October 7, 2024 • 39 mins
When you imagine something -- like the sun peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm -- do you see it with rich visual detail, or instead with very little internal picture? In an earlier episode we tackled the spectrum of visual imagination, from hyperphantasia to aphantasia -- and in this episode we dive even deeper with guest Joel Pearson to surface the most surprising differences between people's internal lives. How does your experience differ from other people's, and how does your brain cobble together the skills you have to accomplish what you need?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
If I ask you to imagine something like the sun
peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm, do
you see it with rich visual detail like a movie.
Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you
not really have any internal picture at all, but instead
just a concept. In an earlier episode, we tackled the
(00:27):
spectrum of internal visual imagination from hyperfantasia at one end
to a fantasia at the other end. How does your
experience differ from other people's and what does this have
to do with the mind's eye or the mind's ear,
or how your brain cobbles together the skills that you
(00:47):
have to nail the tasks before you. Welcome to Inner
Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
author at Stanford and in the episodes we dive deeply
into our three pound universe to uncover some of the
most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode returns to
(01:21):
an issue that I hit a little while ago about
how we visualize on the inside. Specifically, we talked about
a fantasia and hyperfantasia. In a fantasia, you just don't
picture anything in your head when you're asked to visually
imagine something, and in Hyperfantasia, it's like a movie going
(01:42):
on on the inside, and every one of us is
somewhere on this spectrum between these two end points. And
if you heard that episode, you know that I talked
with Ed Katmoll, who's the founder of Pixar Films, and
Ed was surprised to discover a while ago that he
is a fantasic. And when he quizzed some of the
(02:05):
best artists and animators at Pixar, he was even more
surprised to discover that many of them were a fantasic.
So the key lesson that emerged from that episode is
that we each have our own experience of reality, but
most of the time we assume that our experiences are
(02:27):
human universals. It never even strikes us that other people
might be having a different reality.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
And this is.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Something we've seen in the scientific community, even very recently.
Some researcher will introspect and think about how they're experiencing
the world, and then they will argue that that is
how brains work. They're operating under the assumption that all
brains are having the same experience on the inside. It's
(02:55):
very reasonable assumption it just turns out to be incorrect.
Episode on how We Imagine on the Inside that turned
out to be a very popular episode.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I got a lot of emails about this.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
And I think this is because it's a real eye
opener to almost everybody when they realize that it's difficult
to know whether your version of reality is true for everybody.
You only know that it's true for you, and when
things get subjected to rigorous study, it often turns out
that there's a different experience going on from person to person.
(03:31):
And one thing that was very interesting to me and
came out of these emails was this question about how
people lean into their own strengths and compensate for their weaknesses,
with the end result being that you often just don't
know from looking at somebody's behavior or performance what that
person can or can't do on the inside. And I
(03:54):
was reminded about this issue of how the brain might
cobble together lots of ways of acomplishing a task. When
Ed Catmull told me about his interaction with Glenn Keen,
who's one of the best animators that Pixar has ever known.
I didn't play that clip in the earlier episode but
I wanted to concentrate on that now.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
When I had my dinner with Glenn Keene after we
had the results, because as I mentioned, when I first
met with Glenn, he said, yeah, he can't visualize, and
he knows that and it's just part of his skill.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
So Ed had run an internal study at Pixar and
found that many of the great artists and animators couldn't visualize.
That was a much more normal thing than would have
been expected. And Ed presented those results to Glenn.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Then he said that he felt relieved because he was
always a little worried that something was.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Wrong with him.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And I was surprised at that one because he was
so good. But it was also true with some of
the people with a fantasia was they they felt relieved
because they felt there might be something wrong with them.
I thought, well, okay, that's curious. It's understandable. And the
terminology that's frequently used is one of a deficiency.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
It's like the mind blind eye.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Which is a phrase that's frequently used when people write about.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
It, A blind mind's eye, right.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah, blind mind's eye. So uh. And I never really
liked the term because.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
I didn't feel like I had a blind mind's eye.
I didn't feel deficient in that way. It was just
like I had a different set of skills. So the
negative terminology wasn't helpful to them. And it was like
a curious thing where people felt like they were deficient
when actually the quality of their work wasn't was extraordinarily good.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Let me make sure I understand the story, though, was
that Glenn felt that way before he understood what a
fantasia was. I mean, the reason I ask is because
most people assume that everyone else's reality is the same
as theirs on the inside. Did he have a sense
in some way that he was different even before he
(06:26):
understood about a fantasia?
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Well, he did know that he couldn't visualize before all
this took place, So I think in some people's cases,
I would say this is true with others too. And
some of the others who were storyboard artists at Disney
said they knew that the others could work faster than
(06:49):
they could, and they felt deficient in their ability to
operate at that speed, but they didn't say anything. In
Glenn's case, he said that he he knew that he
couldn't visualize because he'd had this discussion with his mentor
about it, but it wasn't until after the result came
out that he said that he felt realated. Initially, he
(07:12):
didn't say that he thought there was any problems. So
there's a little bit of something inside of people saying, oh,
maybe there's something wrong with me because I can't do it.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Again.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
That was Ed catmull, the founder of Pixar Films. He
is a fantasic and you can hear my full interview
with him on episode fifty nine. Anyway, so many people
contacted me about this that I decided it was time
to do a second episode on this topic with a
deeper dive into the science. So I called a friend
and colleague of mine, Joel Pearson, a professor of cognitive
(07:50):
neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Now you may remember I had Joel on the show
a little while ago to talk about the science and
psychology of intuition, as in what it is, when to
trust it, when not to trust it. But I had
him back now to speak more about a fantasia and
(08:10):
hyper fantasia and all of the studies that his lab
has done on this So here's my interview with Joel Pearson. Okay,
so Joel tell us what is a fantasia.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Well, it's the name to describe a complete lack of
visual imagery. Now we can dig a little bit deeper
and talk about imagery in the other senses, but primarily
it refers to people that either acquired or lost their
visual imagery or were born without any visual imagery.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
And what percentage of population are we looking at? That
has a fantastic Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Kind of a controversial question. So it seems to be
between say two percent and four percent, give or take.
I think it's probably more like five to seven percent.
Because a lot of people I talk to who have
it or discover that imagery exists, they never realized imagery
actually exists. They always thought it was a metaphor and
the mind's eye was simply a metaphor. So they're shocked.
And so I think the way people measure it with
(09:07):
questionnaires is actually under undermeasuring the total number. Yeah, so
I think it's a little bit higher. Sounds right.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
So you know, back in two thousand and seven, I
did this paper where we did brain imagery and show
that we could correlate what someone's subjective report is on
the vividness of visual imergy questionnaire to their brain imaging.
But you've done something even cooler and simpler than brain imaging,
which is pupil ametory. So tell us explain to us
what that's.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, there's a paper. So we've been on this quest
to try and have objective measurements of visual imagery. And
the pupil measure was simply we get par dispants into
the lab and they have to imagine bright objects or
dark objects. Right, So if you look at a bright
object or a dark object, we actually use at triangle.
So if you look at the bright triangle, your pupil
can strict right bright light. When you look at the
dark thing, it relaxes and opens up. And it turns
(09:53):
out if you have someone imagine the same shapes a
light or a dark triangle, the pupil would do a
similar thing. Right. So simply by imagining a bright light
it contracts, which is pretty cool in itself, right, And
it turns out you do that in the normal population, let's say,
to people's typical imagery. You get this effect, then you
can be got people with a fantasia into the lab
(10:14):
and we didn't see the effects, so their eyes, their
pupils don't constrict, right, And then the question is, well
are they are they faking it? They just don't want
to do it because they think they have a fantasia. Right,
it's some sort of a psychological thing. We have this
other condition where we have rather than just one triangle,
we have two or three or four triangles. And you
see this set size effect which seems to be linked
(10:35):
with the sort of cognitive and mental effort. So unpack
the set size effects. Yeah, so when there's more triangles,
you see a more of a general dilation independent of
the bright or dark condition, right, And that just seems
to be like people are trying harder with more triangles.
