
might be someone out there saying, wow, what are you saying.
Are you saying that because I can't create a mental image,
I don't have an imagination. No, I'm not saying that
at all. So I'll give you one example of that.
(11:36):
So in our book that you and I wrote together,
we have the story of Helen Keller.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Helen Keller, if you're not familiar, lived around the beginning
of the twentieth century. She lost her ability to see
or hear at a very young age. She was both
blind and deaf, and yet she became a world famous author, advocate,
and speaker.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
No one would argue that Helen Keller, who was an
advanced scholar, did not have an imagination, because she had
to be able to imagine the world as a result
of the tactle sensations that she had and her ability
to sense vibrations and intellectually, she had very complex ideas
that she was able to express even through her challenges.
(12:23):
She had to have had some means of constructing a
version of the world that she could work with.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I see, sometimes we think that imagination is only imagining images, songs,
or sounds, but actually imagination maybe goes deeper and can
include concepts and ideas and different representations of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, I think there are many ways, even emotions.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
That sets us up for our next segment when we
come back, we're going to talk to another cognitive scientist
who has a general theory of imagination and how it
relates to everything from how we come up with ideas
to how it helps us make meaning out of life,
and how it even affects our mental health. So stay
with us, we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're
(13:24):
talking about the signs of imagination, and so far we've
learned that not everyone can imagine the same way. There
are people with the characteristic of having incredibly vivid imaginations,
and there are people who can't visualize images, or can't
imagine sounds or voices or music. Just imagine what it
would be like to be someone like that, to not
(13:46):
be able to picture something in your brain, or not
be able to hum a tune in your head. Their
way of processing the world is very different from others. Now,
what's interesting is that I just asked you to imagine
what it would be like to be such a person,
and we actually thought about it for a second. You
used your imagination. In other words, imagination is not just
(14:07):
visualizing images or hearing sounds in your brain. It's also
the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, which
makes sense of all these different flavors of imagination. I
reached out to another contractive scientists, doctor Jessica Andrews Hannah,
a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Arizona.
According to doctor Andrews Hannah, imagination is basically the default
(14:30):
mode that your brain operates it. Well, thank you, doctor
Andrews Hannah for joining us.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
I'm happy to be here, thanks for reaching out.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Awesome. So, as you might know, I'm someone who makes
his living using his imagination, but I've never thought about
what it is, or how it works or what's happening
in my brain. So maybe to start us off, can
you tell us what is imaginating? Like, how do you
define what it is?
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, that's a great question, particularly because different fields of
stuffy actually take a slightly different approach. So there, for example,
is a field of imagination research focusing on our ability
to engage in creative thought. This idea that I can
imagine something new and novel that maybe has a particular use,
(15:18):
you know, that might solve a problem. Right, that's very
different than other kinds of imagination that have been talked
about in terms of I can see something an image
in my head. You know, I'm imagining that I was
at my tenth birthday party, and I can see it
clearly as if I'm mentally time traveling to the past,
(15:38):
and almost as if I'm there right. So those flavors
of imagination are really highlighting the discrepant ways that people
might talk about in psychology and neuroscience.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Here, doctor ANDREWS. Hana is saying that defining imagination is
tricky because we used to try to describe lots of
things we do with our brain, from coming up with
new ideas, to picturing images or sounds in our heads,
to imagining what someone else might be thinking. If you
think about it, even remembering a memory from your past
(16:11):
uses your imagination. You are conjuring up impressions that aren't
really there. And planning for the future is also using
your imagination. When you're thinking ahead, you're thinking about and
envisioning events or scenarios that haven't happened yet. So one
way to think about imagination is that it's everything your
brain does when it's not engaging with woods around you. Basically,
(16:35):
imagination is synonymous with your inner life.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
So the nice thing about adopting this broad cond of
dictionary definition of imagination is that it's encompassing all the
different flavors and facets, and it's kind of highlighting that
what they all have in common is this ability to
dissociate a bit from our external world and turn our
(17:00):
thoughts and attention inward.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
I see to sort of like have internal experiences that
are not directly coming from the outside, and those can
be things in the past, things we project into the future,
or even things that maybe don't exist right now. Exactly interesting,
So it's sort of related to your inner life. Exactly
what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (17:22):
What is inner life? Our inner mental life includes things
like our memories, our past experiences, our plans, are kind
of wondering about what if, our daydreams, and mind wandering.
So in that sense, people can refer to this as
perceptually decoupled cognition or internal menation or imagination.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Essentially, what doctor Andrew s Heina is saying is that
if you think about it, whatever you're not interacting with
or paying attention to the things that are happening around you,
you're basically living inside your head, and to do that,
you need to make stuff up, and that requires imagination.
In other words, we all use our imaginations all the time.
(18:06):
There's no such thing as a person who doesn't have imagination. Next,
I wanted to know how this all works in your brain.
