I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is curiously When we think of imagination, we tend to think it's reserved for the creatives among us, painters and poets, artists and musicians. But the truth is, we use our imagination almost all the time anytime we reminisce, anticipate, or plan. In fact, research suggests we spend between 1/4 and 1/2 of our waking hours with our minds wandering elsewhere, away from
the present moment. Doctor Adam Zieman's 2025 book The Shape of Things Unseen explores just how central imagination is to human experience. In it, the UK based neurologist blends neuroscience with the humanities and the arts, drawing on evolutionary biology, child development, literature and music to paint a picture of the
imaginative mind. He examines William Plake's visionary poetry, Mozart's ability to hear concertos in his head, and the creative insights behind scientific breakthroughs like the discovery of benzene. But Doctor Zeaman also reveals imaginations Darker side. A wandering mind can be an unhappy mind. Excessive rumination contributes to depression and our ability to simulate future scenarios, and sometimes trap us in anxiety. From psychospat illness to the
placebo effect. From living with vivid mental imagery to living without it, Doctor Zeeman shows how imagination operates at every level of human consciousness. Today on the podcast, we explore the science of imagination. A perception might be a kind of controlled hallucination. What artists can teach us about the creative process, and why the line between the creative and the curious may be thinner
than we think. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about imagination in the shape of things Unseen. Doctor Adam Zeeman, welcome to the show. Thank. You for having me? Today we're going to be talking about your 2025 book. I'll lift it up here. It's called The Shape of Things Unseen, a new science of imagination. I found it to be a really fascinating, comprehensive look
at, you know, human imagination. You, you kind of made it hard for a, a podcast interviewer to kind of break this book down because there's just so much in it about how we think and how we perceive the world and how imagination is a double edged sword. It leads to great things, but also negative outcomes. You wove in like research studies and literary references and patient stories.
So I wanted to set the stage for us and listener to kind of Orient all of us about how I kind of might want to approach this conversation. So I wanted to talk about imagination first, the kind of definition of it, the pros and cons of it, and then talk about sensory experience, how we can use our imagination to create mental images. Talk about mind's ear, mind's touch, the various ways we can conjure up senses in our in our mind.
And then talk about creativity, how writers, artists, visual artists use their imagination because that's a big part of your book as well. And then the latter part of the book is kind of how mental disorders, you talk about mental disorders in the context of imagination, various neurological illnesses like hysteria and neurological functional disorder in the placebo effect.
It's all very, very interesting. And then to end, I kind of wanted to talk about your experience as a, you know, as a clinician, as a research scientist, and what it was like to write about science, to write Popular Science. So that's kind of setting the table for us. I wanted to just ask, like what brought you to this topic? The book is a new science of imagination. What brought you to exploring the science of imagination?
So I, I guess I've had a very long standing interest since I was a student, as many people do in, in what makes U.S. special, you know, whether, whether there's anything about the human mind that's really distinctive that sets us apart from the rest
of creation. And I think that quite a strong candidate is imagination in the very broad sense of the capacity that allows us to detach ourselves from the here and now, recollect the past, anticipate the future, lose ourselves in the virtual worlds that are created by artists and, and I believe by scientists. So I wanted to explore this capacity, which seemed to me was a a distinctively human possession. Just in terms of like basic definitions, how would you define imagination?