And the cool thing is you see this set size
effect in both groups, in people with imagery and people
(10:57):
without imagery, people with a fantasia. So suggest they are
trying as hard as they can, or they're trying pretty
hard because it's set size effects there, but there's no
difference in the luminance or the brightness of the shapes.
So they're trying, but something's just not happening in their brain.
It's not happening in visual cortex. Whatever is driving that
pupil response is not there, so and is.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
It a clear enough effect that you can just ask
somebody when they tell you that there are fantastic you
can see, hey picture?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Can you do it that way? In ser I don't
know if you can do it right now? Like what's
your pupil You probably did lots of trials under the
right conditions. I think it'd be cool to try and
you know, have a phone test of that where you
could just test that in anyone any time. But yeah,
the data was pretty clear and it correlated with other
measures of visual imagery we have in the lab. So
it's nice to see the different techniques that have come together.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
You and I know lots and lots of people with
a fantasia who are terrifically successful in their careers. For example,
we both are friends with Ed Catmoll, who I interviewed
in a previous episode. And there's you know, this very
famous software engineer who's a fantasic and nonetheless did all
the UI for the for Mozilla. One of the engineers
at my company, Neo Censury, is a fantasic can yet
(12:28):
he's a terrifically creative engineer. So you've studied the issue
about what are the strategies that people of the East
Fantasia are using?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Tell us about that. Yes, so it depends what we're
talking about. We're talking about so working memory, so holding
information in short term memory and visual information. People with
imagery or people with no imagery have different strategies. So
I have imagery, and if I have to remember, you know,
like how many coups you have in front of me,
I'm going to basically imagine those cups while I'm trying
(12:55):
to hold it in memory. And that's my mnemonic strategy
to use a technical word. People without imagery won't do that.
They have to use and it's not just one other strategy.
It seems to be a bunch of different strategies. So
they'll use words, geometry, locations in space. So there's a
range of different compensatory mechanisms or strategies if you like.
And they've been practicing most of the people have been
(13:16):
practicing those strategies their whole life, right, so they're very
good at it. So if you just look at the
performance data, it can look exactly the same in some
of these memory tests, these short term working memory tests,
and then we see this sort of strategy difference across
the board in other things we've measured as well.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, and it's funny because you and I both in
several other researchers around the planet figured when we first
learned about a fantasia, figured, oh, we can just do
some simple tests on this, and we were surprised that
on many tests you can't really find a performance difference.
And it's precisely because of this, right, because people figure
out other strategies to get buy in the world. And
I mentioned to you the other day my hypothesis about
(13:56):
why really good artists and animators like a Pixar, maybe
why why a fantasics are more likely to become good artists.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
This is just the dumb hypothesis.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
But I figure, if you're a kid in you're hyperfantagic,
and someone says, draw the horse, you know, you sort
of know what a horse looks like, and you draw
with there. But if you're a fantasic, you really have
to stare at the model and you have to figure
out what the heck's out there, and you have a
dialogue with the page and you get more practice. That
way is the hypothesis, and That's why, even though it
seems like a surprise at first that Pixar found that
(14:28):
it had so many a fantagic animators there, maybe it's
not such a surprise because they were learning different strategies
in life and ended up becoming better artists that way.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, I think the exactly And what is it, Glenn
Keane that's his name. Yeah, the animator at picks out
when you see you've seen the footage of him. Yeah,
but he embodies the motions the movements of his character,
and he's like jumping around. If you're watching the video,
I'm still moving around on the chair, right, And so
he has to almost feel in his body, I think
before he draws it. So I've sat down with people
with with a fantasia and said, you know, draw an apple.
(14:59):
When they to draw a beautiful, perfect, almost perfect apple, right,
I say, well, how do you know what you're going
to draw before the pen touched the paper? And he
was like, I don't really. As I'm drawing it, I
know I know what an apple looks like. I know
it looks like an apple. So I just keep drawing, right,
which is different to how I draw an apple. But again,
the strategy probably the brain mechanisms are different there, but
(15:21):
you still get a very similar outcome.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Also, you found that people can be perfectly good at
facial recognition and yet they are a fantastic one. They're
trying to picture a face internally.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, this is a So, this is thing called procep
pagnosia where people have just trouble recognizing just faces, right,
nothing else that no perceptions normal comes to a face.
Show them a picture of Brad Pitt. They're like, I
don't know. They could use the hair or the clothes, right,
and that's perceptual. Now, we've found a few cases of
people that have what looks like pro so pagnosia, but
(15:54):
only in their imagery, which is pretty wild. Right, So
they have I don't know, proce pagnosia, A fantasia. I've
got a good name for this, and I've just started
studying this. But yeah, they don't seem to be able
to imagine human faces. And when you ask can, they
say they've got a dog or something, and you say,
can you imagine the dog's face? They say, yeah, sure,
no problem, it's just the human face, which is super specific.
(16:14):
Right now, should also at this point say that a
fantasia is not just purely visual. When the studies we've
done it goes there can be full multisensory a fantasia,
so no mind's ear, no minds smell or taste, none
of the senses. In the studies we've done, people this
seem to have Most people have pure visual a fantasia
or multisensory. The other sort of subtypes of the pure
(16:36):
auditory a fantasia are very very rare.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And so let's describe what auditory fantasia would be. So
you say, okay, picture of betas like symphony. The person says,
I just have no idea or you know a picture.
I had the Happy Birthday song in your head. Do
you hear it? Somebody who is hyper fantasia in that
way it says, oh, yeah, it's like a symphony. I'm
hearing the thing, but other people don't hear it.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, So it's like, can't get the e worms the
name for these songs that gets these annoying songs they
get stuck in our head right so that they have
no mind's ear. If you're like, they can't now, I
should say that. In the studies we've done a lot
of the publicity around a fantasia is around pure visual
a fantasia, so there's always a bias there. When we're
collecting data in our database international database, a lot of
(17:23):
those have reached out to us because they've heard about again,
pure visual imagery, so there could be a bias there
in selecting the participants as well.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So my impression, but you've got data on this which
I want to ask you. My impression has been that
it's actually a dice toss on anything. Like somebody might
have visual a fantasia, but they've got perfectly good ability
to imagine the auditory, but not so good at imagining
let's say, how their muscles would feel if they were
going up twenty flights of stairs, But they're perfectly good
at at smell fantasia.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
And it's just each one.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
It is felt to me is sort of a random
toss of those. But have you found clustering that.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, I mean the multisensory across the board is the
largest group really that and pure visual but that's probably
a bias.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
And by that you mean someone who has a fantasia
across all the sensors.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yeah, which is pretty if you think about it, just
per second and something that always struck me. What is
the equivalent in perception. There's no like natural occurring multisensory blindness, right,
So spatial neglect or something might be the closest thing
to that, but that's not blindness. So that's an interesting
way that that a fantasial imagery differs from perception. Right
You just the chances of being blind and having no
(18:31):
taste and being deaf and through all the senses is
I don't know the probabilities are, but it's I've never
come across someone like that, right, right, right, I don't
know if it exists even.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
It would certainly be very unlucky to have that, that's right.
But of course it makes sense because you've got all
these windows on the world that pick up on different
energy sources, whether photons are compression waves or mixtures and molecules.
And then but imagery is you know, this this multicolor
theater that you're putting together on the inside in the Dora,
in this hurricane of electrical spikes, we're putting together a
(19:03):
model of the world. So if there's some problem in that,
in you know, maybe it's a form of consciousness. Essentially,
that says, okay, here's how he puts this together to
make this theatrical play. Yeah, that's a really interesting clue
into what's going on there.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, nicely put. You should write a book.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
David, So okay, But do you also find people like
I did, where it's you know, it's one and not
the other, and they're probably good at hearing but not
at the visualized.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, the hearing is less common, but there is, Yeah,
there is auditory a fantasia, and then there's a sort
of a sub this question as this, where that people
will be able to get to have a song in
their mind, but they won't be able to have they
won't have the voice in their mind right, so they're
inner monologue. It's in a dialogue thing. Like there's a
lot of people when they read a book, they'll hear
a voice, some version of their own voice sort of
(19:52):
saying the words in their mind. And some people won't
have that, but they'll still be able to you know,
sing a song or listen to music in their minds. E.
