January 6, 2018 • 56 mins
Mental images play an important role in our daily experience of reality, from thoughts of the past to daydreams, fantasies and entire worlds of the imagination. Just what’s happening when we see through the mind’s eye and what on Earth is it like for individuals who experience aphantasia and experience no visual imagination at all? In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore. (Originally published May 10, 2016)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and this is
one of our from the Vault selections. Yeah, this particular
episode originally published May two thousand sixteen, and it concerns
a fantasia blindness of the mind's eye, the idea that
if you're reading a description in a book or someone's
(00:26):
explaining something to you, certain individuals will not be able
to form that mental picture. And this is this is
a fascinating topic. When we originally aired this, we heard
from a lot of people, some people who suddenly realized, Hey,
I think this is this is how my mind works.
I think this episode generated some of the most listener
male of anything we ever did. Yeah, we did a
(00:47):
whole additional listener mail episode that came out after this. Yeah,
and we'll make sure to link to that on the
landing page for this episode. Anyway, we hope you enjoy
this episode from the old days. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. He
(01:12):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today's episode concerns
the mind's eye concerns mental imagery, and so we decided
that the best way to kick off this episode is
to take you on a little guided mental journey. Yeah,
so close your eyes unless you're driving or doing something
that requires your eyes to be open, and in that case,
(01:34):
don't close your eyes if you If you are able
to close your eyes, close your eyes if not. Just
imagine you're eight years old and you're walking along a
beach with your mother, your barefoot. The tide is coming
in and you see trails of footprints leading back and
forth along the beach where other people have walked the
same path today. But the waves are coming higher and
(01:57):
higher and slowly smoothing all those footprints way. But then
you look up at your mother and you notice something strange.
She's wearing armor, a steel chest plate and a visored helm,
with chainmail drooping across her arms and legs, rustling lightly
as she walks. Across the front of her chest plate
(02:17):
is a painted figure. It's foghorn, Leghorn. She raises the
visor on her helm and smiles at you. A mosquito
hovers in front of her face, and she flails one
arm to knock it away and you both laugh, but
then you notice something else. Your mother has a piece
of metal dangling from her hip opposite you. It's a
(02:38):
long sword. She puts one hand on the hilt and says,
don't worry, only a bit of insurance in case he
shows up. A wave of seawater rolls up over your feet,
washing dry sand from between your toes, and you ask who.
Then there's a faint rumbling under your feet. It's not
just the tickling wash of the waves. The ground is shaking,
(03:02):
and about two out in the water, a dark shape
begins to rise up from the waves. At first it's
just a green, black lump, but then the huge glaring eyes,
the cavernous mouth, climbing higher and higher as it approaches.
It's Godzilla. Not the friendly Godzilla who defends Earth against
(03:23):
all the heel monsters. This is the angry Godzilla who
breathes beams of radiation and crushes ten story buildings with
a single swipe. Your mother puts an arm across your chest.
She draws her long sword and says stand back. This
could get serious, And with the flip of a switch,
her hover boots engage, her feet lift off the ground,
(03:45):
and then she's rocketing towards the head of the monster
to defend the realms of humankind. Alright, so uh, we
we tried to draw in a few different types of
of imagery. They are a few different types of memories memories, right.
We wanted to have sort of generic landscape that would
be easy for a lot of people to picture, like
a beach. Most people have some kind of image, generically
(04:07):
of what a beach looks like. We also wanted something familiar.
Usually they say to picture a relative or familiar family member,
So hopefully you've got an image of a mother or
family figure there, but then also some pop culture images. Right,
most people hopefully know what Godzilla looks like. If you don't,
you gotta go back and watch the original Godzilla from
the fifties and right, uh and then uh and then
(04:29):
fall horn like horn and personal favorite of mine. You know.
It's one of the interesting things with this exercise is
to think back on it, and think back of the
specifics and ask yourself questions like who did I have
a more vivid memory of what I looked like as
a child, what my mother looked like, what Godzilla looked like?
(04:50):
And in these details are not necessarily telling of your
relationship with your mother versus your relationship with Godzilla. But but,
but it it kind of just raises our awareness of
the vast spectrum of visual stimuli that are informing are
our inner vision of the world. Yeah, and this is
a strange thing because the only person who can experience
(05:12):
your mental imagery is you. You can sort of describe
your mental imagery to other people, but nobody can take
a look at it to see what it is you're
picturing in your mind. So this is something that you
largely have to deal with entirely on your own, and
you don't know how similar or how different your own
process of mental imagery is to that of other people
(05:33):
unless you really put your heads together and start talking
about your mental images and detail and trying to figure
out if their difference is. It's not a standard thing
that people do, really right, because even to describe it,
if I describe my mental images to you, they become
your mental images. Like it's in a way, I'm kind
of handing off the blueprints and then you build a
different building. It's the same building, but a different building.
(05:54):
And likewise, maybe you paint, maybe you write um and
some other artistic medium you create music to try and
convey these images in your head. But you're still but
you're still then limited by your artist artistic ability and
then other people's interpretations of those works of art. You know,
I already realized. I didn't think about this when I
was writing this, but I did already see a contradiction
(06:16):
in what I told people to imagine the original angry Godzilla.
But then I also said green black, Right, Well, Godzilla
in color is sort of greenish black, but the original
anger Godzilla black and white. He's just you know, you
look at him and he just looks like this charred monstery.
So this is a this is already a mental confabulation
(06:37):
on my part. I'm imagining a Godzilla that never existed
anywhere in reality. But anyway, so most of you were
with us there on that journey. You were, to some
extent able to picture some of the things we were
talking about. You could see in your mind's eye the beach,
the armor, your mother, the sword, the fog horn, leg horn,
the Godzilla. But there are some people who probably couldn't
(07:01):
see any of that. They were there with us, they
were understanding the concepts. They were able to follow the plot,
whatever plot there was, and they could probably recount a
list of the events that happened in the little scene
we just described, but they couldn't see any of it
in their imagination. And this is the concept we're going
(07:22):
to be talking about today. One study has found that
this might be about up to one in fifty people
who have this kind of experience where they just don't
create pictures inside their mind the way most people do.
Uh And this condition now hasn't come to be known
as a fantasia or the blindness of the mind's I So,
(07:44):
the American biotech leader Craig Venter, you know about him, right.
He's famous for being a leader in the quest of
sequence the human genome, and he's famous for creating a
synthetic organisms. Uh So, he has actually described that he
has an unusual way of thinking, a way of thinking
that's essentially purely conceptual, like we've been describing, without any
(08:06):
mental imagery. Venter says, quote, it's like having a computer
store the information, but you don't have a screen attached
to the computer. He's describing his own mind. I don't know.
I I have trouble understanding what that would be like.
But maybe maybe to understand it better. We should first
(08:27):
look at some facts about what the mind's eye itself
is before we get into the blindness of the mind's eye.
What's going on when you create pictures in your head? Well,
of course we're talking about mental imagery here, but also
there's some other sensations thrown in as well. It all
amounts to a quasi perceptional experience that occurs in the
(08:47):
absence of the appropriate external stimuli. Um. So, I can
close my eyes, I can see a deceased loved one's face,
I can hear their voice. I can imagine myself standing
on the shore of a distant ocean, a past ocean,
or even some future sure that I haven't even walked
on yet. I mean this, this is the kind of
thing that I mean, most of us take for granted.
(09:08):
We use it, we employ it every day. Um well,
I mean, as I did with the Angry Godzilla and color,
you can picture things you've never actually seen, right, Yeah
you can. Yeah, there are things if you're like me,
I feel there are things in books. For instance, no
one has ever painted a picture of this character or
this scene. Uh, and yet you have a very like
(09:28):
crystal clear vision like I have a better visual memory
of some things that have occurred in books than things
that have occurred in real life. You know, Oh yeah, yeah,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Uh. Isn't it
so weird to finally see a book you've read but
it's never been illustrated or made into a film, or
anything finally made visual by someone else. It's always people
(09:51):
always have the same reaction. That's not what I thought
so and so looked for. It's not what it looks
like now. The things we perceive in the mind's eye,
their their products of memory. There can structed from specific
or varied memories. They may be accurate, they may be
amalgams of diverse influences. Really, this runs the gamut from
something you saw yesterday that you near perfectly remember, to
(10:11):
have you know, vague side from your childhood that you
at least think you remember, to an envisioned future scene
in your own life, something you dreamt, something you daydreamed,
landscape be viewed from the imagined walls of a fictional world,
or your own creation of a of a an author's creation.
It's just like pretty much any time we are envisioning something,
any time we are closing our eyes or even keep
(10:33):
with our eyes open are imagining something, we are seeing
something in our mind that is of course the mind's eye, uh,
doing its thing. Yeah, And I think this has always
been a very interesting avenue for philosophy to investigate because
it is something that we recognized was sort of strange
(10:53):
about the human experience before we had neuroscience or psychology
or or any of these scientific ways of instigating it. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean because because it obviously plays such a central
role in the way we navigate the world and the
way we think about time and a world of movable objects, right. Um.
And so yeah, we've been as long as we've had philosophers,
(11:16):
as long as we've had people among us with with
time to you know, look up from their labors and
think about the human condition, we've been thinking about the
mind's eye. Um. On the podcast here, we've talked about
the method of Loki before the the ancient Greek technique
in which person utilizes spatial memory to memorize nonspatial information. Uh. Look,
(11:39):
that kind of plays into into some of this. That
involves a certain amount of a reflection on what's on
how we're using the mind's eye, you know, I I've
tried to use the method of Loki, and I have
not been very good at it. Yeah, I wonder if
I'm just not doing it right. Like when I'm able
to to really get it set in my mind, it
does help me remember the By the way, this is
(12:01):
so a quick version of it is, if you need
to make a list of digits of numbers to remember,
you're not going to remember those digits. So instead you
imagine your house being full of odd characters that each
embody one of the digits in that number sequence, and
then you can remember by picturing the room and where
all of the odd characters were in the room, and
(12:24):
then you just remember what digit they correspond to or
something like that. Yeah, like a very simplified version of
this that I have employed frequently in the past. It's
kind of like a um uh you know, often called
the memory palace because it's an imagined place that you
fill with these examples. But oftentimes I only have room
in my mind for one example, and that is, uh,
(12:45):
that's when I am a swimming laps and I want
to remember what number lap I'm on, because if I
forget the lap number, then I'm going to make myself
revert to the to the lower number. So if I
if I don't know for sure I'm and four, I'm
gonna do three. And I don't want to keep doing
one less than I want to do because I'm gonna
wear myself out right. But I'm also busy swimming. I'm
(13:08):
having a hard time necessarily remembering which lap I am
currently on. So instead of trying to remember four, as
easy as that would seem, I find it easier to
just force myself to think of, say, the four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse, like, think of think of that, and
that'll stick in my head just a little better as
I'm you know, vigorously of swimming these laps um, you know.
(13:30):
So it'll just be some sort of visual association with
just a single digit. I don't know. I don't know
if anybody else out there has has done something of
that that that nature, but that is kind of a
simplified um, good crap. What's what's your visual image for eight?
I can't think of anything for eight? Oh for eight,
I think of Alan robe gerlays The Voyeur, where you
(13:52):
have a character who keeps making figure eights out of rope. Yeah,
so I think of him setting by the shore um
not quite contemplating horrible things and making little figure eights.