Like what is it in basic terms? It's not a term of science, of course, it's a tricky, it's a tricky term. And I think 1 can distinguish at least three levels or three planes on which the term is used. So there's perhaps it's simplest to start with the what I think is the most colloquial of the three senses. So if I ask you to imagine an apple, you will, if you have imagery, and most of us do, form an image of an apple in its
absence. So the capacity to represent things in their absence is that is at least one of the core senses of imagination. There is a a slightly technical sense in which the words used by neuroscientists and psychologists in which one could say that in perception 1 forms an image of the world. So the world casts an image on the retina and that image then gives rise to a perceptual apprehension of the world, which is sometimes described as a
perceptual image. So sometimes image is used to refer to your awareness of the, of the here and there, the world around you. That's less colloquial than the second sense, which I mentioned. First, the ability to represent things in their absence, your ability to imagine an apple or your front door or your best friend in, in his or her
absence. And then there is a third sense, a much a very broad sense in which imagination refers to our capacity to to reconceive and reconfigure the world, world as we do when we are creative. And it's curious in a way that we use the same term for the ability that underpins creativity as we do for the ability that allows us to represent things in our absence. Because they're, they're rather, they're rather separate, but they're, but they're
interestingly related. I think there are good reasons why we use the same word, but those senses are a somewhat distinct. As a kind of footnote, it's interesting to reflect on the etymology of imagination, so that the root is apparently a Sanskritic word, which is something like eym, aim, which means to twin or to pair. So that idea of twinning pairing is at the root of not just imagination but also mimesis and imitation.
And one can see how that that idea of twinning or pairing suddenly underpins the idea of representing things in their absence, as we do when we think about that apple that isn't isn't in the room. But it also makes sense in terms of forming A perceptual image, because then you're twinning within yourself, the world, the world around you, using your senses. One thing I loved about your book was that it was just, it was good. It was good old fashioned science writing, popularizing
science for lay readers. There was so much more like richness to the book because you added in so many like personal reflections, personal experiences, literary references, historical references. And I'd liked all the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. One of the quotes I wanted to read was from Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream, because I wondered if this is maybe where the title of the book might have come from.
And so in the play the quote is. And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name. And it did that have something to do with your title? The shape of things on scene. I'm sure you're right that that was the origin, though. It was filtered through my own conscious so that the title came to me.
And it was only later that it occurred to me that of course, I was borrowing from Shakespeare unconscious plagiarism. At least I've modified it a little.
Titles can be quite potent. And actually, I found The Shape of Things Unseen was quite a, an appropriate title, particularly given the interest which sort of coincidentally, I've developed in the course of writing the book in, in people who are, who are unable to visualize or to experience sensory imagery, of course, have, have sense of, have some sense of the shape of things on scene because they're they're not able to see them in
their mind's eye. It reminded me of when when you talk about the ability to conjure up mental images, we'll get into the varying degrees of being able to of having a mind's eye, the aphantasia lacking completely versus hyperphantasia. This an interesting test that I think you introduced me to a long time ago, which is if someone with a Fantasia like myself, if you ask me the question, what's a darker green like, like grass on a lawn or like a pine tree or something like that.
I could, I could tell you the answer to that. I can't see it in my mind's eye, but I do know, right? And so that's very much unseen, and yet it has shaped. Interestingly, ChatGPT also knows the answer to that question, though it's never seen anything. There are several like big ideas in your book that you circle
around. And one of them, I think is that imagination, like you said at the beginning, it allows us to kind of spend time away from the present, you know, whether it's imagining the future or reminiscing on the past. And I wanted to just read A1 short paragraph that I think encapsulates this idea. And then we can we can talk about it. But you, you say actually on page 2, we we may not all be constantly engaged in creative
work. We are all incessant visitors to imaginative worlds as we contemplate future possibilities, recollect vanished experiences, enjoy vicarious lives, travel into the imagined territories of science. Deeply absorbed by these pursuits, we spend so much of our time in our heads that we often need to be reminded to return to the here and now. And yeah, talk about imaginations, ability to dislocate us from the present reality, because I think that was a central theme in the book.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm always reminded in this context of watching my research assistant once crossing the road, a busy road off, sit my office, listening to music through his headphones and reading the book that was open in his hands. We do risk falling into potholes, don't we, when we become too absorbed in, in, in imaginary imaginative worlds. But this has been studied now
quite intensively. And it turns out that if you sample people's experience from moment to moment, we are very often lost in our thoughts, lost in daydreams. Sort of 30 to 40% of the time people will report being absent from the here and now. And in fact, the the single most common mental content is visual imagery, more common than awareness of the here and now, more common than any than any
other other mental content. So, so we really do, I think in a, in a, in a now empirically proven sense, live in our thoughts. Of course not, not constantly. It's very important that the world corrects those thoughts from time to time. And when you're playing football, I guess you, you're pretty much in the here and now. But but much of the time we're occupied by by imaginative
processes. You're saying we're spending more time playing messing with visual images on our mind than we're than we are perceiving the the present? But you give people buzzes, and the buzzes sound random intervals, and you ask people to report what what is occupying their awareness. The most common content is visual imagery. Not not here and now, but but imagining something. In your book you referenced a a
Harvard study. I think it was something about a wandering mind and and you said it, it said like a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. So what you explore in this context is the double edged sword of yeah, sure, like being able to plan and think and imagine and suggest and propose and create it. It's all well and good and has wonderful outcomes, but it's the IT has a the flip side of the coin. Is that too much of it can make
us unhappy? In the most extreme case, you gather rumination, which can lead to clinical depression. And I wonder what other ways imagination can kind of get us into trouble in this context. As sort of as a way into that, let me say that I, I think just as you indicate, there's a kind of deep tension in, in our human lives here. We, we have a wish to be present.