So that's another, you know, even more specific category. You
know what this all reminds me of?
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So Okay, In my book Incognito, I wrote about this
team of rivals framework, which is you've got all these
neural networks that are all doing different things, and you've
evolved lots of these over the you know, yawns, and
so you know, all these different ways of doing things.
So one of the classes I teach her at Stanford
is literature in the Brain.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
And one of the questions with literature is if you
just read some passage.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
From Hemingway, are you inside the character or are you
watching as though watching a movie seeing the characters there?
And so I really queried the students on this very carefully,
and what it seems is that we're doing both. We
do both, and we kind of switch back and forth.
If you force someone to answer, they'll do one or
the other.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Interesting way, independent of how the first person second, how
the book's written exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
It's just some Hemingway asks scene where it's like some
guy's talking and doing something. The question is are you
the guy or are you watching the guy? Yeah, And
it certainly seems like bounce back and forth pretty seamlessly there.
So this all comes back to this point you were
making about all the different strategies that people have to
solve whatever kind of problem, and maybe visualizing something is
(21:11):
just one of you know, eight different ways that you
can get through any problem.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, and you mentioned books there. I think it's interesting.
So there are some studies going on at the moment
looking at how much people with a fantasia enjoy reading fiction,
for example, because a lot of on the online discussions,
there's a huge amount of people saying I find fiction boring,
I don't get into it. And we've run a study
where we had people come into the lab and read
these scary stories. Right, they're swimming and the something bumps
(21:37):
their foot and they see a dark shadow and then
a fin comes past them, and it kind of builds
and builds until the shark attacks. And when you have
someone with imagery read that in a dark room with
one of those skin conductance things on their finger, right,
measuring these slight changes in sweat, you see this nice
increase in their sort of their sweat and their heart
rate goes up and things like that. People with a
(21:57):
fantas not so much. Pretty much flat lines, right, So
just so all the doing is reading the words on
a screen, so that sort of from that those data
you could sort of put the story together that, yeah,
then they're not gonna be as emotionally engaged when they're
reading fiction. Oh, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
And I assume it's the same if they're listening to
an audiobook.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
I think, so we haven't done that with the audio yet,
but interesting, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Seems like it would be if the problem is actually
visualizing what's going on.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yeah, I mean you could take a go go one
step further, right and say that if you have strong
imagery and you're listening to an audiobook or a podcast
while you're driving, and you have these vivid imagery, right,
it's gonna be way more dangerous, right, You're gonna your
time to break. You're gonna have it like it's like
having a high blood alcohol level. So I mean, let's
be clear, we haven't tested that. It's just the HYPOTHESI
but yeah, oh fascinating.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I mean yeah, the thing that is it is always
fascinating the most and lots of my episodes involved this
is just the diversity from head to head, how how
different people's realities are.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yeah, and you.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Know, maybe there's this question driving tests in one hundred
years from triving cars, but if there were, you know,
when they say, okay, look we need a test you
for this and if so, then we're going to make
sure your car can't go close enough to the It's.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
On out to do a list of experiments. But I
think it could be a thing or just talking on
the phone. Right, you're just visualizing what the other person's saying.
It's going to make a difference.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Now, how does this pan out a court of law?
If somebody is hyper fantasic and it has very vivid imagery,
does that mean it is any more accurate?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
So there's some data suggests that that when your imagery
is more vivid, your memories are more likely to be corrupted. Right, Wow,
So you saw something yesterday and I say, then today,
Then I say, oh, was there a red car there?
And you try and remember back and you imagine a
red card. It's very vivid. You have the original memory,
red car, they're happening together. And then the next day
(23:47):
I say, was a red car and your memory comes
back and bang the red cars glued onto that into
that scene. Let's say, and now you remember with a
red car. Right, If your imagery is less vivid, weaker,
then that probably shouldn't happen. As there's some evidence to
suggest that. And we're running some studies now looking at
this idea of false memory, false memories, and if they're
gonna pop up more with strong imagery.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, and so one of the other class I teach
you is the brain and the law, and I always
teach about I would's testimony and the difficulties there like this,
But I had never considered this question of whether eyewitnesses
should be tested for their position along the fantasia spectrum,
so you have some sense of whether they're less likely
(24:30):
to be accurate.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
And it's I think of imagery as just a format
of our thoughts, right, like this is is distribution. Most
people were somewhere in the middle here, this normal distribution,
and each tale you think strong hype, fantasia or idaic
imagery as it was called sort of a couple of
decades ago. And then people with a fantasia, people say,
is it a disorder? Is it a condition? What do
we call it? I don't think. I don't think it's
(24:53):
not a disorder. That's that's it's not You shouldn't diagnose it.
There's no think about a cure, none of that. Right,
It's part of the normal you diversity, cognitive diversity that
we all know live in but like you said, it
will change a range of things, and that's what we're
testing now. It does change if your thoughts have a
different format. It is going to change you know, a
bunch of things in life. So it does change things.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
One of the things I study is you know, synesthesia,
and it's the same issue where it's not a disorder
some these stage just it's just.
Speaker 5 (25:22):
A different way to perceive reality.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So tell us about alexithymia. You had mentioned to me
the other day that there's a relationship here. Yeah, so
we ran this large so define it.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Sorry, Yes, So alexithymia is this condition where people sort
of have a lack of emotional response or they feel
less emotion.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
And they're not very good at diagnosing themselves others.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, it's you could say it's I once say it's
towards a spectrum of autism, but it's kind of in
that realm, right, and it's the some links to psychopathy.
So we were testing this as part of a larger
project looking at empathy, right, And so we measured empathy
with questionnaires with pictures with these paradigms where you you know,
here's a horrible disease, would you donate to this cause
(26:22):
and not for profit. We had to show people videos
across the board and all those things. People with imagery
scored higher and with empathy than those with a fantasia
and why that's the question. So we thought we original
hypothesis was that with the questionnaires you see it, but
once you had a video or a picture, there should
be no difference because imagery shouldn't make a difference, right,
(26:43):
But it seemed to even with the videos, So we
think it's it's it's initially like, if you're being described
with a scenario and you can conjure up and imagine
that you have this virtuality thing coming up, you're going
to feel more for that individual or whatever whoever it
might be. And over the years that happens more and
more and more, so overall your empathy builds and gets stronger.
(27:04):
So it's the role of imagery in the moment, but
it's also a developmental thing. So then we started testing
alex A thime Yere as part of that, and that
sort of is part of the experiment.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And you had interviewed a memory champion with a fantasia tell,
which is so surprising, right, But it's surprising because of
her technique that she used.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, this is a lady in Australia who's actually written
a book on memory, and she's I think she's one.
It was international or national memory competitions, right, And I
think that the most common method is this memory palace, right.
And this is idea that you imagine your house and
you put them different memories. Let's say it's a deck
of cards. You have this card here on the entrance,
and then you walk in the other cards here, and
(27:45):
you make them a bit more exciting than just a card.
So you and you walk through and you remember the
deck of cards in this random order. Now, she could
do this without imagery, and so I asked her how
does she do it? She said, well, I don't use
my house or anything visual. I used a spatial layer
of my neighborhood and the roads and where houses are
and trees. And she has perfect or near perfect spatial layout.
(28:09):
But the weird thing is when I think of space,
I think of objects in space, and she doesn't. She
has these points in space, but they're perfectly laid out.
And this ties in with experiments we've run on measures
of mental rotation or space questionnaires on spatial abilities and
people with a fantasia score as well or sometimes better
than people with imagery. So it seems to be the
(28:30):
spatial layout of things seems almost perfectly maintained despite the
object imagery not being there. Yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
And as you know, you know ed Catmill did all
these things with patterns of how you make let's say,
a hand out of little patches of space and where
the light bounces off and what color of the late
carriers and other stuff. A fantasic he picture it, but
he understood the physical, you know, the physical sense of it, like, oh,
(28:59):
there's the thing, and that's what's bouncing off of it.