That's a good thing to have in your mind here
at the gym or the y m c a guess
wherever you swim laps. So one of the important things
when when thinking about the memory palace and then ultimately
(14:14):
thinking about memory and the mind's eye, is just to
to refresh here a little bit about human memory itself.
Human memory is not just like a tape real rolling
in the brain that we just, oh, let's go back
and look and see what happened yesterday. Human memory in
multiple ways. It's not multiple, certainly not that accurate, right,
because human memory consists of several different types of memory
(14:36):
that are working in uh kind of an unequal chorus
um to create the human experience of memory that we have.
So we have sensory memory, um, you know what something
feels like, what it smells, It smells like, that sort
of thing. We have short term memory. We have long
term term memory. We have and then we divide long
(14:56):
term memory out. We have explicit memories of consciousness, we
have in iplicit memories of unconsciousness. We have declarative memories
of facts and events. We have procedural memories involved that
involves skills and tasks. We have episodic memory that deals
with events and experiences, and we have semantic memory that
concerns facts and concepts. So we have all these different
(15:17):
types of memories, each one dealing with in a way
certain you know, different types of skills, different types of
ways of utilizing memory when we engage with the world.
And studies have shown in the past that, uh, if
you have a part of the brain associated with the
one type of memory is injured, sometimes you see those
other types of memory compensating. So it's like a a
(15:38):
in a way, it's like a staff. It's like a
staff of different memory drones and they all have their
jobs to do. But if somebody is slacking, then it
may fall to another employee to uh to to you know,
to step up and and cover for their shortcomings. Yeah.
I think that's a good metaphor that the brain is
more like a workforce than a machine. If one part
of a machine breaks, the whole machine gen probably isn't
(16:00):
gonna work. But if one part of a workforce is
slacking or calls in sick today, the others can often
find a way to cover for them, right, and they
might cover you know, everyone does their job a little
bit differently, so their their skill set might allow them
to cover in a slightly different way. But back to philosophers.
So philosophers have continue to argue about the minds, and
(16:21):
we're certainly not gonna be able to do an exhaustive
journey through all of their their takes. But you go
back as far as Plato, for example, and Plato brought
us one of the most famous examples of this. Uh.
He utilizes mental images in his famous allegory of the Cave. Yeah,
and that's sort of the idea that the world that
we perceive is not the true reality, you know. But
(16:41):
Plato had this whole belief in ideal forms, you know,
things that were the more true version of the thing
than the thing we're familiar with. Right. There's a realm
of forms out there, and in that realm of forms,
there's such thing as a perfect chair. But in this
world we can only build imperfect chairs that inch maybe
a little closer and closer towards that unobtainable ideal. Yeah.
(17:03):
And so his metaphor for explaining this was that of
the cave, where there are people who are chained up
in a cave and they don't even really realize that
they're in a cave. And uh, and there's an opening
to the cave through which light comes through, and figures
pass in front of the opening to the cave, casting
shadows on the wall of the cave, and all we
see we're facing the back of the cave, the wall,
(17:24):
and we see the shadows, and we think the shadows
are the real things, but they're not there. They're only
the the sort of like the vague outlines of the
things that that are the true forms. If anyone out
there is watching The Path on Hulu, there's actually a
scene um in the first episode where they roll out
this this allegory and it's it's pretty entertaining, but but
(17:49):
I mean, certainly it's an it's an allegory. You can
have a lot of fun with either trying to contrast
your worldview to another individual's worldview, to try and win
someone over with your true version of reality versus there
they're you know, their illusion based understanding of reality. But
it also you know, gets down to like what is
our perception of reality itself? These mental images that fill
(18:11):
our mind when we close our eyes those are imperfect.
But also the mental images when we have our eyes open,
we're still just in a sense, we are still just
seeing those shadows on the walls of a cave. Yeah.
So Aristotle also referred to mental imagery and his work
referred to it as a as a fantasia with an
(18:32):
F with a P, not an fright, not the Disney movie. Uh,
And this was central to his theory of memory. Yeah.
Though you know, I can see why the Disney movie
would be called that, I mean, they it evokes the
concept of fantasy, even though he didn't I think directly
mean fantasy and the way we do, like somebody coming
up with a with a fantasy to escape from life. Yeah,
(18:53):
it was the idea of being able to to imagine
things in your mind now. And A. Carts also thought
a lot about mental imagery and how they form in
the mind. Uh, the view that an idea is a
quasi perceptual thing, perhaps even pictorial, formed in the imagination.
And he did distinguish between images formed in the brain
(19:14):
and ideas in the mind because he was a duelist
he saw uh, he saw the mind and the body
as separate. The essence of mind is thought and the
body is an extension of it. Thoughts are not extended
in space, but the body is now us. Where in
philosophy you have you have like idealism, which states that
reality is equivalent to mental images, and the mental images
(19:36):
are reality itself. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want
to take this very far, the people who believe in
hardcore idealism would probably say that there is no like
that reality is merely the mental image of a higher
being or something like that. Yeah. So, as you can see,
you can really go down the deep end, into the
deep end, uh, contemplating mental imagery and what are the
(19:57):
philosophical ramifications of it? Um, there's you know, there's a lot,
there's a great deal more we can discuss this kind
of the philosophical groundwork. I guess you could say. Um.
For instance, though in the nineteen eighties, there's a great
deal of debate over the over the connection from between
mental images and language. So one side argued that representations
(20:17):
underlying the experience of mental imagery are the same type
as those used in the language. And then there was
the other camp, and they held that that these representations
served to depict, not describe objects. Okay, so what does
that mean in practice. Well, my understanding is that basically
comes down to, you know, to what extent is mental
imagery like the the the groundwork of language itself. Um well,
(20:40):
like I said earlier, at times, it feels like it's
it's very difficult to um to overstate the importance of
mental imagery in our perceptions of reality. Um So, just
how deep does that go? Does it underlie just about
everything in cognition? Does it underlie language? Does it underlie um,
you know, just every free, little detail of our experience. Yeah, well,
(21:02):
this does seem to sort of tie into us stuff
we talked about in the Tip of the Tongue episode,
where you can you can perhaps you can have the
face in your mind, you know, oh, I know this
actor's face, and you can picture it, and you can
know the actor's name well enough that if somebody said it,
you'd be like, yeah, that's it. You'd immediately recognize that.
(21:24):
But you can't make the connection. But of course, in
recent years, we've seen the study of mental imagery make
a more scientific transition. I think we we've started to
look at it from a neuroscientific point of view, where
people are saying, okay, well, let's identify what brain regions
are actually being used and activated when people are in
the process of coming up with mental pictures. And one
(21:46):
of the sources we used for this episode, it was
a paper by Adams Salman and colleagues and and UH,
these authors identify that essentially in the brain voluntary imagery,
that the mental images you come up with have been
associated in previous research with the brain's frontal parietal executive
systems or of the executive control you know, the president
(22:08):
of your brain sitting there directing traffic, and with the
posterior brain regions, which you know in the back of
the brain that's often the identified with visual processing. And
together you sort of put these things uh into a
teamwork relationship and they are what allows you to come
up with mental pictures. That's right. And UH, we've also
(22:30):
seen studies where we've taken f M R I, We've
done a PET and we've done PET scans on individuals
summoning mental images. You know, they're asked to summon a
mental image and then we look at the brain and
see what it's doing in real time. And UH reveals
that activation in brain areas that are used in visual perception,
which doesn't sound that surprising. Uh, this is pretty cool.
(22:50):
Visual and mental imaging share roughly two thirds of the
same active activated brain regions, So there's a lot of
a lot of cross over there between the usual and
mental imaging systems, a lot of shared mechanics. Yeah. Like if,
for example, if you show somebody a picture of somebody's
face and then you asked the same test subject imagine
this person's face, a lot of their brain activity is
(23:13):
going to be roughly similar. Right. In fact, the study
found that when the same task is performed in perception
and then with eyes closed using mental images, you get overlaps.
So so again, a lot of the same mechanisms, a
lot of the same brain equipment is being used, whether
(23:33):
you're dealing with just visual perception or mental perception. Of course,
that's funny because the phenomenal experience is completely different, right,
Like you, uh, somebody, to somebody who has a fantasia,
this might be new information, but it's obviously not going
to be new information to most people out there. Uh.
(23:53):
When you picture something in your mind's eye, it is
extremely different than seeing it in front of you, But
it's hard to explain how it's different. Yeah, you know. Yeah,
you know, there's a there's a two thousand fifteen BBC
article titled a Fantasia, A Life without Mental Images by
James Gallagher, and I'll be sure to include a link
(24:15):
to that article on the landing page for this episode
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com because in addition
to running through some examples of uh, some accounts of
individuals who have this blindness of the mind's eye, which
we're going to discuss more here, there's also a quiz
you can take, uh. And it's just an eight question
quiz about asking you like the level of detail that
(24:36):
you experience when you are asked to mentally envision, uh,
you know, someone you see every day, Uh, A sunrise,
I believe, clouds in the sky, the clouds clearing in
the sky, a thunderstorm, the these sort of images some
of the same kind of stuff that we ask you
to summon at the beginning of this episode. Yeah, but
it doesn't just ask you can you picture it? It
(24:56):
asks you to rank level of details. So for each ample,
it might say picture, get someone in mind and maybe
a close friend or spouse or close family member, and
picture that person and then on a scale of not
very well at all too extremely well, how well can
you see in your mind's eye the contours of their
(25:18):
face and the shape of their body, and what color
their eyes are, and and so it's asking for specific
details of the image to to get at the vividness
of the picture in your mind. And that suggests to me,
and I think their findings do suggest so far that
it's not just an on off switch. It's not like
you can make pictures with your mind or you can't.
(25:39):
There seems to be a spectrum, that's right. Some people
seem to have very intense, very lucid, vivid mental images.
Other people have kind of hazier, blurrier or more generic
mental images, and some people have almost no mental imagery
at all, or even report having none. And it's so
at the opposite end of the scale of the main
(26:00):
topic today. You know, we're talking about these a fantasiacts,
but there's also what's come to be known as hyper fantasia, right,
and these would be people who I think would experience
visions of the mind ie with just extreme lucidity is
far compared to most of us. So they're not just
vague pictures, but they have bright colors and vivid details.
(26:20):
So if I tell you imagine a beach, you might
picture sand and waves and maybe some umbrellas. But I
bet you wouldn't naturally say, Okay, I can tell you
there are seven umbrellas in the picture in my mind,
and these are the colors of stripes on the umbrellas.
But somebody might actually be able to have that level
(26:42):
of vividness in their mind's eye. Yeah. This idea of
a spectrum of of of mental detail and visual imagery,
it uh, it really makes you reanalyzed just how you're
painting the picture in your head. Uh, these memories, you know,
like it. I think we both scored around the same
on this where we had kind of like typical image.
(27:04):
I was in the typical range. Yeah, but even even
then I was I found myself asking questions like, well,
how when I think about these people that I see
every day in my life and they are very important
to me, Uh, you know, what does it mean that
I don't have like just a picture perfect vision of them?