So then, what is happening in the brain or what
does psychologists and neuroscientists understand about what's happening in the
brain when we use our imagination.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, it has most closely been linked to a network
of brain regions that have collectively been referred to as
the default mode network. And so this is a very
interesting set of brain regions that was discovered fairly accidentally
in the neuroscience literature twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
You said it was sort of discovered accidentally. What does
that mean.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting reflection of the early
field of cognitive neuroscience in psychology, where in the early
nineties we're able to put a person in an MRI
scanner and kind of record what parts of the brain
were engaged when people were thinking or seeing. So the
experiments that were done early on mostly involved visual stimuli
(19:13):
or maybe auditory stimuli. Cognitive tasks involving our attention to
our external.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
World, like how do we react to things exactly?
Speaker 3 (19:21):
How do we react, how do we see, how do
we hear, et cetera. And as we know as scientists,
you know, if we're going to be measuring the effect
associated with an experimental condition, we need to be able
to reference it to a control condition.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Okay, here's how scientists discovered the brain areas related to imagination.
When we first started scanning brains in an fMRI machine,
scientists were mostly interested in how the brain reacted to
and acted on things in the outside world, but as
a control to have something to compare to, they would
ask test subjects to just sit there and do nothing.
(20:04):
The scientists thought that's what they were getting. They thought
they were getting signals from the brain when it wasn't
doing anything. And this went on for years and years.
But then one day someone realized, wait a minute, maybe
the brain is not doing nothing.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And it wasn't until about the late nineteen nineties that
enough experiments had been conducted that researchers could start to
look at similarities across the studies. Right, And what professor
named Marcus Rachel discovered is that there also seemed to
be a consistent set of brain regions that are more
(20:40):
engaged when we're passively sitting there. And what researchers kind
of started to realize is that our mind doesn't shut off.
It's that your attention is turning inward. And it turns
out when you ask people what was going through your mind,
people would say, well, in fact, I was thinking about
my past, I was planning my future. I was thinking
(21:03):
about what I would do after the experiment is over.
I was bored, and so I was coming up with
a story or something. Those are all often very spontaneous
forms of imagination.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Meaning we don't just use our imagination when we're trying
to imagine things. It's almost like our default mode is
to use our imagination.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
What neuroscientists found was that the brain sort of has
to modes to it. One is the active mode when
we're doing things and interacting with the world, and the
other is the default mode, which is when we let
our minds wander and daydream. And to wander and daydream
you need imagination.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
So there is a researcher Nancy Andreasen, and around that
time she published a study in which she coined the
acronym rest and rest in her paper, stands for episodic
silent thought, as it's a resting state, right, isn't it
a lack of cognition? You're actually engaged in quite a
(22:09):
lot of cognition. That's what we default to when we're
otherwise not occupied with, you know, other things.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
That's like the ultimate academic ninja move, Like you come
up with an acronym that means the opposite of what
it's it's supposed to be.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
That's like multiple levels of you know.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Okay, so what is this network? Like, what are these
brain regions? Okay, As it turns out, there are brain
regions that we can associate with this day dreaming, mind
wandering imagination mode of the brain.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Well, first of all, this default mode network as a
whole takes up about twenty percent of the whole brain,
so it's actually a very large network of brain regions
that are really a representation in all four lobes of
the brain and the cerebellum. Actually, there's a lot of
cortical real state dedicated to our ability to engage in imagination,
(23:04):
and a lot of these regions are on the surface
of the brain or the cortex, but they also include
a subcortical representation regions, you know, like the part of
the basal ganglia and the hippocampus, which we know is
important for learning and memory. But also there's projections to
the parietal lobe. There's other projections to other parts of
(23:28):
the brain as well, the temporal lobe, the frontal cortex,
the frontal lobe as well. And there's an incredible amount
of individual variability, Like the position in my brain might
be slightly different than its position in your brain, so
our brain representation of imagination that might also relate to
(23:48):
the idiosyncratic nature of our thoughts.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
In other words, you can see slight differences in this
brain network between different people, which maybe explains why we
each have such a unique imagination and way of thinking. Now,
is it the case that when we're imagining things as
opposed to processing outside sensory things that I see in here,
(24:13):
totally different areas light up? Do I have an imaginative
brain and an external brain?
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Yeah? I think the field really hasn't settled on an
answer there. You know, is it the case that we are,
in one moment of time, for example, simultaneously attending inward
and externally or are we maybe very rapidly flipping, and
then our brain is like changing in very fast, dynamic ways.
(24:40):
That's a whole other, very very interesting area that we
don't really know hardly at all about.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Okay, when we come back, we're going to explore the
dark side of the signs of imagination and how using
imagination the wrong way can affect your mental health. Stay
with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back. We're talking
(25:13):
about the science of imagination, and we learned some scientists
see basically everything we do that's not interacting with the
outside world as an act of imagination. You use your
imagination to have thoughts and recall memories and plan for
the future, and to think about how other people are feeling.
And we talked about how imagination happens in the brain.
(25:36):
According to scientists, when you imagine things, your frontal lobes
basically ask the sensory parts of your brain to replay
sensations and images and sounds. This is why you have
the sense of experiencing what you imagine. But that signal
from the frontal lobes is weaker, which is why that
(25:56):
sense is not as strong as the feeling of experience
and seeing what's real. Your brain is somehow able to
tell the difference between imagining something and actually living it.