We get into difficulties when we fail to be present, psychological difficulties, which we, we, we can come on to, but we know no human life could be lived entirely in the present. We, you know, we have to, we have to take account of what might happen in the future. And we, we to understand ourselves, we need to take account of what's happened in the past.
So I think there's a, there's a constant tug in, in human lives between the, the wish to, to live fully in the present and, and the wish to understand ourselves longitudinally, so to, so to speak, and, and to, to, to take account of the imagined past and the imagined future. So as you say, a few people with people who who dwell too much on the past are often less happy than than others. That was the, that was the finding of the of the Harvard study.
And, and as you say, when we become depressed, we tend to ruminate in a rather repetitive way on past experiences. It's problematic for us if we lose contact with reality, as people do in psychosis. When they hallucinate, they generate images which seem to them which they take for reality
but which deceive them. This reminds me to say, and perhaps this is something you want to come on to, that there's an idea currently that our awareness of the world around us is best regarded as a kind of controlled hallucination. So there is a sense in which everything we experience comes comes from the brain, comes from our heads most of the time are able to ensure that our awareness is reasonably in line with, with the with the external facts.
What happens in psychosis is that the the experience we generate loses its moorings it it loses contact with with external reality and that that's clearly not not a good idea for us. I absolutely want to talk more about that in a in a few minutes. This idea of like, to what degree are we passively like observing reality versus creating it?
Yeah, fascinating. But it, it, it made me think too of I, I wonder where our species would be like without the ability to imagine the ability to imagine images for one. Like I have a I had a colleague, this was 7-8 years ago when I wrote this fictional story about someone with a Fantasia and they cured it with a digital technology to create hypervantasia. The idea of having hyperphantasia has always seemed like a superpower to me because I lack the ability to conjure up mental images.
So to be able to kind of go to your favorite movie and play it back and stop it at your favorite scene, or even just picture a loved one who's passed and it's all just seems like wonderful. What inspired the story was I had a colleague who she was at the top end of hyper Fantasia. So she told me over lunch once that when she was bored at work at her desk, she would just go into her mind and lift off and fly around, fly around the Boston area.