What does it mean that when I think back on
a beach, I find my like a sunrise on a beach,
(27:24):
I keep thinking of, you know, images of sunrises from
paintings and films more so than actual beach sunrises that
I've witnessed. Do you think about the final scene of
the Warriors, Yeah, that sort of thing, like I end
up like putting a fictional Instagram filter over all of
these these memories, and I'm not really remembering. I'm not
really summoning a mental image of a thing I actually saw.
(27:48):
I'm summoning this mental image that's composed of these varying elements.
You know. One thing I read when we were doing
our research for this episode was a first person essay
that I came across by the software designer Blake Ross,
who was involved in Mozilla Firefox on Facebook, and he's
also done some screenwriting. And he found out after reading
(28:08):
an article I think in either in the New York
Times or in Discover magazine by Carl Zimmer about a
fantasia that he he had this experience, and he also
was just shocked to find out that other people weren't
like him. His discovery was that, oh, I never realized
other people could see pictures in their minds. His whole life.
He thought when people said stuff like picture this, they
(28:31):
were just being metaphorical. He didn't realize other people could
actually hold these pictures in their brains. And in this
essay he starts he recounts how when he found out
about this, he was asking all his friends, what's it
like to picture something in your mind? And asking all
these questions I've never really thought to ask myself about
my process of mental imagery that were very interesting, Like
(28:52):
he was asking his friends, Okay, when you see a
picture in your mind, like you picture a beach, is
it still? Is it a still photograph or is it
more like video where things are moving? And that distinction
just hit me like a wrecking ball. I was like,
I don't know. When I picture something in my mind,
I can make it move consciously if I need to.
(29:14):
But when I just picture a beach, it is almost
neither still nor moving. It is it exists in super
position between these two things. It's kept for me. I
guess when I think about it, it's kind of like
the old music video for What Was It where the
people go into the painting or into the drawing Take
on Me. Yeah, I feel like my my mental imagery
(29:35):
is kind of like the take on Me video. It's
stuff is moving, but it's all kind of stationary as well. Yeah. Well,
I mean, I certainly can imagine something moving on purpose.
But when I just picture a thing and I don't
imagine it moving on purpose, I don't think it's still,
but it's not moving either. It's very strange. It reminds
(29:56):
me of two of the experience of reading a book,
especially a book to set more or less in the
real world, And at times I'll find myself stopping and
thinking about, like, oh, I'm picturing this in this living
room from that I've limp that I visited or lived
in at some point in my life, Like that, for
some reason, is the living room that my brain is
drawing in for this setting where I'm picturing this character. Sometimes,
(30:20):
you know, sometimes the character just is that character and
that and there's not really like a firm mental image
in your head exactly what they look like. Other times
you can't shake their um their appearance as being that
of someone you know or or you know a character
actor from a movie, etcetera. But I do find myself
(30:42):
like analyzing, like where are all these elements coming from?
Like some of them are obviously coming from the the author.
The author is providing the blueprint, the author is providing
the scaffolding. But then that scaffolding is kind of like
magnetically drawing in elements from my own visual memory. Yeah, definitely, Uh,
I know exactly what you're talking about there. Uh. An
interesting thing about fiction that that Blake Ross says in
(31:05):
his first person essay about this is he he reports that,
so he's always read books, you know, he's enjoyed fiction,
and he's written fiction. But when he writes fiction, he
has almost no visual description because he just doesn't picture
things in his head. And when he reads, he skips
visual description. He just kind of jumps over it. That's
not it has no meaning to him. Really. Huh, yeah,
(31:25):
it's it's it's fascinating. Okay, now it's time to take
a quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when
we come back, more on the mind's eye and a fantasia.
All right, So, just how common is a fantasia? Um,
(31:47):
it's a difficult question because this is something that hasn't
really been uh in the public mindset. It hasn't been
out there, it hasn't been something you get a pamphle
it on until very recently. There was one interesting study
on this from before it had a name. Before this
a fantasia term came out that was studying sort of
the lack of generative power and mental imagery, and that
(32:08):
that was in two thousand nine, right, study by Fall, Yeah,
Bill Fall psychologists. And what did it find? He found
that between two point one percent and two point seven
percent of participants in his study claimed to have no
visual imagination. So that's where we got that number up
at the beginning, that it might be around one in
(32:29):
fifty of you who just didn't see any pictures when
you were following along in the story with us. Yeah, Now,
of course we have to that that number is not
coming from like a you know, large scale study, so
results aren't really fully supported, but it gives us sort
of at least a ball park. I think, yeah, it's
something to work with. But but a lot of this
(32:49):
recent research has popped up because of an interesting I'm
about to use a great word here, synergy between between
actual medical rea search and some writing in the popular press. Actually,
I think like Carl Zimmer's articles had something to do
with people coming out of the woodwork to say, hey,
now I have this experience of a fantasia. I can't
(33:12):
make mental pictures. But it started with the research of
Adam Zaman, Right. Yeah, he's a professor of cognitive and
behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter Medical School, and
along with co authors uh Um, MICHELLEA. De Wira, and
Surio Della Sala, they coined the term a fantasia in
(33:32):
their two thousand fifteen paper Lives Without Imagery congenital a
Fantasia that was published in the journal Cortex. Now, people had,
as we said, previously described things along these lines like
it had always been kind of noted that, well, there's
some people out there who say that they can't create
any mental pictures. But nobody really looked very deeply into this,
(33:53):
and I think some of the I think the earliest
example that the authors we were looking at were able
to draw on was just the nineteen century. Now, this
condition and the condition had in these earlier works and
condition had previously been referred to as a defective revisualization
or visual ear reminiscence. What a great word, ear reminiscence.
Somebody was trying to make us say that, yeah, sorry,
(34:16):
not gonna work. It's a fantasia. Uh And there are
skeptics actually out there who say that that what we're
talking about here does not exist at all. I think
that's fascinating because how would you prove them wrong? Yeah,
and why why would you make that argument? I don't know. Well,
I mean, arguing about the existence of somebody else's internal experience.
I mean, that's just it's crazy. Yeah, I mean it
(34:37):
almost seems seems like you'd have to be making the
counter argument of saying, oh, you don't have a fantasia,
you just have a lazy mind, right, your imagination is
just a bit stunted. But I can understand why people
might be tempted to this direction because I, as I
we've said before, I think you probably would agree with this.
I can't imagine what this is like. Yeah, I have
(34:58):
no ability soever to put myself in a position of
not being able to make mental pictures that I don't
even understand what that means really, Right, It's kind of
like if most of us are more or less the
same computer hardware with differing software. You know, we can
talk all day about I don't understand how your software works,
(35:18):
and this is how my software works. But here we're
talking about essentially a difference in hardware. Um, I don't
know if that analogy completely holds up. But essentially there's
something a little more, uh, you know, base level is
different and and how do we even begin to describe
that to each other? Yeah, So Zaman first started studying this,
I think in two thousand ten, right, because of the
(35:42):
story of this. So there was a patient who reported
having contracted, like acquired a fantasia after a medical procedure, right, right,
So there was a sixty five year old man who
had coronary angioplastic and that's where they So if you
have a blockage in one of your arteries or something
like that, they'll open up one of your arteries and
(36:03):
stick a catheter in it, and somewhere along your body
wherever the blockage is occurring, they'll inflate a small balloon
or something inside your artery to widen it, essentially and
allow easier passage of blood. Yeah. It's not the kind
of thing that you would initially imagine altering your brain functioning. Yeah,
and it's generally not considered a major surgical procedure, but
(36:23):
it's like it's you. I think you're typically left awake
for it. They don't even necessarily put you under, though
they might need to give you some drugs to calm
you down. But yeah, it's this is this is not
like a gigantic big deal. So it's coronary angioplasty. And
after the procedure, this patient was unable to form mental
pictures and he had not had this problem before, and
(36:46):
so yeah, and that's where this study comes in. And afterwards,
after there were some pieces published about this, Zaman started
to hear from people who said, Hey, I have this condition.
And not only do I have it, I didn't get
it from I didn't have an angioplastic or any you know,
injury or or surgery. I've always had it. This is
(37:07):
just how I am. So Zaman and his co authors
they they looked at twenty one of these self reporting
cases and then they discovered most of these individuals um
kind of discovered their condition, their own condition in their
twenties when through conversations or or readings they found a
discrepancy between how other people described the use of the
(37:30):
mind's eye and their own experiences. Can you imagine I
just have a hard time imagining how you get that
far in life without realizing. Now, this is another thing
that's addressed yet again in that that essay I mentioned
by Blake Ross, where he just talks about how whenever
he heard people using the language of the mind's eye
were talking about, you know, picturing something, imagining something, he
(37:53):
thought it was all metaphorical. He thought they were just
talking about conceptually meditating on the idea of a beach
or something. So you're sitting there thinking about the concepts
of sand and water and sunshine and umbrellas. But he
didn't realize that other people were literally seeing something in
their mind. Yeah. I mean, it's like we said earlier,
(38:14):
when one when you have all these different types of memory,
and if one is taking uh, you know, a back seat,
the other ones are going to compensate. So it's not
like if you have a fantasia, you're not gonna be
able to function in society at all. It seems like
quite the contrary. Uh, individuals find a way to function.
They find they just end up utilizing these different modes
of memory. Okay, but of these twenty one self reporting cases,
(38:37):
what did Zalmon find about them? Well, so I found
that nineteen of the twenty one were male. And uh,
it's worth noting that this might have more to do
with the readership of Discover magazine. This is not a
randomized self selected because right this is where people would
have read that Carl Zimmer article, and they were the
ones who said, hey, so yeah, I just might have
to do with the male readership discover On the other hand,
(38:59):
they found it. Five of the twenty one reported that
it affected relatives as well. This is something I've read
of people's experiences online. Some of them say, one of
my parents has this. Yeah, so this leads us to
believe it might be hereditary. And then ten of the
twenty one said, uh, said that all all versions of
the imagery were affected. Now, now, like I alluded to earlier,
(39:23):
this does seem to me, based on what I've read
so far, to be sort of a um it's not
necessarily an all or nothing. It's sort of a spectrum condition.
Because one of the things that these people reported is
that it's not like they've never ever in their entire
live seni mental image. They just generally don't see them,
(39:44):
like some of them sometimes reported that they might have
had very brief involuntary mental images, like they they might involuntarily, quote,
flash an image of somebody's face, but it's just that
this is rare and they can't do it on man, Right,
it's something that just might occur during while they're awake.