At least that's what's supposed to have it.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
We also rely on regions in the hippocampus and other
regions that might be interfacing with our primary sensory networks
in our brain that actually may distinguish between what's imagined
and what is reality in the here and now. And
then then we get into kind of questions regarding hallucination.
That process can get mixed up in people who are
(26:35):
hallucinating with a certain psychoses schizophrenia, for example, people don't
know whether they're hallucinating or not. They would actually think
that hallucination's auditory, visual, etc. Are real, Right, So there's
lots of clinical relevance.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
And that brings us to the dark side of imagination. Yes,
and people with schizophrenia or people who are drugs, the
line between imagination and reality can get blurred. You can
literally be sort of trapped in your imagination. But according
to doctor Andrews Hannah, this is something that can happen
to all of us in our daily lives and it
(27:10):
can affect our mental health. Doctor Andrews Hannah has a
theory that there are two kinds of imagination in your brain.
One is called your mind's eye, which is the ability
to think up images, in memories and sounds. Think of
it as your ability to play a movie in your head.
The other kind of imagination, she calls your mind's mind,
(27:32):
which is when you use your imagination to essentially worry.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
So often people will be rehashing past experiences at a
very high level and extrapolating and overgeneralizing. You know, I
had a negative interaction with a colleague, What does this
mean about my future? What does it mean about me
as a person? Why do I always act this way?
Et cetera. Right, that's the process of rumination.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Doctor Andrews. Hannah thinks need both kinds of imagination, your
ability to play it moving in your head and your
ability to rehash and ruminate on experiences, but that you
can get into trouble, mental trouble if those two get
out of balance.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Often people will kind of get stuck on negative past
experiences and have a hard time pulling themselves away from
those negative self focused thoughts. And the therapies psychotherapies that
often work well for folks are therapies that train people
to think in more of a concrete, detailed self separating way.
(28:38):
For example, and mindfulness therapies, you are trained to bring
mindful attention to your thoughts and experiences and really kind
of be aware of all the details, all the emotions,
the censory details, both in your external world but also
in your inner world. And that process of bringing detail
(28:59):
to a thought actually has this kind of side effect
of helping you distance yourself from a thought, to be
able to know that I'm having a negative thought right now,
but if it is not defining who I am, this is
a thought that will go away.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Meaning like some of you get stuck in your mind's mind,
and to help you get out of that, it helps
to engage your minds.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Uh, is that the idea, Yes, that is exactly the idea.
We need to have this healthy balance, engaging in bold.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
So it's good to have an imagination. It's basically how
we think about everything in the world. But it can
also trap you and you can lose balance. And according
to Sector Andrew's Hanna, it's getting harder and harder to
find this kind of balance in our lives.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
It's super important. I think there are so many societal
implications now, particularly because of the accessibility of digital devices
that we really don't as a society preserve time, create
time for just letting our minds wander, which we're not
going to do when we're scrolling on TikTok or whatever
it is, right, is really important for mental health, but
(30:13):
also having kids seeing kids develop, right, children develop where
you know, my kids will go over to their friend's
house and all their friends will be on smartphones and TikTok.
I think observing trying to raise kids in a society
that is sort of built to in many ways do
everything it can to prevent people from engaging in imagination,
(30:37):
even at a young age. Right, we buy a toy
and you know, there's like one way to use a toy.
You don't have to use your imagination anymore. You just
follow the instructions.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
There's so many spaces where I think from a very
early age, we're not fostering the development of imagination from
a young age. And that is so critical because if
we can help children be okay with being bored, right,
boredom is a good state because then you will turn
and use your imagination to get out of that boredom
and to kind of be okay with sitting alone with
(31:09):
your thoughts, then that will make you very resilient, particularly
for mental health challenges. That when life becomes very stressful,
you can turn inward to help improve our well being
rather than make it worse.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, meaning like it seems to we're moving towards a
society that leaves less time to use our imagination.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
Yeah, for sure, less opportunity from a very young age,
but also especially in Western societies, less opportunity in the workforce.
You know, we're very success driven. We have to put
in eighty hour work week, you know, to mean that
we're successful. That is not good for all of the
restorative benefits of being alone with our thoughts. We can
(31:51):
actually get much of our best work done during those moments. Yeah,
because we're using our imagination. But I also have to
also remind myself because if I'm walking from one building
to another, what am I going to do? I'm gonna,
you know, get on my email and try to address
a few emails during that two minute a period of time.
So it's not like, you know, I sort of know
(32:12):
what's good for you, but it's very hard implementing this well.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
In my own Well. Thank you so much, Dictor Andrews
Hanna for joining us.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Thank you very much. This is really fun.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well, thank you doctor Godwin, Thank you. I never imagined
this will go so well.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
I had a vision, my awesome.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Well imagine that we reached the end of the episode.
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See
you next time You've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
of iHeartRadio, writing and produced by me or Hey cham
pndited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio
(32:52):
engineer and mixer Ksey peckrom And you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode.
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