And what an incredible power to be able to escape from one's present circumstances. That's a very benign example. But then you think of, you talked about this in your book, Viktor Frankel in the concentration camp, he literally used it as a survival tactic. He was able to dislocate from a incredibly grim catastrophic situation to to specifically like go into his apartment and walk down the street. And he said these images brought into tears what an incredible
survival ability. And without that, we would be at a great loss, I think. Absolutely. But to illustrate the the the, the tension that we were talking about a moment ago, there is a risk to indulging one's daydreams, and there's recently been described as syndrome of
maladaptive daydreaming. Somewhat dissatisfied with their current situation and who for whom daydreaming becomes somewhat addictive, they lose themselves in enrich absorbing daydreams about possible futures to the extent that they that they they neglect the present, they neglect their their their current duties. Yeah, no, that, that's what happens in my story. The person becomes actually
disabled. Because if you can imagine a world where everything is perfect, where you're perfect, where there's no pain, where you can do anything, why would you stay in reality? Reality is so messy and problematic. So I wonder how you pull those people out. I mean, it's interesting that you talked about a specific case of psychosis in that regard. How do you lure them back to reality? Well, I think using different approaches in different
circumstances. So you know, psychosis is generally treated using medication in the hope that the brain in time will recover its equilibrium and regain its its recover its moorings, regain its links with reality. The the approach and psychosis is typically pharmacological, whereas in PTSD, say post traumatic stress disorder, where where people's minds are invaded by intrusive images, behavioural approaches can be can be particularly effective.
If I may just going back a step, you, you were asking where we'd be without imagination, and I think the answer to that question does depend on which kind of imagination you have in mind. If the question is where would we be without creativity, I think the answer is we'd be a very long way back, couldn't we? I mean, our whole, our lives are, are completely soaked through with culture and culture is the product of individual acts of imagination in the sense
of creativity. They're they're they're, they're the, our culture is the result of innumerable small acts of creation. Creativity in this sense, meaning the ability to make things that are both new and useful. So we'd we'd be nowhere really if we if we liked imagination in that sense. The question of what sensory imagery does for us is a really, really interesting one, which we'll perhaps we'll come to.
I think it's, I think it's much less obvious what sensory usually does for us than it is what human creativity does for us. Human creativity is really absolutely fundamental to our to our lives. Let's go to sensory experience. And, you know, you talk about there's a lot of variation in our ability to imagine various senses, whether it's sound or vision or I met someone at the conference we were at who has a very strong mind's touch.
Her dog had passed away and she was able to kind of imagine her dog laying on her chest. She could feel the weight of her dog. That's a mind's touch. Really fascinating you. You wrote about Mozart and his mind's ear, which was seemed to be like off the charts. You know, he could, he actually heard concertos in his head and he would rush to the. No pad and and have to write them down. So talk about, you know, our ability to imagine sense and the variation among us.
Yeah. So I mean this is an invisible variation. I think each of us tends to take his, her, her own experience as the norm. So it, it comes, it comes for example, as a a huge surprise for many people with athentasia, many people who lack imagery to discover that other people actually enjoy sensory experience, imaginative sensory experience. So typically people that Fantasia say up to a certain point, I'd always assume that talk of the mind's eye was just
a metaphor. It was just a figure of speech. And then at a certain moment I realized, actually people really are seeing something in their mind's eye. We're very visual animals. So visualization is, is a particularly dominant, prominent example of sensory imagery. But you've mentioned the mind's ear. Many, many people enjoy something like the experience of hearing in in their mind's ear. Many of us can imagine the feel of velvet has against the feel of satin or of sandpaper.
There are people who appear to have imagery of smells and tastes. I think most of us can imagine running for a bus, say, so we have most of us have motor imagery or kinesthetic imagery. You know, you can imagine walking gently down a country lane as opposed to racing to catch a train. We can enjoy multimodal or most of us can enjoy multimodal sensory motor experience.
And it turns out, I don't know whether you want to come on to this at this point, but it turns out that what happens in the brain when we are, for example, visualizing has quite a lot in common with what happens in the brain when we're seeing. So there is an important sort of neurological overlap between perception and imagery, if you like.
What is happening when we engage in sensory imagery is that we run offline the systems in the brain that we engage online when we are perceiving, when, when, when we are sensing. That the apparent differences between people's experience in this regard is not simply a matter of description. That it goes deeper than that. So like in like sports psychology, like Olympians right now, skiers are preparing for
their events, right? So they talk about, you know, visual as the power of visualization and running through the event in your mind's eye before doing it. And are are you, are you saying it's almost like a neurological match between doing it? There is there is a neurological match. So let me give you a couple of examples, if you It was a nice experiment showing that simply imagining exercising a finger increased strength over the course of a few weeks. It didn't increase muscle, it
increased strength. So the effect was probably in in was the effect was in the brain. Another experiment showed that getting novice pianists to practice a particular pattern of finger movements mentally enlarged the area of cortex in which those movements were represented. Just as much as actually practicing for real mental practice makes a makes a difference.