It might occur during dreams some of them. This is
(40:06):
another thing, the interesting variation on dream experience. Some report
that they don't have dreams at all or don't remember
having them if they do have them, and some report
that they do have dreams and can experience visual content
and dreams, but just can't do it while they're awake
or on command. Yeah. Zeman is a big believer that
this is essentially a variant of neuropsychological functioning and kind
(40:29):
of like synesthesia in a sense, and again kind of
on on a spectrum as well. So so again, don't
think of it as a you know, as a as
a as a brain injury, don't think of it as
a as as an ailment. It is just a different,
uh a different way that the mental chorus is coming
together to receive reality. Yeah. Another thing that I thought
(40:51):
was interesting is, uh so we've been talking about images
being visual as in like what you know, light, photons,
and the eyes, but this does seem to extend to
varying degrees to other senses as well. Right, Some of
the people who report that they have a fantasia for
visual images. Also can't imagine the feelings of other senses,
(41:14):
if you know what I mean. And then some report
that they sort of can, again, making it seem like
a kind of spectrum issue, like can you hear a
piece of music that you're not currently listening to? Yeah? Yeah,
that's that's That's another good one. I certainly can. Like
one of the ones I wanted to think was the
Star Wars theme. I can just play the whole Star
(41:34):
Wars theme in my mind from beginning to end. Yeah,
And certainly we've all experienced earworms, so that's kind of
a variant of that now. Um. Also in this UH
the Zaman paper, they said of the individuals, a number
of them reported modest effects on their relationships, which I
guess one can imagine if you and your um, your
significant other are ultimately engaging with mental imagery and drastically
(41:58):
different ways. And also, fourteen of the twenty one participants
reported difficulties with autobiographical memory. So here's a quick quote
from the paper. The same number identified UH compensatory strengths
in verbal, mathematical, and logical domains. They their successful performance
in a task that would normally elicit imagery count how
many windows there are in your house or apartment, etcetera
(42:21):
was achieved by drawing on what participants described as knowledge, memory,
and subvisual models. Yeah, this is interesting. So this again
gets back into the idea that you end up just
utilizing different modes of memory the workforce of the brain. Yeah, right,
because I can't imagine. So if somebody said how many
windows are there in your house? I would do that
with a picture. I would picture my house and sort
of picture walking around the sides of my house and
(42:43):
seeing how many windows are there. But they can do
this without the picture. It's not like they're unable to
do it. So there's something else kicking in. Must be
conceptual facts logged about the house. Okay, so we need
to take one more quick break and then we'll be
right back with more a fan tasia. Now that BBC
(43:08):
paper that we mentioned earlier by James Gallagher. In that paper,
Gallagher spoke with one Neil kin Mure of Lancaster. Uh,
this is a self reporting individual with blindness of the
mind's eye, and he provided some interesting insight on the condition.
So I have just a couple of quotes here from
that that piece that I found were interesting, he said. Quote,
my stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep,
(43:30):
and he explained what he meant. I tried to do it,
and I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences. There
was nothing to count. No, that's a that's that's an
interesting because I guess that might be one of the
earliest examples of of here mentally mentally imagined this. Like
with my own uh son, I had a similar situation.
(43:51):
Like I distinctly remember the first time I told him
to close his eyes and encouraged him to imagine an
elephant because he was really obsessed with the elephants at
the time. And Um, I saw the delight on his
face as he imagined the elephant. Um. But you know,
after doing this research, I realized, well, there's equally a
possibility that he wouldn't be able to see the elephant.
(44:12):
And you know, there wouldn't be anything go wrong with
him if he couldn't see it. In the BBC piece,
um the the the interviewed individual, Neil kim Miller also
said that he had a terrible memory, but he was
good with facts and and then there's an additional quote
This is the hardest thing to describe what happens in
my head when I think about things. When I think
about my fiancee, there is no image, but I am
(44:35):
definitely thinking about her. I know today she has her
hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not
describing an image I am looking at I'm remembering features
about her. That's the strangest thing, And maybe that is
a source of some regret. Yeah, I mean, this is
the thing because typically these people report that they it's
not like they can't they don't know what somebody looks like. Right,
It's not like that scene in like Hannibal where they
(44:58):
show face blindness as just seeing p but with like
smooth skin over their face. Yeah. What's that condition called
a congenital prosopagnosia? Is that a where you you have
a born condition where you just can't recognize faces people
You see people who are familiar to you, but you
just they just don't look like anybody, uh you know,
whoever that is. And and it's not like that you
(45:19):
or at least not for everybody. Like we said, there
seems to be a wide variation in how this applies
to people's lives, but I haven't read that it's like that.
For most people, it seems like they report, yeah, they
recognize people. Once they see a picture of of a
close family member or of the president or whoever it is,
they know who it is. They just can't make the
picture without looking at it. It's almost kind of like
(45:41):
we talked about in the P versus NP episode, like
the kinds of problems that once a solution is presented,
you can easily check to see if it's correct, but
you can't come up with a solution and a reasonable
amount of time by yourself. It sounds like a version
of that. You can't make the picture, but when somebody
shows you the picture, you can say, oh, yeah, that's it. Yeah, definitely.
(46:01):
But anyway, I I just find this condition really fascinating.
And so if you yourself are somebody who thinks you
may be experiencing a fantasia, or if you just want
to learn more about it, one interesting resource I think
would be to go and look at some of the
message boards online that have recently been created by people
(46:23):
who claimed to have this experience. Because there's one I
found that was a fant dot asia. Nice. Yeah, but
it's a it's just like a forum online, people talking
about their experiences. Uh, and it seems to be a
lot of people having this kind of, uh, this awakening
kind of experience. They're like, oh, man, I didn't even
(46:44):
realize that this was what was causing all this confusion
between me and other people all these years, or I
didn't realize I was the I wasn't the only one
who was like this, or you know, people really seem
to be having a lot of fun coming together with
a community of other people who have the same issue. Well,
like it reminds one of the whole you know, the
old example of hey, what if when I think of
(47:07):
purple and you think of purple? What if we what
if we're each seeing different colors? But there's never a
way to prove that out. But but this is kind
of like a case where what it's kind of like
if you were one day able to say, oh, yeah,
the purple I see is different from the purple these
people see. I'm gonna I'm gonna go hang out now
with individuals who see purple the way I see people.
(47:28):
I've never understood what the deal with Barney was, but
now I get it. Uh No, but so I have
all these questions about a fantasia, like what it means.
And again, just to emphasize, it does seem like we
haven't nailed down that there's a specific cause and a
very specific effect yet, because there seemed to be a
range of different ways this manifests in people's minds. It's
(47:51):
associated with different things. Some people dream, some people don't,
some people have memory problems, some people don't um. But
one of the things I was wondering about was can
a fantasiacs hallucinate? Yeah? So what if an a fantasiac
takes a drug that often causes visual hallucinations? Do they
see anything different? Yeah? Are they just going to get
(48:12):
the non visual hallucinatory effects, uh? Or is it going
to sort of ignite a type of visual imagery that
isn't normally there sort of heighten the flashes that some
of the you know, the the the occasional flashes that
some of these individuals experience. Yeah. And so I looked
this up actually on the on the forum boards, and
they had actually addressed it. So one member of a
(48:34):
message board said they typed a question that struck me
as intriguing. This person said they were confused Essentially, they said,
how is hallucinating different from seeing things in your mind? Again,
that question is hard to answer, but to somebody who has, uh,
you know, a mind's eye, it's very clearly different. I
(48:54):
don't feel like I'm hallucinating when I imagine something, But
try to describe the difference. Well, you're seeing being something
in your mind that's not there. Okay, that sounds like hallucination,
I think, but then it's also been It's also just
like seeing it. So, yeah, we come back again to
the cave. We're all still lined up staring at the
(49:17):
play of shadows on the wall. Yeah, some of us
maybe just have a slightly different view of the shadows
and others. Okay, Robert, I've got a question for you. Okay,
hit me. Do you think you could try to simulate
this in your in your own mind? Like? Could you try?
I know you it would be impossible for us to
(49:38):
really fully be able to do it, But can you
try to go through a standard day to day process,
something you would do all the time without using any
mental pictures. I was trying this morning, and I couldn't
do it. Just trying, yeah, trying not to think of
mental images immediately calls to mind mental images. It's like,
(49:58):
you know, telling somebody like, don't think of a rhinoceros
wearing a jet pack. Yeah, you just did it. Uh.
And even it works in the in the general sinse
just saying, try not to think of mental images, and
immediately my mind is filled with rhinoceroses and jet packs. Yeah.
I mean, if anything, I have to try and keep
from daydreaming and keep from or keep from you know,
(50:19):
pummeling myself with with different mental images. Uh, and and
actually focus in on a task, you know. Yeah. I
mean the way this really seems like it would come
through is like, how does if you can't have mental images,
how do you have fantasies about things you would like
to do? So you imagine, you know, your boss makes
you furious and you wish you could punch him in
the nose. You wouldn't actually do it, but you at
(50:41):
least have that image for a moment, right. Uh. I
think that's probably a nearly universal experience for people. Thought
of it. But what happens if you can't have that
image in your mind? Do you do? You think about it? Conceptually?
It's like I I just thinking about the concept of
punching my boss in the well. And then also even if,
(51:01):
like I was just thinking to myself, like, what are
some of the times when I'm actually able to to not,
you know, mentally imagine anything and have these mental visualizations
in my mind? I think, well, okay, maybe when I'm
doing yoga, because I'm able to sort of shut out
a lot of stuff, I'm able to shut off the
default mode network to a large extent. But even then,
(51:22):
if I'm focusing on a pose, I am also focusing
on a mental image of what I must look like
in that pose, which may or may not have a
match up to how I'm actually doing the pose. So
what is it like then to engage in a in
a physical activity like that with a fantasia? I mean,
(51:45):
I mean, obviously you can do it, but it just
kind of drives home just how much mental visualizations, um,
how big a role they play and just everything we do. Okay,
another question, ok, fiction writing. This is something again from
the from the Blake cross piece. So he's he is,
he's done some screenwriting, and he describes his process for
(52:07):
fiction writing without having mental images, which he described in
terms of words and parts of speech. I thought this
was interesting. So he said, like, when I'm imagining something,
I imagine a noun, the word, and then I imagine
a verb that follows it, the word um. And so
there's something very different about his process for writing than
(52:28):
I would have. So when I'm imagining a scene, there's
there's translation going on. I think of a picture, and
then I have to put the picture into words. But
could it be possible that this allows people to do
creative writing without any translation the original creative thing that's
happening these words. That's interesting. Yeah, Like they're not having
(52:50):
They're not in that situation that I mentioned earlier, where
as an artist or a creator of any kind, you
are stuck trying to translate the mental image into something
another person can share in. Like you said, there's no
translation going there. Well, it makes me wonder if the
maybe the ultimate form of direct written communication with almost
(53:12):
nothing lost in between, would be an a fantasiac writing
to another a fantasiac somebody, because there you're not translating
it into pictures on both sides or on either side.
I will say that something that does remind me of
is like in my own writing process. There there's definitely
the point where I have an image in my mind
(53:33):
or seen in my mind, characters in my mind, and
I'm trying to bring that to life on the page.
But then if I'll get into these situations where I'm writing,
and in a way what I'm writing is coming before
the mental image, so I kind of create the point.
Not to say it's it's a fantasia at all, but
I'm kind of writing before the mental visualization. I'm kind
(53:56):
of reading what I've writen I've written and and experiencing
it more or less in real time as a reader would.
Oh yeah, well, I bet you've had the experience I
know I have of writing something before you get the picture,
and then getting the picture, and then going back and
revising what you've written based on the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
for sure. So this is Yeah, the writing is definitely
(54:17):
a fascinating area to think about this because it is
this sort of it's the mental image, but then this
stripping down of the mental image, the translating it into
into another form. Uh yeah, yeah, Well, it's fascinating to
be coming into this topic and it's such an interesting
time for it, you know, when when it seems we're
on the cusp of a lot of new learning about
(54:38):
what this condition is, how many people have it, what
it's like for them, And Hey, if you out there
actually experience this, if you have some level of a
fantasia or you're toward that end of the mental image
re spectrum, I think it would be great to hear
about your experience. If you want to write in and
tell us what it's like. Yeah, and if you're on
the other end of the spectrum, if your hyper visualizer, uh,
(55:01):
let us know about that as well. Uh. In the meantime,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership. That's where you will find all
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(55:24):
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
(56:00):
Star to start back by
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and this is
one of our from the Vault selections. Yeah, this particular
episode originally published May two thousand sixteen, and it concerns
a fantasia blindness of the mind's eye, the idea that
if you're reading a description in a book or someone's
(00:26):
explaining something to you, certain individuals will not be able
to form that mental picture. And this is this is
a fascinating topic. When we originally aired this, we heard
from a lot of people, some people who suddenly realized, Hey,
I think this is this is how my mind works.