So I happen to be mostly a fantasic. I'm much
closer to that end of the spectrum, and so I
totally get it about this lady saying, Okay, look, if
i'magining my neighborhood, I know the feeling that this is
over to this side of that, that's over here and
that's behind me. But I'm not picturing it particularly well.
(29:19):
I just but I have a clear sense of three
dimensional space, and.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Are they points in space or are they just space existing?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I feel like more it's just space existing which is
what I assume Ed has as well, because he probably
told you.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
But you know, he first started.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Realizing this when he was at a friend's house who's
a meditator. Said, Okay, I just picture a sphere in
the air, and I just couldn't do it. And I
can't do that either. It doesn't really make sense to me.
But I can, of course have a sense of a sphere,
like I could touch the sphere and whatever, but I don't.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
I don't have any particularly good picture of it. Yeah,
the image of it. I hear that so often this
someone does a meditation cost and I say picture this
pist yourself, and they're like, what do they mean? I
can't do it?
Speaker 4 (30:01):
Yeah, my entire life.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
This thing about count sheep to go to sleep.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
I didn't understand. But can you do that?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
I mean, are you able to picture sheep as such?
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (30:10):
I can?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Like, right, yeah I can. Yeah, he's he's jumping over
the fence or whatever. Yeah I can. Yeah. I mean
it's not but let's be clear. So it's not like
if I'm seeing a sheep right now. It's not that strong.
But I have a conscious experience of a sheep. The
color I have to kind of zoom in. If I
want to get the details of the face and the eyes,
I can't get the details across the whole sheep simultaneously.
(30:31):
There's a capacity kind of issue there. But I have
a conscious experience of a sheep, and I can make
it move around in my mind's eye. Amazing.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
What have you found about creativity?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, so creativity is one of these things that I
get emails all the time, right, people saying I couldn't
be an artist because I have a fantasia. This is
the reason why I couldn't be creative, right, And so
we've run experiments on this. We haven't published the data yet,
but in all the there's all this sort of what
we call divergent thinking tasks. Right, We've got to come
up with crazy ideas for a paper clip, as many
as you can say in three minutes. So we ran
(31:03):
a hole, got a whole of data. People with a fantasia,
people with imagery almost no difference, and in fact, on
you know, slightly better in people with a fantasia. We
ran convergent thinking tasks, the opposite where people have to
converge across the board. All these different things we ran.
There's no evidence that people with a fantasia should be
less creative.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Give us an example of conversion thinking.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, so that might be where you so typically, so
let's say you're you know, you're in a you're trying
to come up with a new product or something, and
a meeting at work and you come up with all
these crazy ideas, one hundred different ideas. Then you've got
to converge all those crazy ideas down and to say
just five different things. So you've got to set will
they work, Well, they won't work. So we came up
with a task of trying sort of get at the
essence of that. And I thought that would show a
(31:45):
difference because I'm like, well, if you're trying and design
a chair and you imagine a chair with three legs,
it's going to fall over, and I'm using my imagery
because I have imagery, right then then that's going to
make show a difference. And it didn't. So we haven't
been able to find any evidence that people with a
fantasia are less creative. Again with the ways in which
we measure it, and there is some data, you know,
large population data saying that generally speaking, people with a
(32:08):
fantasia are more commonly found in seat of stem science, technology,
mathematical kind of jobs, and people with imagery are slightly
more likely to be found in the creative industries. Again,
I don't know if that's causal, but there is that
trend there that people have documented as well.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I'll be interested to follow those numbers and see if
they hold true, because this was the surprise for Ed
when he realized that so many people have picked sorry fantasic.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah, but there have been. There have been. We had
an art exhibition in the UK and all the artists
had a fantasia and there's visual there were sculptures, there's
a conceptual, you name it, and amazing art. I thought,
I don't think then there's no reason we can see
or you know, or have measured yet that there should
be a deficit in creativity. And tell us about episodic memory.
Episodic because episodes are in your life, so childhood memories,
(32:57):
what I did last week, what I did last year,
and so the way one of the main ways of
measuring this is with a type of interview. So we
use a task like that where people have to sort
of bring a memory to mind that was like one
month ago, six months ago, one year ago, different sort
of control, try and control as best we can the time.
And we found that people with a fantasia come up
with less details from their memory than people with imagery,
(33:20):
and it was less vivid than a whole lot of
things were different about the experience, but simply the objects
in the memory they could name were less if you
have a fantasia. It's not like catastrophically dramatically different. Was
clearly significant, So doesn't The memories are still there, but
there is a clear difference that.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Doesn't surprise me at all. I have a very difficult
time pulling up memories because I'm not picturing much of anything.
As you know, I've done a lot of research on
how we judge the passage of time, and so much
of it has to do with how much footage you
can bring up. So if you have a really exciting
weekend and so it says, hey, how long has it
(33:58):
been since Friday? Said, oh my god, it's been ever
since I was at work on Friday. Because this, But
so it makes me wonder if people with hyper fantasia
feel as though they've lived longer because they've got all
this memory, they all this footage, they can draw on.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
I think, so, have you ever done the float tank?
Speaker 4 (34:15):
I haven't.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Ah, So that's one of the things where I completely
lose track of time. But I got my thoughts. I
get to these deep spirals of thoughts and this, and
I'm imagining this thing. It's I'm not hallucinating because people
say they hallucinate in the float tank. And then I think, well,
it's probably been five minutes, and then like fifty minutes
is up like that, and I completely use track of time.
But I think it's a really interesting thing. But yeah,
(34:36):
I want to do this experiment now and see if
hyper fantastics have, like I feel like their life has
been much longer because every time they recall things, it
gets these sort of high reds images get jammed in down.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
So when they look for the footage of what happened
since I saw you last time, well this, this, this, this, this,
it's been a month there. That was my interview with
Joel Pearson, and the bottom line is that there's a
great deal of internal variety of experience, much more than
any of us would naively expect. What we learn with
(35:11):
time and experience and scientific study is that when you
introspect about what experience is like. All you can ever
do is introspect on what your experience is like. As
a scientific community, we're really just at the foot of
the mountain on this topic. There's so much more exploration
(35:34):
that has to be done to understand the differences in
reality from head to head. Just as one example, a
new study came out about what's called and endophasia, which
is a lack of internal voice. So phasia refers to language,
endophasia means internal language, and an endophasia means a lack
(35:58):
of internal language and endophasia, So it turns out you
might have thought that everyone has the same degree of
talking to themselves on the inside, but they don't. The
loudness of your internal radio differs from head to head,
And when this sort of thing gets subjected to study,
you can see that people all the way at one
(36:21):
end of the spectrum with an indophasia no internal voice,
they are worse at memorizing words because presumably they're not
hearing the words over and over, and they're worse at
recognizing rhymes that are written on a page but not heard,
because presumably if your brain is imagining how the word sound,
(36:42):
you'll immediately pick up on rhymes, even if they're not obvious,
like enough and stuff or though and foe and go Anyway.
I haven't studied this population yet, but they may well
be better at some other things, like without the constraints
of verbal thought, they might approach certain types of problems
(37:06):
more creatively or unconventionally. Or maybe they're privileged in certain
artistic abilities where visual experiences are more prominent. I don't
know yet until we study this, but that's the kind
of thing that one could look for. We all tackle
the tasks of the world given the tools that we have.
And this is a more general story, not just about
(37:27):
our brains, but our bodies. We all have different genetic
programs that unpack different bodies. Some taller, some shorter, some narrower,
some wider. Some people are good sprinters and others are
good marathon runners, and.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
On and on.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
But for the most part, all bodies say cool, I'll
just figure out how to use the machinery of the
world chairs and cars and bicycles and surfboards and pogo
sticks and so on. Some people have advantages for certain things,
like Kareem old Jabbar given his height for playing basketball,
or Michael Phelps his wingspan for swimming. But for the
(38:07):
rest of us, we cobble together our many different skills
to manage our tasks in the world, and this is
the way that we all find our way through the
mental landscape. Whether you are someone who has internal visualization
like a movie or instead just has concepts, you can
(38:28):
both do art, you can develop different approaches to tackle
that mountain, and more likely you even cobble together many
different approaches. So when we talk about neurodiversity, it goes
deeper than you think. Quite possibly, we are each a
minority of one. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast
(38:55):
for more information and to find further reading. Send me
an email at podcast ask an Eagleman dot com with
questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner
Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to
leave comments Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this
is Inner Cosmos.