I think this episode generated some of the most listener
male of anything we ever did. Yeah, we did a
(00:47):
whole additional listener mail episode that came out after this. Yeah,
and we'll make sure to link to that on the
landing page for this episode. Anyway, we hope you enjoy
this episode from the old days. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. He
(01:12):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today's episode concerns
the mind's eye concerns mental imagery, and so we decided
that the best way to kick off this episode is
to take you on a little guided mental journey. Yeah,
so close your eyes unless you're driving or doing something
that requires your eyes to be open, and in that case,
(01:34):
don't close your eyes if you If you are able
to close your eyes, close your eyes if not. Just
imagine you're eight years old and you're walking along a
beach with your mother, your barefoot. The tide is coming
in and you see trails of footprints leading back and
forth along the beach where other people have walked the
same path today. But the waves are coming higher and
(01:57):
higher and slowly smoothing all those footprints way. But then
you look up at your mother and you notice something strange.
She's wearing armor, a steel chest plate and a visored helm,
with chainmail drooping across her arms and legs, rustling lightly
as she walks. Across the front of her chest plate
(02:17):
is a painted figure. It's foghorn, Leghorn. She raises the
visor on her helm and smiles at you. A mosquito
hovers in front of her face, and she flails one
arm to knock it away and you both laugh, but
then you notice something else. Your mother has a piece
of metal dangling from her hip opposite you. It's a
(02:38):
long sword. She puts one hand on the hilt and says,
don't worry, only a bit of insurance in case he
shows up. A wave of seawater rolls up over your feet,
washing dry sand from between your toes, and you ask who.
Then there's a faint rumbling under your feet. It's not
just the tickling wash of the waves. The ground is shaking,
(03:02):
and about two out in the water, a dark shape
begins to rise up from the waves. At first it's
just a green, black lump, but then the huge glaring eyes,
the cavernous mouth, climbing higher and higher as it approaches.
It's Godzilla. Not the friendly Godzilla who defends Earth against
(03:23):
all the heel monsters. This is the angry Godzilla who
breathes beams of radiation and crushes ten story buildings with
a single swipe. Your mother puts an arm across your chest.
She draws her long sword and says stand back. This
could get serious, And with the flip of a switch,
her hover boots engage, her feet lift off the ground,
(03:45):
and then she's rocketing towards the head of the monster
to defend the realms of humankind. Alright, so uh, we
we tried to draw in a few different types of
of imagery. They are a few different types of memories memories, right.
We wanted to have sort of generic landscape that would
be easy for a lot of people to picture, like
a beach. Most people have some kind of image, generically
(04:07):
of what a beach looks like. We also wanted something familiar.
Usually they say to picture a relative or familiar family member,
So hopefully you've got an image of a mother or
family figure there, but then also some pop culture images. Right,
most people hopefully know what Godzilla looks like. If you don't,
you gotta go back and watch the original Godzilla from
the fifties and right, uh and then uh and then
(04:29):
fall horn like horn and personal favorite of mine. You know.
It's one of the interesting things with this exercise is
to think back on it, and think back of the
specifics and ask yourself questions like who did I have
a more vivid memory of what I looked like as
a child, what my mother looked like, what Godzilla looked like?
(04:50):
And in these details are not necessarily telling of your
relationship with your mother versus your relationship with Godzilla. But but,
but it it kind of just raises our awareness of
the vast spectrum of visual stimuli that are informing are
our inner vision of the world. Yeah, and this is
a strange thing because the only person who can experience
(05:12):
your mental imagery is you. You can sort of describe
your mental imagery to other people, but nobody can take
a look at it to see what it is you're
picturing in your mind. So this is something that you
largely have to deal with entirely on your own, and
you don't know how similar or how different your own
process of mental imagery is to that of other people
(05:33):
unless you really put your heads together and start talking
about your mental images and detail and trying to figure
out if their difference is. It's not a standard thing
that people do, really right, because even to describe it,
if I describe my mental images to you, they become
your mental images. Like it's in a way, I'm kind
of handing off the blueprints and then you build a
different building. It's the same building, but a different building.
(05:54):
And likewise, maybe you paint, maybe you write um and
some other artistic medium you create music to try and
convey these images in your head. But you're still but
you're still then limited by your artist artistic ability and
then other people's interpretations of those works of art. You know,
I already realized. I didn't think about this when I
was writing this, but I did already see a contradiction
(06:16):
in what I told people to imagine the original angry Godzilla.
But then I also said green black, Right, Well, Godzilla
in color is sort of greenish black, but the original
anger Godzilla black and white. He's just you know, you
look at him and he just looks like this charred monstery.
So this is a this is already a mental confabulation
(06:37):
on my part. I'm imagining a Godzilla that never existed
anywhere in reality. But anyway, so most of you were
with us there on that journey. You were, to some
extent able to picture some of the things we were
talking about. You could see in your mind's eye the beach,
the armor, your mother, the sword, the fog horn, leg horn,
the Godzilla. But there are some people who probably couldn't
(07:01):
see any of that. They were there with us, they
were understanding the concepts. They were able to follow the plot,
whatever plot there was, and they could probably recount a
list of the events that happened in the little scene
we just described, but they couldn't see any of it
in their imagination. And this is the concept we're going
(07:22):
to be talking about today. One study has found that
this might be about up to one in fifty people
who have this kind of experience where they just don't
create pictures inside their mind the way most people do.
Uh And this condition now hasn't come to be known
as a fantasia or the blindness of the mind's I So,
(07:44):
the American biotech leader Craig Venter, you know about him, right.
He's famous for being a leader in the quest of
sequence the human genome, and he's famous for creating a
synthetic organisms. Uh So, he has actually described that he
has an unusual way of thinking, a way of thinking
that's essentially purely conceptual, like we've been describing, without any
(08:06):
mental imagery. Venter says, quote, it's like having a computer
store the information, but you don't have a screen attached
to the computer. He's describing his own mind. I don't know.
I I have trouble understanding what that would be like.
But maybe maybe to understand it better. We should first
(08:27):
look at some facts about what the mind's eye itself
is before we get into the blindness of the mind's eye.
What's going on when you create pictures in your head? Well,
of course we're talking about mental imagery here, but also
there's some other sensations thrown in as well. It all
amounts to a quasi perceptional experience that occurs in the
(08:47):
absence of the appropriate external stimuli. Um. So, I can
close my eyes, I can see a deceased loved one's face,
I can hear their voice. I can imagine myself standing
on the shore of a distant ocean, a past ocean,
or even some future sure that I haven't even walked
on yet. I mean this, this is the kind of
thing that I mean, most of us take for granted.
(09:08):
We use it, we employ it every day. Um well,
I mean, as I did with the Angry Godzilla and color,
you can picture things you've never actually seen, right, Yeah
you can. Yeah, there are things if you're like me,
I feel there are things in books. For instance, no
one has ever painted a picture of this character or
this scene. Uh, and yet you have a very like
(09:28):
crystal clear vision like I have a better visual memory
of some things that have occurred in books than things
that have occurred in real life. You know, Oh yeah, yeah,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Uh. Isn't it
so weird to finally see a book you've read but
it's never been illustrated or made into a film, or
anything finally made visual by someone else. It's always people
(09:51):
always have the same reaction. That's not what I thought
so and so looked for. It's not what it looks
like now. The things we perceive in the mind's eye,
their their products of memory. There can structed from specific
or varied memories. They may be accurate, they may be
amalgams of diverse influences. Really, this runs the gamut from
something you saw yesterday that you near perfectly remember, to
(10:11):
have you know, vague side from your childhood that you
at least think you remember, to an envisioned future scene
in your own life, something you dreamt, something you daydreamed,
landscape be viewed from the imagined walls of a fictional world,
or your own creation of a of a an author's creation.
It's just like pretty much any time we are envisioning something,
any time we are closing our eyes or even keep
(10:33):
with our eyes open are imagining something, we are seeing
something in our mind that is of course the mind's eye, uh,
doing its thing. Yeah, And I think this has always
been a very interesting avenue for philosophy to investigate because
it is something that we recognized was sort of strange
(10:53):
about the human experience before we had neuroscience or psychology
or or any of these scientific ways of instigating it. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean because because it obviously plays such a central
role in the way we navigate the world and the
way we think about time and a world of movable objects, right. Um.
And so yeah, we've been as long as we've had philosophers,
(11:16):
as long as we've had people among us with with
time to you know, look up from their labors and
think about the human condition, we've been thinking about the
mind's eye. Um. On the podcast here, we've talked about
the method of Loki before the the ancient Greek technique
in which person utilizes spatial memory to memorize nonspatial information. Uh. Look,
(11:39):
that kind of plays into into some of this. That
involves a certain amount of a reflection on what's on
how we're using the mind's eye, you know, I I've
tried to use the method of Loki, and I have
not been very good at it. Yeah, I wonder if
I'm just not doing it right. Like when I'm able
to to really get it set in my mind, it
does help me remember the By the way, this is
(12:01):
so a quick version of it is, if you need
to make a list of digits of numbers to remember,
you're not going to remember those digits. So instead you
imagine your house being full of odd characters that each
embody one of the digits in that number sequence, and
then you can remember by picturing the room and where
all of the odd characters were in the room, and
(12:24):
then you just remember what digit they correspond to or
something like that. Yeah, like a very simplified version of
this that I have employed frequently in the past. It's
kind of like a um uh you know, often called
the memory palace because it's an imagined place that you
fill with these examples. But oftentimes I only have room
in my mind for one example, and that is, uh,
(12:45):
that's when I am a swimming laps and I want
to remember what number lap I'm on, because if I
forget the lap number, then I'm going to make myself
revert to the to the lower number. So if I
if I don't know for sure I'm and four, I'm
gonna do three. And I don't want to keep doing
one less than I want to do because I'm gonna
wear myself out right. But I'm also busy swimming. I'm
(13:08):
having a hard time necessarily remembering which lap I am
currently on. So instead of trying to remember four, as
easy as that would seem, I find it easier to
just force myself to think of, say, the four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse, like, think of think of that, and
that'll stick in my head just a little better as
I'm you know, vigorously of swimming these laps um, you know.
(13:30):
So it'll just be some sort of visual association with
just a single digit. I don't know. I don't know
if anybody else out there has has done something of
that that that nature, but that is kind of a
simplified um, good crap. What's what's your visual image for eight?
I can't think of anything for eight? Oh for eight,
I think of Alan robe gerlays The Voyeur, where you
(13:52):
have a character who keeps making figure eights out of rope. Yeah,
so I think of him setting by the shore um
not quite contemplating horrible things and making little figure eights.
That's a good thing to have in your mind here
at the gym or the y m c a guess
wherever you swim laps. So one of the important things
when when thinking about the memory palace and then ultimately
(14:14):
thinking about memory and the mind's eye, is just to
to refresh here a little bit about human memory itself.
Human memory is not just like a tape real rolling
in the brain that we just, oh, let's go back
and look and see what happened yesterday. Human memory in
multiple ways. It's not multiple, certainly not that accurate, right,
because human memory consists of several different types of memory
(14:36):
that are working in uh kind of an unequal chorus
um to create the human experience of memory that we have.
So we have sensory memory, um, you know what something
feels like, what it smells, It smells like, that sort
of thing. We have short term memory. We have long
term term memory. We have and then we divide long
(14:56):
term memory out. We have explicit memories of consciousness, we
have in iplicit memories of unconsciousness. We have declarative memories
of facts and events. We have procedural memories involved that
involves skills and tasks. We have episodic memory that deals
with events and experiences, and we have semantic memory that
concerns facts and concepts. So we have all these different
(15:17):
types of memories, each one dealing with in a way
certain you know, different types of skills, different types of
ways of utilizing memory when we engage with the world.
And studies have shown in the past that, uh, if
you have a part of the brain associated with the
one type of memory is injured, sometimes you see those
other types of memory compensating. So it's like a a
(15:38):
in a way, it's like a staff. It's like a
staff of different memory drones and they all have their
jobs to do. But if somebody is slacking, then it
may fall to another employee to uh to to you know,
to step up and and cover for their shortcomings. Yeah.
I think that's a good metaphor that the brain is
more like a workforce than a machine. If one part
of a machine breaks, the whole machine gen probably isn't
(16:00):
gonna work. But if one part of a workforce is
slacking or calls in sick today, the others can often
find a way to cover for them, right, and they
might cover you know, everyone does their job a little
bit differently, so their their skill set might allow them
to cover in a slightly different way. But back to philosophers.
So philosophers have continue to argue about the minds, and
(16:21):
we're certainly not gonna be able to do an exhaustive
journey through all of their their takes. But you go
back as far as Plato, for example, and Plato brought
us one of the most famous examples of this. Uh.
He utilizes mental images in his famous allegory of the Cave. Yeah,
and that's sort of the idea that the world that
we perceive is not the true reality, you know. But
(16:41):
Plato had this whole belief in ideal forms, you know,
things that were the more true version of the thing
than the thing we're familiar with. Right. There's a realm
of forms out there, and in that realm of forms,
there's such thing as a perfect chair. But in this
world we can only build imperfect chairs that inch maybe
a little closer and closer towards that unobtainable ideal. Yeah.
(17:03):
And so his metaphor for explaining this was that of
the cave, where there are people who are chained up
in a cave and they don't even really realize that
they're in a cave. And uh, and there's an opening
to the cave through which light comes through, and figures
pass in front of the opening to the cave, casting
shadows on the wall of the cave, and all we
see we're facing the back of the cave, the wall,
(17:24):
and we see the shadows, and we think the shadows
are the real things, but they're not there. They're only
the the sort of like the vague outlines of the
things that that are the true forms. If anyone out
there is watching The Path on Hulu, there's actually a
scene um in the first episode where they roll out
this this allegory and it's it's pretty entertaining, but but
(17:49):
I mean, certainly it's an it's an allegory. You can
have a lot of fun with either trying to contrast
your worldview to another individual's worldview, to try and win
someone over with your true version of reality versus there
they're you know, their illusion based understanding of reality. But
it also you know, gets down to like what is
our perception of reality itself? These mental images that fill
(18:11):
our mind when we close our eyes those are imperfect.
But also the mental images when we have our eyes open,
we're still just in a sense, we are still just
seeing those shadows on the walls of a cave. Yeah.
So Aristotle also referred to mental imagery and his work
referred to it as a as a fantasia with an
(18:32):
F with a P, not an fright, not the Disney movie. Uh,
And this was central to his theory of memory. Yeah.
Though you know, I can see why the Disney movie
would be called that, I mean, they it evokes the
concept of fantasy, even though he didn't I think directly
mean fantasy and the way we do, like somebody coming
up with a with a fantasy to escape from life. Yeah,
(18:53):
it was the idea of being able to to imagine
things in your mind now. And A. Carts also thought
a lot about mental imagery and how they form in
the mind. Uh, the view that an idea is a
quasi perceptual thing, perhaps even pictorial, formed in the imagination.
And he did distinguish between images formed in the brain
(19:14):
and ideas in the mind because he was a duelist
he saw uh, he saw the mind and the body
as separate. The essence of mind is thought and the
body is an extension of it. Thoughts are not extended
in space, but the body is now us. Where in
philosophy you have you have like idealism, which states that
reality is equivalent to mental images, and the mental images
(19:36):
are reality itself. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want
to take this very far, the people who believe in
hardcore idealism would probably say that there is no like
that reality is merely the mental image of a higher
being or something like that. Yeah. So, as you can see,
you can really go down the deep end, into the
deep end, uh, contemplating mental imagery and what are the
(19:57):
philosophical ramifications of it? Um, there's you know, there's a lot,
there's a great deal more we can discuss this kind
of the philosophical groundwork. I guess you could say. Um.
For instance, though in the nineteen eighties, there's a great
deal of debate over the over the connection from between
mental images and language. So one side argued that representations
(20:17):
underlying the experience of mental imagery are the same type
as those used in the language. And then there was
the other camp, and they held that that these representations
served to depict, not describe objects. Okay, so what does
that mean in practice. Well, my understanding is that basically
comes down to, you know, to what extent is mental
imagery like the the the groundwork of language itself. Um well,
(20:40):
like I said earlier, at times, it feels like it's
it's very difficult to um to overstate the importance of
mental imagery in our perceptions of reality. Um So, just
how deep does that go? Does it underlie just about
everything in cognition? Does it underlie language? Does it underlie um,
you know, just every free, little detail of our experience. Yeah, well,
(21:02):
this does seem to sort of tie into us stuff
we talked about in the Tip of the Tongue episode,
where you can you can perhaps you can have the
face in your mind, you know, oh, I know this
actor's face, and you can picture it, and you can
know the actor's name well enough that if somebody said it,
you'd be like, yeah, that's it. You'd immediately recognize that.
(21:24):
But you can't make the connection. But of course, in
recent years, we've seen the study of mental imagery make
a more scientific transition. I think we we've started to
look at it from a neuroscientific point of view, where
people are saying, okay, well, let's identify what brain regions
are actually being used and activated when people are in
the process of coming up with mental pictures. And one
(21:46):
of the sources we used for this episode, it was
a paper by Adams Salman and colleagues and and UH,
these authors identify that essentially in the brain voluntary imagery,
that the mental images you come up with have been
associated in previous research with the brain's frontal parietal executive
systems or of the executive control you know, the president
(22:08):
of your brain sitting there directing traffic, and with the
posterior brain regions, which you know in the back of
the brain that's often the identified with visual processing. And
together you sort of put these things uh into a
teamwork relationship and they are what allows you to come
up with mental pictures. That's right. And UH, we've also
(22:30):
seen studies where we've taken f M R I, We've
done a PET and we've done PET scans on individuals
summoning mental images. You know, they're asked to summon a
mental image and then we look at the brain and
see what it's doing in real time. And UH reveals
that activation in brain areas that are used in visual perception,
which doesn't sound that surprising. Uh, this is pretty cool.
(22:50):
Visual and mental imaging share roughly two thirds of the
same active activated brain regions, So there's a lot of
a lot of cross over there between the usual and
mental imaging systems, a lot of shared mechanics. Yeah. Like if,
for example, if you show somebody a picture of somebody's
face and then you asked the same test subject imagine
this person's face, a lot of their brain activity is
(23:13):
going to be roughly similar. Right. In fact, the study
found that when the same task is performed in perception
and then with eyes closed using mental images, you get overlaps.
So so again, a lot of the same mechanisms, a
lot of the same brain equipment is being used, whether
(23:33):
you're dealing with just visual perception or mental perception. Of course,
that's funny because the phenomenal experience is completely different, right,
Like you, uh, somebody, to somebody who has a fantasia,
this might be new information, but it's obviously not going
to be new information to most people out there. Uh.
(23:53):
When you picture something in your mind's eye, it is
extremely different than seeing it in front of you, But
it's hard to explain how it's different. Yeah, you know. Yeah,
you know, there's a there's a two thousand fifteen BBC
article titled a Fantasia, A Life without Mental Images by
James Gallagher, and I'll be sure to include a link
(24:15):
to that article on the landing page for this episode
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com because in addition
to running through some examples of uh, some accounts of
individuals who have this blindness of the mind's eye, which
we're going to discuss more here, there's also a quiz
you can take, uh. And it's just an eight question
quiz about asking you like the level of detail that
(24:36):
you experience when you are asked to mentally envision, uh,
you know, someone you see every day, Uh, A sunrise,
I believe, clouds in the sky, the clouds clearing in
the sky, a thunderstorm, the these sort of images some
of the same kind of stuff that we ask you
to summon at the beginning of this episode. Yeah, but
it doesn't just ask you can you picture it? It
(24:56):
asks you to rank level of details. So for each ample,
it might say picture, get someone in mind and maybe
a close friend or spouse or close family member, and
picture that person and then on a scale of not
very well at all too extremely well, how well can
you see in your mind's eye the contours of their
(25:18):
face and the shape of their body, and what color
their eyes are, and and so it's asking for specific
details of the image to to get at the vividness
of the picture in your mind. And that suggests to me,
and I think their findings do suggest so far that
it's not just an on off switch. It's not like
you can make pictures with your mind or you can't.
(25:39):
There seems to be a spectrum, that's right. Some people
seem to have very intense, very lucid, vivid mental images.
Other people have kind of hazier, blurrier or more generic
mental images, and some people have almost no mental imagery
at all, or even report having none. And it's so
at the opposite end of the scale of the main
(26:00):
topic today. You know, we're talking about these a fantasiacts,
but there's also what's come to be known as hyper fantasia, right,
and these would be people who I think would experience
visions of the mind ie with just extreme lucidity is
far compared to most of us. So they're not just
vague pictures, but they have bright colors and vivid details.
(26:20):
So if I tell you imagine a beach, you might
picture sand and waves and maybe some umbrellas. But I
bet you wouldn't naturally say, Okay, I can tell you
there are seven umbrellas in the picture in my mind,
and these are the colors of stripes on the umbrellas.
But somebody might actually be able to have that level
(26:42):
of vividness in their mind's eye. Yeah. This idea of
a spectrum of of of mental detail and visual imagery,
it uh, it really makes you reanalyzed just how you're
painting the picture in your head. Uh, these memories, you know,
like it. I think we both scored around the same
on this where we had kind of like typical image.
(27:04):
I was in the typical range. Yeah, but even even
then I was I found myself asking questions like, well,
how when I think about these people that I see
every day in my life and they are very important
to me, Uh, you know, what does it mean that
I don't have like just a picture perfect vision of them?
What does it mean that when I think back on
a beach, I find my like a sunrise on a beach,
(27:24):
I keep thinking of, you know, images of sunrises from
paintings and films more so than actual beach sunrises that
I've witnessed. Do you think about the final scene of
the Warriors, Yeah, that sort of thing, like I end
up like putting a fictional Instagram filter over all of
these these memories, and I'm not really remembering. I'm not
really summoning a mental image of a thing I actually saw.