If I ask you to imagine something like the sun
peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm, do
you see it with rich visual detail like a movie.
Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you
not really have any internal picture at all, but instead
just a concept. In an earlier episode, we tackled the
(00:27):
spectrum of internal visual imagination from hyperfantasia at one end
to a fantasia at the other end. How does your
experience differ from other people's and what does this have
to do with the mind's eye or the mind's ear,
or how your brain cobbles together the skills that you
(00:47):
have to nail the tasks before you. Welcome to Inner
Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
author at Stanford and in the episodes we dive deeply
into our three pound universe to uncover some of the
most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode returns to
(01:21):
an issue that I hit a little while ago about
how we visualize on the inside. Specifically, we talked about
a fantasia and hyperfantasia. In a fantasia, you just don't
picture anything in your head when you're asked to visually
imagine something, and in Hyperfantasia, it's like a movie going
(01:42):
on on the inside, and every one of us is
somewhere on this spectrum between these two end points. And
if you heard that episode, you know that I talked
with Ed Katmoll, who's the founder of Pixar Films, and
Ed was surprised to discover a while ago that he
is a fantasic. And when he quizzed some of the
(02:05):
best artists and animators at Pixar, he was even more
surprised to discover that many of them were a fantasic.
So the key lesson that emerged from that episode is
that we each have our own experience of reality, but
most of the time we assume that our experiences are
(02:27):
human universals. It never even strikes us that other people
might be having a different reality.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
And this is.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Something we've seen in the scientific community, even very recently.
Some researcher will introspect and think about how they're experiencing
the world, and then they will argue that that is
how brains work. They're operating under the assumption that all
brains are having the same experience on the inside. It's
(02:55):
very reasonable assumption it just turns out to be incorrect.
Episode on how We Imagine on the Inside that turned
out to be a very popular episode.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I got a lot of emails about this.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
And I think this is because it's a real eye
opener to almost everybody when they realize that it's difficult
to know whether your version of reality is true for everybody.
You only know that it's true for you, and when
things get subjected to rigorous study, it often turns out
that there's a different experience going on from person to person.
(03:31):
And one thing that was very interesting to me and
came out of these emails was this question about how
people lean into their own strengths and compensate for their weaknesses,
with the end result being that you often just don't
know from looking at somebody's behavior or performance what that
person can or can't do on the inside. And I
(03:54):
was reminded about this issue of how the brain might
cobble together lots of ways of acomplishing a task. When
Ed Catmull told me about his interaction with Glenn Keen,
who's one of the best animators that Pixar has ever known.
I didn't play that clip in the earlier episode but
I wanted to concentrate on that now.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
When I had my dinner with Glenn Keene after we
had the results, because as I mentioned, when I first
met with Glenn, he said, yeah, he can't visualize, and
he knows that and it's just part of his skill.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
So Ed had run an internal study at Pixar and
found that many of the great artists and animators couldn't visualize.
That was a much more normal thing than would have
been expected. And Ed presented those results to Glenn.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Then he said that he felt relieved because he was
always a little worried that something was.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Wrong with him.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And I was surprised at that one because he was
so good. But it was also true with some of
the people with a fantasia was they they felt relieved
because they felt there might be something wrong with them.
I thought, well, okay, that's curious. It's understandable. And the
terminology that's frequently used is one of a deficiency.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
It's like the mind blind eye.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Which is a phrase that's frequently used when people write about.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
It, A blind mind's eye, right.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah, blind mind's eye. So uh. And I never really
liked the term because.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
I didn't feel like I had a blind mind's eye.
I didn't feel deficient in that way. It was just
like I had a different set of skills. So the
negative terminology wasn't helpful to them. And it was like
a curious thing where people felt like they were deficient
when actually the quality of their work wasn't was extraordinarily good.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Let me make sure I understand the story, though, was
that Glenn felt that way before he understood what a
fantasia was. I mean, the reason I ask is because
most people assume that everyone else's reality is the same
as theirs on the inside. Did he have a sense
in some way that he was different even before he
(06:26):
understood about a fantasia?
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Well, he did know that he couldn't visualize before all
this took place, So I think in some people's cases,
I would say this is true with others too. And
some of the others who were storyboard artists at Disney
said they knew that the others could work faster than
(06:49):
they could, and they felt deficient in their ability to
operate at that speed, but they didn't say anything. In
Glenn's case, he said that he he knew that he
couldn't visualize because he'd had this discussion with his mentor
about it, but it wasn't until after the result came
out that he said that he felt realated. Initially, he
(07:12):
didn't say that he thought there was any problems. So
there's a little bit of something inside of people saying, oh,
maybe there's something wrong with me because I can't do it.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Again.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
That was Ed catmull, the founder of Pixar Films. He
is a fantasic and you can hear my full interview
with him on episode fifty nine. Anyway, so many people
contacted me about this that I decided it was time
to do a second episode on this topic with a
deeper dive into the science. So I called a friend
and colleague of mine, Joel Pearson, a professor of cognitive
(07:50):
neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Now you may remember I had Joel on the show
a little while ago to talk about the science and
psychology of intuition, as in what it is, when to
trust it, when not to trust it. But I had
him back now to speak more about a fantasia and
(08:10):
hyper fantasia and all of the studies that his lab
has done on this So here's my interview with Joel Pearson. Okay,
so Joel tell us what is a fantasia.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Well, it's the name to describe a complete lack of
visual imagery. Now we can dig a little bit deeper
and talk about imagery in the other senses, but primarily
it refers to people that either acquired or lost their
visual imagery or were born without any visual imagery.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
And what percentage of population are we looking at? That
has a fantastic Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Kind of a controversial question. So it seems to be
between say two percent and four percent, give or take.
I think it's probably more like five to seven percent.
Because a lot of people I talk to who have
it or discover that imagery exists, they never realized imagery
actually exists. They always thought it was a metaphor and
the mind's eye was simply a metaphor. So they're shocked.
And so I think the way people measure it with
(09:07):
questionnaires is actually under undermeasuring the total number. Yeah, so
I think it's a little bit higher. Sounds right.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
So you know, back in two thousand and seven, I
did this paper where we did brain imagery and show
that we could correlate what someone's subjective report is on
the vividness of visual imergy questionnaire to their brain imaging.
But you've done something even cooler and simpler than brain imaging,
which is pupil ametory. So tell us explain to us
what that's.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, there's a paper. So we've been on this quest
to try and have objective measurements of visual imagery. And
the pupil measure was simply we get par dispants into
the lab and they have to imagine bright objects or
dark objects. Right, So if you look at a bright
object or a dark object, we actually use at triangle.
So if you look at the bright triangle, your pupil
can strict right bright light. When you look at the
dark thing, it relaxes and opens up. And it turns
(09:53):
out if you have someone imagine the same shapes a
light or a dark triangle, the pupil would do a
similar thing. Right. So simply by imagining a bright light
it contracts, which is pretty cool in itself, right, And
it turns out you do that in the normal population, let's say,
to people's typical imagery. You get this effect, then you
can be got people with a fantasia into the lab
(10:14):
and we didn't see the effects, so their eyes, their
pupils don't constrict, right, And then the question is, well
are they are they faking it? They just don't want
to do it because they think they have a fantasia. Right,
it's some sort of a psychological thing. We have this
other condition where we have rather than just one triangle,
we have two or three or four triangles. And you
see this set size effect which seems to be linked
(10:35):
with the sort of cognitive and mental effort. So unpack
the set size effects. Yeah, so when there's more triangles,
you see a more of a general dilation independent of
the bright or dark condition, right, And that just seems
to be like people are trying harder with more triangles.
And the cool thing is you see this set size
effect in both groups, in people with imagery and people
(10:57):
without imagery, people with a fantasia. So suggest they are
trying as hard as they can, or they're trying pretty
hard because it's set size effects there, but there's no
difference in the luminance or the brightness of the shapes.