(27:48):
I'm summoning this mental image that's composed of these varying elements.
You know. One thing I read when we were doing
our research for this episode was a first person essay
that I came across by the software designer Blake Ross,
who was involved in Mozilla Firefox on Facebook, and he's
also done some screenwriting. And he found out after reading
(28:08):
an article I think in either in the New York
Times or in Discover magazine by Carl Zimmer about a
fantasia that he he had this experience, and he also
was just shocked to find out that other people weren't
like him. His discovery was that, oh, I never realized
other people could see pictures in their minds. His whole life.
He thought when people said stuff like picture this, they
(28:31):
were just being metaphorical. He didn't realize other people could
actually hold these pictures in their brains. And in this
essay he starts he recounts how when he found out
about this, he was asking all his friends, what's it
like to picture something in your mind? And asking all
these questions I've never really thought to ask myself about
my process of mental imagery that were very interesting, Like
(28:52):
he was asking his friends, Okay, when you see a
picture in your mind, like you picture a beach, is
it still? Is it a still photograph or is it
more like video where things are moving? And that distinction
just hit me like a wrecking ball. I was like,
I don't know. When I picture something in my mind,
I can make it move consciously if I need to.
(29:14):
But when I just picture a beach, it is almost
neither still nor moving. It is it exists in super
position between these two things. It's kept for me. I
guess when I think about it, it's kind of like
the old music video for What Was It where the
people go into the painting or into the drawing Take
on Me. Yeah, I feel like my my mental imagery
(29:35):
is kind of like the take on Me video. It's
stuff is moving, but it's all kind of stationary as well. Yeah. Well,
I mean, I certainly can imagine something moving on purpose.
But when I just picture a thing and I don't
imagine it moving on purpose, I don't think it's still,
but it's not moving either. It's very strange. It reminds
(29:56):
me of two of the experience of reading a book,
especially a book to set more or less in the
real world, And at times I'll find myself stopping and
thinking about, like, oh, I'm picturing this in this living
room from that I've limp that I visited or lived
in at some point in my life, Like that, for
some reason, is the living room that my brain is
drawing in for this setting where I'm picturing this character. Sometimes,
(30:20):
you know, sometimes the character just is that character and
that and there's not really like a firm mental image
in your head exactly what they look like. Other times
you can't shake their um their appearance as being that
of someone you know or or you know a character
actor from a movie, etcetera. But I do find myself
(30:42):
like analyzing, like where are all these elements coming from?
Like some of them are obviously coming from the the author.
The author is providing the blueprint, the author is providing
the scaffolding. But then that scaffolding is kind of like
magnetically drawing in elements from my own visual memory. Yeah, definitely, Uh,
I know exactly what you're talking about there. Uh. An
interesting thing about fiction that that Blake Ross says in
(31:05):
his first person essay about this is he he reports that,
so he's always read books, you know, he's enjoyed fiction,
and he's written fiction. But when he writes fiction, he
has almost no visual description because he just doesn't picture
things in his head. And when he reads, he skips
visual description. He just kind of jumps over it. That's
not it has no meaning to him. Really. Huh, yeah,
(31:25):
it's it's it's fascinating. Okay, now it's time to take
a quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when
we come back, more on the mind's eye and a fantasia.
All right, So, just how common is a fantasia? Um,
(31:47):
it's a difficult question because this is something that hasn't
really been uh in the public mindset. It hasn't been
out there, it hasn't been something you get a pamphle
it on until very recently. There was one interesting study
on this from before it had a name. Before this
a fantasia term came out that was studying sort of
the lack of generative power and mental imagery, and that
(32:08):
that was in two thousand nine, right, study by Fall, Yeah,
Bill Fall psychologists. And what did it find? He found
that between two point one percent and two point seven
percent of participants in his study claimed to have no
visual imagination. So that's where we got that number up
at the beginning, that it might be around one in
(32:29):
fifty of you who just didn't see any pictures when
you were following along in the story with us. Yeah, Now,
of course we have to that that number is not
coming from like a you know, large scale study, so
results aren't really fully supported, but it gives us sort
of at least a ball park. I think, yeah, it's
something to work with. But but a lot of this
(32:49):
recent research has popped up because of an interesting I'm
about to use a great word here, synergy between between
actual medical rea search and some writing in the popular press. Actually,
I think like Carl Zimmer's articles had something to do
with people coming out of the woodwork to say, hey,
now I have this experience of a fantasia. I can't
(33:12):
make mental pictures. But it started with the research of
Adam Zaman, Right. Yeah, he's a professor of cognitive and
behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter Medical School, and
along with co authors uh Um, MICHELLEA. De Wira, and
Surio Della Sala, they coined the term a fantasia in
(33:32):
their two thousand fifteen paper Lives Without Imagery congenital a
Fantasia that was published in the journal Cortex. Now, people had,
as we said, previously described things along these lines like
it had always been kind of noted that, well, there's
some people out there who say that they can't create
any mental pictures. But nobody really looked very deeply into this,
(33:53):
and I think some of the I think the earliest
example that the authors we were looking at were able
to draw on was just the nineteen century. Now, this
condition and the condition had in these earlier works and
condition had previously been referred to as a defective revisualization
or visual ear reminiscence. What a great word, ear reminiscence.
Somebody was trying to make us say that, yeah, sorry,
(34:16):
not gonna work. It's a fantasia. Uh And there are
skeptics actually out there who say that that what we're
talking about here does not exist at all. I think
that's fascinating because how would you prove them wrong? Yeah,
and why why would you make that argument? I don't know. Well,
I mean, arguing about the existence of somebody else's internal experience.
I mean, that's just it's crazy. Yeah, I mean it
(34:37):
almost seems seems like you'd have to be making the
counter argument of saying, oh, you don't have a fantasia,
you just have a lazy mind, right, your imagination is
just a bit stunted. But I can understand why people
might be tempted to this direction because I, as I
we've said before, I think you probably would agree with this.
I can't imagine what this is like. Yeah, I have
(34:58):
no ability soever to put myself in a position of
not being able to make mental pictures that I don't
even understand what that means really, Right, It's kind of
like if most of us are more or less the
same computer hardware with differing software. You know, we can
talk all day about I don't understand how your software works,
(35:18):
and this is how my software works. But here we're
talking about essentially a difference in hardware. Um, I don't
know if that analogy completely holds up. But essentially there's
something a little more, uh, you know, base level is
different and and how do we even begin to describe
that to each other? Yeah, So Zaman first started studying this,
I think in two thousand ten, right, because of the
(35:42):
story of this. So there was a patient who reported
having contracted, like acquired a fantasia after a medical procedure, right, right,
So there was a sixty five year old man who
had coronary angioplastic and that's where they So if you
have a blockage in one of your arteries or something
like that, they'll open up one of your arteries and
(36:03):
stick a catheter in it, and somewhere along your body
wherever the blockage is occurring, they'll inflate a small balloon
or something inside your artery to widen it, essentially and
allow easier passage of blood. Yeah. It's not the kind
of thing that you would initially imagine altering your brain functioning. Yeah,
and it's generally not considered a major surgical procedure, but
(36:23):
it's like it's you. I think you're typically left awake
for it. They don't even necessarily put you under, though
they might need to give you some drugs to calm
you down. But yeah, it's this is this is not
like a gigantic big deal. So it's coronary angioplasty. And
after the procedure, this patient was unable to form mental
pictures and he had not had this problem before, and
(36:46):
so yeah, and that's where this study comes in. And afterwards,
after there were some pieces published about this, Zaman started
to hear from people who said, Hey, I have this condition.
And not only do I have it, I didn't get
it from I didn't have an angioplastic or any you know,
injury or or surgery. I've always had it. This is
(37:07):
just how I am. So Zaman and his co authors
they they looked at twenty one of these self reporting
cases and then they discovered most of these individuals um
kind of discovered their condition, their own condition in their
twenties when through conversations or or readings they found a
discrepancy between how other people described the use of the
(37:30):
mind's eye and their own experiences. Can you imagine I
just have a hard time imagining how you get that
far in life without realizing. Now, this is another thing
that's addressed yet again in that that essay I mentioned
by Blake Ross, where he just talks about how whenever
he heard people using the language of the mind's eye
were talking about, you know, picturing something, imagining something, he
(37:53):
thought it was all metaphorical. He thought they were just
talking about conceptually meditating on the idea of a beach
or something. So you're sitting there thinking about the concepts
of sand and water and sunshine and umbrellas. But he
didn't realize that other people were literally seeing something in
their mind. Yeah. I mean, it's like we said earlier,
(38:14):
when one when you have all these different types of memory,
and if one is taking uh, you know, a back seat,
the other ones are going to compensate. So it's not
like if you have a fantasia, you're not gonna be
able to function in society at all. It seems like
quite the contrary. Uh, individuals find a way to function.
They find they just end up utilizing these different modes
of memory. Okay, but of these twenty one self reporting cases,
(38:37):
what did Zalmon find about them? Well, so I found
that nineteen of the twenty one were male. And uh,
it's worth noting that this might have more to do
with the readership of Discover magazine. This is not a
randomized self selected because right this is where people would
have read that Carl Zimmer article, and they were the
ones who said, hey, so yeah, I just might have
to do with the male readership discover On the other hand,
(38:59):
they found it. Five of the twenty one reported that
it affected relatives as well. This is something I've read
of people's experiences online. Some of them say, one of
my parents has this. Yeah, so this leads us to
believe it might be hereditary. And then ten of the
twenty one said, uh, said that all all versions of
the imagery were affected. Now, now, like I alluded to earlier,
(39:23):
this does seem to me, based on what I've read
so far, to be sort of a um it's not
necessarily an all or nothing. It's sort of a spectrum condition.
Because one of the things that these people reported is
that it's not like they've never ever in their entire
live seni mental image. They just generally don't see them,
(39:44):
like some of them sometimes reported that they might have
had very brief involuntary mental images, like they they might involuntarily, quote,
flash an image of somebody's face, but it's just that
this is rare and they can't do it on man, Right,
it's something that just might occur during while they're awake.
It might occur during dreams some of them. This is
(40:06):
another thing, the interesting variation on dream experience. Some report
that they don't have dreams at all or don't remember
having them if they do have them, and some report
that they do have dreams and can experience visual content
and dreams, but just can't do it while they're awake
or on command. Yeah. Zeman is a big believer that
this is essentially a variant of neuropsychological functioning and kind
(40:29):
of like synesthesia in a sense, and again kind of
on on a spectrum as well. So so again, don't
think of it as a you know, as a as
a as a brain injury, don't think of it as
a as as an ailment. It is just a different,
uh a different way that the mental chorus is coming
together to receive reality. Yeah. Another thing that I thought
(40:51):
was interesting is, uh so we've been talking about images
being visual as in like what you know, light, photons,
and the eyes, but this does seem to extend to
varying degrees to other senses as well. Right, Some of
the people who report that they have a fantasia for
visual images. Also can't imagine the feelings of other senses,
(41:14):
if you know what I mean. And then some report
that they sort of can, again, making it seem like
a kind of spectrum issue, like can you hear a
piece of music that you're not currently listening to? Yeah? Yeah,
that's that's That's another good one. I certainly can. Like
one of the ones I wanted to think was the
Star Wars theme. I can just play the whole Star
(41:34):
Wars theme in my mind from beginning to end. Yeah,
And certainly we've all experienced earworms, so that's kind of
a variant of that now. Um. Also in this UH
the Zaman paper, they said of the individuals, a number
of them reported modest effects on their relationships, which I
guess one can imagine if you and your um, your
significant other are ultimately engaging with mental imagery and drastically
(41:58):
different ways. And also, fourteen of the twenty one participants
reported difficulties with autobiographical memory. So here's a quick quote
from the paper. The same number identified UH compensatory strengths
in verbal, mathematical, and logical domains. They their successful performance
in a task that would normally elicit imagery count how
many windows there are in your house or apartment, etcetera
(42:21):
was achieved by drawing on what participants described as knowledge, memory,
and subvisual models. Yeah, this is interesting. So this again
gets back into the idea that you end up just
utilizing different modes of memory the workforce of the brain. Yeah, right,
because I can't imagine. So if somebody said how many
windows are there in your house? I would do that
with a picture. I would picture my house and sort
of picture walking around the sides of my house and
(42:43):
seeing how many windows are there. But they can do
this without the picture. It's not like they're unable to
do it. So there's something else kicking in. Must be
conceptual facts logged about the house. Okay, so we need
to take one more quick break and then we'll be
right back with more a fan tasia. Now that BBC
(43:08):
paper that we mentioned earlier by James Gallagher. In that paper,
Gallagher spoke with one Neil kin Mure of Lancaster. Uh,
this is a self reporting individual with blindness of the
mind's eye, and he provided some interesting insight on the condition.
So I have just a couple of quotes here from
that that piece that I found were interesting, he said. Quote,
my stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep,
(43:30):
and he explained what he meant. I tried to do it,
and I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences. There
was nothing to count. No, that's a that's that's an
interesting because I guess that might be one of the
earliest examples of of here mentally mentally imagined this. Like
with my own uh son, I had a similar situation.
(43:51):
Like I distinctly remember the first time I told him
to close his eyes and encouraged him to imagine an
elephant because he was really obsessed with the elephants at
the time. And Um, I saw the delight on his
face as he imagined the elephant. Um. But you know,
after doing this research, I realized, well, there's equally a
possibility that he wouldn't be able to see the elephant.
(44:12):
And you know, there wouldn't be anything go wrong with
him if he couldn't see it. In the BBC piece,
um the the the interviewed individual, Neil kim Miller also
said that he had a terrible memory, but he was
good with facts and and then there's an additional quote
This is the hardest thing to describe what happens in
my head when I think about things. When I think
about my fiancee, there is no image, but I am
(44:35):
definitely thinking about her. I know today she has her
hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not
describing an image I am looking at I'm remembering features
about her. That's the strangest thing, And maybe that is
a source of some regret. Yeah, I mean, this is
the thing because typically these people report that they it's
not like they can't they don't know what somebody looks like. Right,
It's not like that scene in like Hannibal where they
(44:58):
show face blindness as just seeing p but with like
smooth skin over their face. Yeah. What's that condition called
a congenital prosopagnosia? Is that a where you you have
a born condition where you just can't recognize faces people
You see people who are familiar to you, but you
just they just don't look like anybody, uh you know,
whoever that is. And and it's not like that you
(45:19):
or at least not for everybody. Like we said, there
seems to be a wide variation in how this applies
to people's lives, but I haven't read that it's like that.
For most people, it seems like they report, yeah, they
recognize people. Once they see a picture of of a
close family member or of the president or whoever it is,
they know who it is. They just can't make the
picture without looking at it. It's almost kind of like
(45:41):
we talked about in the P versus NP episode, like
the kinds of problems that once a solution is presented,
you can easily check to see if it's correct, but
you can't come up with a solution and a reasonable
amount of time by yourself. It sounds like a version
of that. You can't make the picture, but when somebody
shows you the picture, you can say, oh, yeah, that's it. Yeah, definitely.
(46:01):
But anyway, I I just find this condition really fascinating.
And so if you yourself are somebody who thinks you
may be experiencing a fantasia, or if you just want
to learn more about it, one interesting resource I think
would be to go and look at some of the
message boards online that have recently been created by people
(46:23):
who claimed to have this experience. Because there's one I
found that was a fant dot asia. Nice. Yeah, but
it's a it's just like a forum online, people talking
about their experiences. Uh, and it seems to be a
lot of people having this kind of, uh, this awakening
kind of experience. They're like, oh, man, I didn't even
(46:44):
realize that this was what was causing all this confusion
between me and other people all these years, or I
didn't realize I was the I wasn't the only one
who was like this, or you know, people really seem
to be having a lot of fun coming together with
a community of other people who have the same issue. Well,
like it reminds one of the whole you know, the
old example of hey, what if when I think of
(47:07):
purple and you think of purple? What if we what
if we're each seeing different colors? But there's never a
way to prove that out. But but this is kind
of like a case where what it's kind of like
if you were one day able to say, oh, yeah,
the purple I see is different from the purple these
people see. I'm gonna I'm gonna go hang out now
with individuals who see purple the way I see people.
(47:28):
I've never understood what the deal with Barney was, but
now I get it. Uh No, but so I have
all these questions about a fantasia, like what it means.
And again, just to emphasize, it does seem like we
haven't nailed down that there's a specific cause and a
very specific effect yet, because there seemed to be a
range of different ways this manifests in people's minds. It's
(47:51):
associated with different things. Some people dream, some people don't,
some people have memory problems, some people don't um. But
one of the things I was wondering about was can
a fantasiacs hallucinate? Yeah? So what if an a fantasiac
takes a drug that often causes visual hallucinations? Do they
see anything different? Yeah? Are they just going to get
(48:12):
the non visual hallucinatory effects, uh? Or is it going
to sort of ignite a type of visual imagery that
isn't normally there sort of heighten the flashes that some
of the you know, the the the occasional flashes that
some of these individuals experience. Yeah. And so I looked
this up actually on the on the forum boards, and
they had actually addressed it. So one member of a
(48:34):
message board said they typed a question that struck me
as intriguing. This person said they were confused Essentially, they said,
how is hallucinating different from seeing things in your mind? Again,
that question is hard to answer, but to somebody who has, uh,
you know, a mind's eye, it's very clearly different. I
(48:54):
don't feel like I'm hallucinating when I imagine something, But
try to describe the difference. Well, you're seeing being something
in your mind that's not there. Okay, that sounds like hallucination,
I think, but then it's also been It's also just
like seeing it. So, yeah, we come back again to
the cave. We're all still lined up staring at the
(49:17):
play of shadows on the wall. Yeah, some of us
maybe just have a slightly different view of the shadows
and others. Okay, Robert, I've got a question for you. Okay,
hit me. Do you think you could try to simulate
this in your in your own mind? Like? Could you try?
I know you it would be impossible for us to
(49:38):
really fully be able to do it, But can you
try to go through a standard day to day process,
something you would do all the time without using any
mental pictures. I was trying this morning, and I couldn't
do it. Just trying, yeah, trying not to think of
mental images immediately calls to mind mental images. It's like,
(49:58):
you know, telling somebody like, don't think of a rhinoceros
wearing a jet pack. Yeah, you just did it. Uh.
And even it works in the in the general sinse
just saying, try not to think of mental images, and
immediately my mind is filled with rhinoceroses and jet packs. Yeah.
I mean, if anything, I have to try and keep
from daydreaming and keep from or keep from you know,
(50:19):
pummeling myself with with different mental images. Uh, and and
actually focus in on a task, you know. Yeah. I
mean the way this really seems like it would come
through is like, how does if you can't have mental images,
how do you have fantasies about things you would like
to do? So you imagine, you know, your boss makes
you furious and you wish you could punch him in
the nose. You wouldn't actually do it, but you at
(50:41):
least have that image for a moment, right. Uh. I
think that's probably a nearly universal experience for people. Thought
of it. But what happens if you can't have that
image in your mind? Do you do? You think about it? Conceptually?
It's like I I just thinking about the concept of
punching my boss in the well. And then also even if,
(51:01):
like I was just thinking to myself, like, what are
some of the times when I'm actually able to to not,
you know, mentally imagine anything and have these mental visualizations
in my mind? I think, well, okay, maybe when I'm
doing yoga, because I'm able to sort of shut out
a lot of stuff, I'm able to shut off the
default mode network to a large extent. But even then,
(51:22):
if I'm focusing on a pose, I am also focusing
on a mental image of what I must look like
in that pose, which may or may not have a
match up to how I'm actually doing the pose. So
what is it like then to engage in a in
a physical activity like that with a fantasia? I mean,
(51:45):
I mean, obviously you can do it, but it just
kind of drives home just how much mental visualizations, um,
how big a role they play and just everything we do. Okay,
another question, ok, fiction writing. This is something again from
the from the Blake cross piece. So he's he is,
he's done some screenwriting, and he describes his process for
(52:07):
fiction writing without having mental images, which he described in
terms of words and parts of speech. I thought this
was interesting. So he said, like, when I'm imagining something,
I imagine a noun, the word, and then I imagine
a verb that follows it, the word um. And so
there's something very different about his process for writing than
(52:28):
I would have. So when I'm imagining a scene, there's
there's translation going on. I think of a picture, and
then I have to put the picture into words. But
could it be possible that this allows people to do
creative writing without any translation the original creative thing that's
happening these words. That's interesting. Yeah, Like they're not having
(52:50):
They're not in that situation that I mentioned earlier, where
as an artist or a creator of any kind, you
are stuck trying to translate the mental image into something
another person can share in. Like you said, there's no
translation going there. Well, it makes me wonder if the
maybe the ultimate form of direct written communication with almost
(53:12):
nothing lost in between, would be an a fantasiac writing
to another a fantasiac somebody, because there you're not translating
it into pictures on both sides or on either side.
I will say that something that does remind me of
is like in my own writing process. There there's definitely
the point where I have an image in my mind
(53:33):
or seen in my mind, characters in my mind, and
I'm trying to bring that to life on the page.
But then if I'll get into these situations where I'm writing,
and in a way what I'm writing is coming before
the mental image, so I kind of create the point.
Not to say it's it's a fantasia at all, but
I'm kind of writing before the mental visualization. I'm kind
(53:56):
of reading what I've writen I've written and and experiencing
it more or less in real time as a reader would.
Oh yeah, well, I bet you've had the experience I
know I have of writing something before you get the picture,
and then getting the picture, and then going back and
revising what you've written based on the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
for sure. So this is Yeah, the writing is definitely
(54:17):
a fascinating area to think about this because it is
this sort of it's the mental image, but then this
stripping down of the mental image, the translating it into
into another form. Uh yeah, yeah, Well, it's fascinating to
be coming into this topic and it's such an interesting
time for it, you know, when when it seems we're
on the cusp of a lot of new learning about
(54:38):
what this condition is, how many people have it, what
it's like for them, And Hey, if you out there
actually experience this, if you have some level of a
fantasia or you're toward that end of the mental image
re spectrum, I think it would be great to hear
about your experience. If you want to write in and
tell us what it's like. Yeah, and if you're on
the other end of the spectrum, if your hyper visualizer, uh,
(55:01):
let us know about that as well. Uh. In the meantime,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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(55:24):
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