So they're trying, but something's just not happening in their brain.
It's not happening in visual cortex. Whatever is driving that
pupil response is not there, so and is.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
It a clear enough effect that you can just ask
somebody when they tell you that there are fantastic you
can see, hey picture?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Can you do it that way? In ser I don't
know if you can do it right now? Like what's
your pupil You probably did lots of trials under the
right conditions. I think it'd be cool to try and
you know, have a phone test of that where you
could just test that in anyone any time. But yeah,
the data was pretty clear and it correlated with other
measures of visual imagery we have in the lab. So
it's nice to see the different techniques that have come together.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
You and I know lots and lots of people with
a fantasia who are terrifically successful in their careers. For example,
we both are friends with Ed Catmoll, who I interviewed
in a previous episode. And there's you know, this very
famous software engineer who's a fantasic and nonetheless did all
the UI for the for Mozilla. One of the engineers
at my company, Neo Censury, is a fantasic can yet
(12:28):
he's a terrifically creative engineer. So you've studied the issue
about what are the strategies that people of the East
Fantasia are using?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Tell us about that. Yes, so it depends what we're
talking about. We're talking about so working memory, so holding
information in short term memory and visual information. People with
imagery or people with no imagery have different strategies. So
I have imagery, and if I have to remember, you know,
like how many coups you have in front of me,
I'm going to basically imagine those cups while I'm trying
(12:55):
to hold it in memory. And that's my mnemonic strategy
to use a technical word. People without imagery won't do that.
They have to use and it's not just one other strategy.
It seems to be a bunch of different strategies. So
they'll use words, geometry, locations in space. So there's a
range of different compensatory mechanisms or strategies if you like.
And they've been practicing most of the people have been
(13:16):
practicing those strategies their whole life, right, so they're very
good at it. So if you just look at the
performance data, it can look exactly the same in some
of these memory tests, these short term working memory tests,
and then we see this sort of strategy difference across
the board in other things we've measured as well.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, and it's funny because you and I both in
several other researchers around the planet figured when we first
learned about a fantasia, figured, oh, we can just do
some simple tests on this, and we were surprised that
on many tests you can't really find a performance difference.
And it's precisely because of this, right, because people figure
out other strategies to get buy in the world. And
I mentioned to you the other day my hypothesis about
(13:56):
why really good artists and animators like a Pixar, maybe
why why a fantasics are more likely to become good artists.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
This is just the dumb hypothesis.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
But I figure, if you're a kid in you're hyperfantagic,
and someone says, draw the horse, you know, you sort
of know what a horse looks like, and you draw
with there. But if you're a fantasic, you really have
to stare at the model and you have to figure
out what the heck's out there, and you have a
dialogue with the page and you get more practice. That
way is the hypothesis, and That's why, even though it
seems like a surprise at first that Pixar found that
(14:28):
it had so many a fantagic animators there, maybe it's
not such a surprise because they were learning different strategies
in life and ended up becoming better artists that way.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, I think the exactly And what is it, Glenn
Keane that's his name. Yeah, the animator at picks out
when you see you've seen the footage of him. Yeah,
but he embodies the motions the movements of his character,
and he's like jumping around. If you're watching the video,
I'm still moving around on the chair, right, And so
he has to almost feel in his body, I think
before he draws it. So I've sat down with people
with with a fantasia and said, you know, draw an apple.
(14:59):
When they to draw a beautiful, perfect, almost perfect apple, right,
I say, well, how do you know what you're going
to draw before the pen touched the paper? And he
was like, I don't really. As I'm drawing it, I
know I know what an apple looks like. I know
it looks like an apple. So I just keep drawing, right,
which is different to how I draw an apple. But again,
the strategy probably the brain mechanisms are different there, but
(15:21):
you still get a very similar outcome.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Also, you found that people can be perfectly good at
facial recognition and yet they are a fantastic one. They're
trying to picture a face internally.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, this is a So, this is thing called procep
pagnosia where people have just trouble recognizing just faces, right,
nothing else that no perceptions normal comes to a face.
Show them a picture of Brad Pitt. They're like, I
don't know. They could use the hair or the clothes, right,
and that's perceptual. Now, we've found a few cases of
people that have what looks like pro so pagnosia, but
(15:54):
only in their imagery, which is pretty wild. Right, So
they have I don't know, proce pagnosia, A fantasia. I've
got a good name for this, and I've just started
studying this. But yeah, they don't seem to be able
to imagine human faces. And when you ask can, they
say they've got a dog or something, and you say,
can you imagine the dog's face? They say, yeah, sure,
no problem, it's just the human face, which is super specific.
(16:14):
Right now, should also at this point say that a
fantasia is not just purely visual. When the studies we've
done it goes there can be full multisensory a fantasia,
so no mind's ear, no minds smell or taste, none
of the senses. In the studies we've done, people this
seem to have Most people have pure visual a fantasia
or multisensory. The other sort of subtypes of the pure
(16:36):
auditory a fantasia are very very rare.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And so let's describe what auditory fantasia would be. So
you say, okay, picture of betas like symphony. The person says,
I just have no idea or you know a picture.
I had the Happy Birthday song in your head. Do
you hear it? Somebody who is hyper fantasia in that
way it says, oh, yeah, it's like a symphony. I'm
hearing the thing, but other people don't hear it.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, So it's like, can't get the e worms the
name for these songs that gets these annoying songs they
get stuck in our head right so that they have
no mind's ear. If you're like, they can't now, I
should say that. In the studies we've done a lot
of the publicity around a fantasia is around pure visual
a fantasia, so there's always a bias there. When we're
collecting data in our database international database, a lot of
(17:23):
those have reached out to us because they've heard about again,
pure visual imagery, so there could be a bias there
in selecting the participants as well.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So my impression, but you've got data on this which
I want to ask you. My impression has been that
it's actually a dice toss on anything. Like somebody might
have visual a fantasia, but they've got perfectly good ability
to imagine the auditory, but not so good at imagining
let's say, how their muscles would feel if they were
going up twenty flights of stairs, But they're perfectly good
at at smell fantasia.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
And it's just each one.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
It is felt to me is sort of a random
toss of those. But have you found clustering that.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, I mean the multisensory across the board is the
largest group really that and pure visual but that's probably
a bias.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
And by that you mean someone who has a fantasia
across all the sensors.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yeah, which is pretty if you think about it, just
per second and something that always struck me. What is
the equivalent in perception. There's no like natural occurring multisensory blindness, right,
So spatial neglect or something might be the closest thing
to that, but that's not blindness. So that's an interesting
way that that a fantasial imagery differs from perception. Right
You just the chances of being blind and having no
(18:31):
taste and being deaf and through all the senses is
I don't know the probabilities are, but it's I've never
come across someone like that, right, right, right, I don't
know if it exists even.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
It would certainly be very unlucky to have that, that's right.
But of course it makes sense because you've got all
these windows on the world that pick up on different
energy sources, whether photons are compression waves or mixtures and molecules.
And then but imagery is you know, this this multicolor
theater that you're putting together on the inside in the Dora,
in this hurricane of electrical spikes, we're putting together a
(19:03):
model of the world. So if there's some problem in that,
in you know, maybe it's a form of consciousness. Essentially,
that says, okay, here's how he puts this together to
make this theatrical play. Yeah, that's a really interesting clue
into what's going on there.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, nicely put. You should write a book.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
David, So okay, But do you also find people like
I did, where it's you know, it's one and not
the other, and they're probably good at hearing but not
at the visualized.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, the hearing is less common, but there is, Yeah,
there is auditory a fantasia, and then there's a sort
of a sub this question as this, where that people
will be able to get to have a song in
their mind, but they won't be able to have they
won't have the voice in their mind right, so they're
inner monologue. It's in a dialogue thing. Like there's a
lot of people when they read a book, they'll hear
a voice, some version of their own voice sort of
(19:52):
saying the words in their mind. And some people won't
have that, but they'll still be able to you know,
sing a song or listen to music in their minds. E.
So that's another, you know, even more specific category. You
know what this all reminds me of?
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So Okay, In my book Incognito, I wrote about this
team of rivals framework, which is you've got all these
neural networks that are all doing different things, and you've
evolved lots of these over the you know, yawns, and
so you know, all these different ways of doing things.
So one of the classes I teach her at Stanford
is literature in the Brain.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
And one of the questions with literature is if you
just read some passage.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
From Hemingway, are you inside the character or are you
watching as though watching a movie seeing the characters there?
And so I really queried the students on this very carefully,
and what it seems is that we're doing both. We
do both, and we kind of switch back and forth.
If you force someone to answer, they'll do one or
the other.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Interesting way, independent of how the first person second, how
the book's written exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
It's just some Hemingway asks scene where it's like some
guy's talking and doing something. The question is are you
the guy or are you watching the guy? Yeah, And
it certainly seems like bounce back and forth pretty seamlessly there.
So this all comes back to this point you were
making about all the different strategies that people have to
solve whatever kind of problem, and maybe visualizing something is
(21:11):
just one of you know, eight different ways that you
can get through any problem.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, and you mentioned books there. I think it's interesting.
So there are some studies going on at the moment
looking at how much people with a fantasia enjoy reading fiction,
for example, because a lot of on the online discussions,
there's a huge amount of people saying I find fiction boring,
I don't get into it. And we've run a study
where we had people come into the lab and read
these scary stories. Right, they're swimming and the something bumps
(21:37):
their foot and they see a dark shadow and then
a fin comes past them, and it kind of builds
and builds until the shark attacks. And when you have
someone with imagery read that in a dark room with
one of those skin conductance things on their finger, right,
measuring these slight changes in sweat, you see this nice
increase in their sort of their sweat and their heart
rate goes up and things like that. People with a
(21:57):
fantas not so much. Pretty much flat lines, right, So
just so all the doing is reading the words on
a screen, so that sort of from that those data
you could sort of put the story together that, yeah,
then they're not gonna be as emotionally engaged when they're
reading fiction. Oh, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
And I assume it's the same if they're listening to
an audiobook.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
I think, so we haven't done that with the audio yet,
but interesting, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Seems like it would be if the problem is actually
visualizing what's going on.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yeah, I mean you could take a go go one
step further, right and say that if you have strong
imagery and you're listening to an audiobook or a podcast
while you're driving, and you have these vivid imagery, right,
it's gonna be way more dangerous, right, You're gonna your
time to break. You're gonna have it like it's like
having a high blood alcohol level. So I mean, let's
be clear, we haven't tested that. It's just the HYPOTHESI
but yeah, oh fascinating.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I mean yeah, the thing that is it is always
fascinating the most and lots of my episodes involved this
is just the diversity from head to head, how how
different people's realities are.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yeah, and you.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Know, maybe there's this question driving tests in one hundred
years from triving cars, but if there were, you know,
when they say, okay, look we need a test you
for this and if so, then we're going to make
sure your car can't go close enough to the It's.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
On out to do a list of experiments. But I
think it could be a thing or just talking on
the phone. Right, you're just visualizing what the other person's saying.
It's going to make a difference.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Now, how does this pan out a court of law?
If somebody is hyper fantasic and it has very vivid imagery,
does that mean it is any more accurate?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
So there's some data suggests that that when your imagery
is more vivid, your memories are more likely to be corrupted. Right, Wow,
So you saw something yesterday and I say, then today,
Then I say, oh, was there a red car there?
And you try and remember back and you imagine a
red card. It's very vivid. You have the original memory,
red car, they're happening together. And then the next day
(23:47):
I say, was a red car and your memory comes
back and bang the red cars glued onto that into
that scene. Let's say, and now you remember with a
red car. Right, If your imagery is less vivid, weaker,
then that probably shouldn't happen. As there's some evidence to
suggest that. And we're running some studies now looking at
this idea of false memory, false memories, and if they're
gonna pop up more with strong imagery.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, and so one of the other class I teach
you is the brain and the law, and I always
teach about I would's testimony and the difficulties there like this,
But I had never considered this question of whether eyewitnesses
should be tested for their position along the fantasia spectrum,
so you have some sense of whether they're less likely
(24:30):
to be accurate.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
And it's I think of imagery as just a format
of our thoughts, right, like this is is distribution. Most
people were somewhere in the middle here, this normal distribution,
and each tale you think strong hype, fantasia or idaic
imagery as it was called sort of a couple of
decades ago. And then people with a fantasia, people say,
is it a disorder? Is it a condition? What do
we call it? I don't think. I don't think it's
(24:53):
not a disorder. That's that's it's not You shouldn't diagnose it.
There's no think about a cure, none of that. Right,
It's part of the normal you diversity, cognitive diversity that
we all know live in but like you said, it
will change a range of things, and that's what we're
testing now. It does change if your thoughts have a
different format. It is going to change you know, a
bunch of things in life. So it does change things.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
One of the things I study is you know, synesthesia,
and it's the same issue where it's not a disorder
some these stage just it's just.
Speaker 5 (25:22):
A different way to perceive reality.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
So tell us about alexithymia. You had mentioned to me
the other day that there's a relationship here. Yeah, so
we ran this large so define it.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Sorry, Yes, So alexithymia is this condition where people sort
of have a lack of emotional response or they feel
less emotion.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
And they're not very good at diagnosing themselves others.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, it's you could say it's I once say it's
towards a spectrum of autism, but it's kind of in
that realm, right, and it's the some links to psychopathy.
So we were testing this as part of a larger
project looking at empathy, right, And so we measured empathy
with questionnaires with pictures with these paradigms where you you know,
here's a horrible disease, would you donate to this cause
(26:22):
and not for profit. We had to show people videos
across the board and all those things. People with imagery
scored higher and with empathy than those with a fantasia
and why that's the question. So we thought we original
hypothesis was that with the questionnaires you see it, but
once you had a video or a picture, there should
be no difference because imagery shouldn't make a difference, right,
(26:43):
But it seemed to even with the videos, So we
think it's it's it's initially like, if you're being described
with a scenario and you can conjure up and imagine
that you have this virtuality thing coming up, you're going
to feel more for that individual or whatever whoever it
might be. And over the years that happens more and
more and more, so overall your empathy builds and gets stronger.
(27:04):
So it's the role of imagery in the moment, but
it's also a developmental thing. So then we started testing
alex A thime Yere as part of that, and that
sort of is part of the experiment.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And you had interviewed a memory champion with a fantasia tell,
which is so surprising, right, But it's surprising because of
her technique that she used.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, this is a lady in Australia who's actually written
a book on memory, and she's I think she's one.
It was international or national memory competitions, right, And I
think that the most common method is this memory palace, right.
And this is idea that you imagine your house and
you put them different memories. Let's say it's a deck
of cards. You have this card here on the entrance,
and then you walk in the other cards here, and
(27:45):
you make them a bit more exciting than just a card.
So you and you walk through and you remember the
deck of cards in this random order. Now, she could
do this without imagery, and so I asked her how
does she do it? She said, well, I don't use
my house or anything visual. I used a spatial layer
of my neighborhood and the roads and where houses are
and trees. And she has perfect or near perfect spatial layout.
(28:09):
But the weird thing is when I think of space,
I think of objects in space, and she doesn't. She
has these points in space, but they're perfectly laid out.
And this ties in with experiments we've run on measures
of mental rotation or space questionnaires on spatial abilities and
people with a fantasia score as well or sometimes better
than people with imagery. So it seems to be the
(28:30):
spatial layout of things seems almost perfectly maintained despite the
object imagery not being there. Yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
And as you know, you know ed Catmill did all
these things with patterns of how you make let's say,
a hand out of little patches of space and where
the light bounces off and what color of the late
carriers and other stuff. A fantasic he picture it, but
he understood the physical, you know, the physical sense of it, like, oh,
(28:59):
there's the thing, and that's what's bouncing off of it.
So I happen to be mostly a fantasic. I'm much
closer to that end of the spectrum, and so I
totally get it about this lady saying, Okay, look, if
i'magining my neighborhood, I know the feeling that this is
over to this side of that, that's over here and
that's behind me. But I'm not picturing it particularly well.
(29:19):
I just but I have a clear sense of three
dimensional space, and.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Are they points in space or are they just space existing?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I feel like more it's just space existing which is
what I assume Ed has as well, because he probably
told you.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
But you know, he first started.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Realizing this when he was at a friend's house who's
a meditator. Said, Okay, I just picture a sphere in
the air, and I just couldn't do it. And I
can't do that either. It doesn't really make sense to me.
But I can, of course have a sense of a sphere,
like I could touch the sphere and whatever, but I don't.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
I don't have any particularly good picture of it. Yeah,
the image of it. I hear that so often this
someone does a meditation cost and I say picture this
pist yourself, and they're like, what do they mean? I
can't do it?
Speaker 4 (30:01):
Yeah, my entire life.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
This thing about count sheep to go to sleep.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
I didn't understand. But can you do that?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
I mean, are you able to picture sheep as such?
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (30:10):
I can?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Like, right, yeah I can. Yeah, he's he's jumping over
the fence or whatever. Yeah I can. Yeah. I mean
it's not but let's be clear. So it's not like
if I'm seeing a sheep right now. It's not that strong.
But I have a conscious experience of a sheep. The
color I have to kind of zoom in. If I
want to get the details of the face and the eyes,
I can't get the details across the whole sheep simultaneously.
(30:31):
There's a capacity kind of issue there. But I have
a conscious experience of a sheep, and I can make
it move around in my mind's eye. Amazing.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
What have you found about creativity?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, so creativity is one of these things that I
get emails all the time, right, people saying I couldn't
be an artist because I have a fantasia. This is
the reason why I couldn't be creative, right, And so
we've run experiments on this. We haven't published the data yet,
but in all the there's all this sort of what
we call divergent thinking tasks. Right, We've got to come
up with crazy ideas for a paper clip, as many
as you can say in three minutes. So we ran
(31:03):
a hole, got a whole of data. People with a fantasia,
people with imagery almost no difference, and in fact, on
you know, slightly better in people with a fantasia. We
ran convergent thinking tasks, the opposite where people have to
converge across the board. All these different things we ran.
There's no evidence that people with a fantasia should be
less creative.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Give us an example of conversion thinking.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, so that might be where you so typically, so
let's say you're you know, you're in a you're trying
to come up with a new product or something, and
a meeting at work and you come up with all
these crazy ideas, one hundred different ideas. Then you've got
to converge all those crazy ideas down and to say
just five different things. So you've got to set will
they work, Well, they won't work. So we came up
with a task of trying sort of get at the
essence of that. And I thought that would show a
(31:45):
difference because I'm like, well, if you're trying and design
a chair and you imagine a chair with three legs,
it's going to fall over, and I'm using my imagery
because I have imagery, right then then that's going to
make show a difference. And it didn't. So we haven't
been able to find any evidence that people with a
fantasia are less creative. Again with the ways in which
we measure it, and there is some data, you know,
large population data saying that generally speaking, people with a
(32:08):
fantasia are more commonly found in seat of stem science, technology,
mathematical kind of jobs, and people with imagery are slightly
more likely to be found in the creative industries. Again,
I don't know if that's causal, but there is that
trend there that people have documented as well.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I'll be interested to follow those numbers and see if
they hold true, because this was the surprise for Ed
when he realized that so many people have picked sorry fantasic.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah, but there have been. There have been. We had
an art exhibition in the UK and all the artists
had a fantasia and there's visual there were sculptures, there's
a conceptual, you name it, and amazing art. I thought,
I don't think then there's no reason we can see
or you know, or have measured yet that there should
be a deficit in creativity. And tell us about episodic memory.
Episodic because episodes are in your life, so childhood memories,
(32:57):
what I did last week, what I did last year,
and so the way one of the main ways of
measuring this is with a type of interview. So we
use a task like that where people have to sort
of bring a memory to mind that was like one
month ago, six months ago, one year ago, different sort
of control, try and control as best we can the time.
And we found that people with a fantasia come up
with less details from their memory than people with imagery,
(33:20):
and it was less vivid than a whole lot of
things were different about the experience, but simply the objects
in the memory they could name were less if you
have a fantasia. It's not like catastrophically dramatically different. Was
clearly significant, So doesn't The memories are still there, but
there is a clear difference that.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Doesn't surprise me at all. I have a very difficult
time pulling up memories because I'm not picturing much of anything.
As you know, I've done a lot of research on
how we judge the passage of time, and so much
of it has to do with how much footage you
can bring up. So if you have a really exciting
weekend and so it says, hey, how long has it
(33:58):
been since Friday? Said, oh my god, it's been ever
since I was at work on Friday. Because this, But
so it makes me wonder if people with hyper fantasia
feel as though they've lived longer because they've got all
this memory, they all this footage, they can draw on.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
I think, so, have you ever done the float tank?
Speaker 4 (34:15):
I haven't.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Ah, So that's one of the things where I completely
lose track of time. But I got my thoughts. I
get to these deep spirals of thoughts and this, and
I'm imagining this thing. It's I'm not hallucinating because people
say they hallucinate in the float tank. And then I think, well,
it's probably been five minutes, and then like fifty minutes
is up like that, and I completely use track of time.
But I think it's a really interesting thing. But yeah,
(34:36):
I want to do this experiment now and see if
hyper fantastics have, like I feel like their life has
been much longer because every time they recall things, it
gets these sort of high reds images get jammed in down.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
So when they look for the footage of what happened
since I saw you last time, well this, this, this, this, this,
it's been a month there. That was my interview with
Joel Pearson, and the bottom line is that there's a
great deal of internal variety of experience, much more than
any of us would naively expect. What we learn with
(35:11):
time and experience and scientific study is that when you
introspect about what experience is like. All you can ever
do is introspect on what your experience is like. As
a scientific community, we're really just at the foot of
the mountain on this topic. There's so much more exploration
(35:34):
that has to be done to understand the differences in
reality from head to head. Just as one example, a
new study came out about what's called and endophasia, which
is a lack of internal voice. So phasia refers to language,
endophasia means internal language, and an endophasia means a lack
(35:58):
of internal language and endophasia, So it turns out you
might have thought that everyone has the same degree of
talking to themselves on the inside, but they don't. The
loudness of your internal radio differs from head to head,
And when this sort of thing gets subjected to study,
you can see that people all the way at one
(36:21):
end of the spectrum with an indophasia no internal voice,
they are worse at memorizing words because presumably they're not
hearing the words over and over, and they're worse at
recognizing rhymes that are written on a page but not heard,
because presumably if your brain is imagining how the word sound,
(36:42):
you'll immediately pick up on rhymes, even if they're not obvious,
like enough and stuff or though and foe and go Anyway.
I haven't studied this population yet, but they may well
be better at some other things, like without the constraints
of verbal thought, they might approach certain types of problems
(37:06):
more creatively or unconventionally. Or maybe they're privileged in certain
artistic abilities where visual experiences are more prominent. I don't
know yet until we study this, but that's the kind
of thing that one could look for. We all tackle
the tasks of the world given the tools that we have.
And this is a more general story, not just about
(37:27):
our brains, but our bodies. We all have different genetic
programs that unpack different bodies. Some taller, some shorter, some narrower,
some wider. Some people are good sprinters and others are
good marathon runners, and.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
On and on.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
But for the most part, all bodies say cool, I'll
just figure out how to use the machinery of the
world chairs and cars and bicycles and surfboards and pogo
sticks and so on. Some people have advantages for certain things,
like Kareem old Jabbar given his height for playing basketball,
or Michael Phelps his wingspan for swimming. But for the
(38:07):
rest of us, we cobble together our many different skills
to manage our tasks in the world, and this is
the way that we all find our way through the
mental landscape. Whether you are someone who has internal visualization
like a movie or instead just has concepts, you can
(38:28):
both do art, you can develop different approaches to tackle
that mountain, and more likely you even cobble together many
different approaches. So when we talk about neurodiversity, it goes
deeper than you think. Quite possibly, we are each a
minority of one. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast
(38:55):
for more information and to find further reading. Send me
an email at podcast ask an Eagleman dot com with
questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner
Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to
leave comments Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this
is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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