I when I was researching this, I particularly enjoyed, perhaps because of my medical background, I particularly enjoyed an article about surgeons who It turns out I had never thought about this, but it turns out that surgeons very often plan for and reflect on their operations and and they do
so using imagery. They, they kind of re replay the, the video if you like and they imagine themselves performing the operation and they think, think through what they're going to have to do and they, and afterwards they analyse difficulties they ran into all mistakes they made again using using sensorimotor imagery. So it's, it's, it's a widely used form of thought.
Yes, the there is a big overlap between what happens in the brain when you're seeing, for example, or hearing or moving, and what happens in the brain when you're imagining seeing or hearing or moving. I want to run something by you. I I instantly knew I wanted to ask you this question when I saw it. So basically Alex Hannell, the famous free solo climber, he climbed A skyscraper. So this, this guy's really something. His latest stunt was to climb a huge skyscraper in Taiwan
without ropes. It was a live event. Everyone's wondering is he going to fall and all that. But he said something really fascinating in one of the interviews. He said that he the way he prepares for free solo, like big free solo events, is that he actually imagines the fear that he will experience while he's climbing without ropes in very gnarly situations. And that preempts him when he's actually in a fearful situation
up there. So in his mind, he practices, yes, the physical movements, the maneuvers, but he also practices the emotional experiences he know he will encounter. And he's that much better able to handle fear in the moment when it's actually happening. So that's a different thing. That's not playing the piano. That's like playing out emotions. How do you what do you think about that? No, that's, that's fascinating.
So it sounds as if he's sort of able to inoculate it or inoculate himself against the, the, the emotion to, to some degree. I mean, it makes sense. The, the principle that I've described applies very widely. So it applies, for example, to pain. So the brain regions engaged by pain overlap considerably with the pain regions engaged when you are looking at somebody in pain, especially if they're close to you.
So if you look at a loved one in pain, that will activate areas that are engaged in the brain when you are in pain and imagining pain or remembering pain can also engage those areas. So there was a study showing that if you looked at brain activity when somebody was subjected to sort of moderately painful stimulus, you little burn on the skin kind of thing that experimenters use, which is bearable, but they're distinctly unpleasant.
Remembering that episode a few hours later or maybe in the next day engaged almost exactly the same set of brain regions as experiencing the pain. So it's a, it's a general principle that experiencing, remembering the experience, imagining the experience and watching somebody else undergoing the experience will engage. Certainly a substantially overlapping set of brain areas. They're not not identical. There are differences you'd expect, but there's, there's substantial overlap.
I'll give you another example and this this is quite old work. There is a particular brain region which is strongly engaged by disgust gets engaged if you if you are disgusted, but exactly that region gets engaged if you look at a photograph of somebody with the facial expression of disgust and if you imagine disgust. This is a little bit something I hadn't thought about, but is there, does it work with affection in love? Like if we like imagine a loved
one versus seeing one in person? Like is there a neurological signature? I believe that there is. I'm trying to. I'm trying to call to mind the evidence. I think that Semi Azeki has done work along these lines, but I would need to remind myself he's looked at the neurological signature of the experience of beauty and he also looked, I tried to remember what the details of the experiment in which he studied romantic
partners was. But I think, I think the broadly the answer I think is yes was was the question going in particular to particular destination? No, It just reminded me of the movie. Contact was one of my favorite movies based off a Carl Sagan novel. And the movie kind of plays with this idea of like, can you prove love can? How do you prove experiences that aren't quantifiable, that aren't measurable? Yeah. Well, so the the pain work I was describing certainly speaks to
that. So you you have a much stronger neural response to seeing somebody you love in pain than you do to seeing a stranger. Just out of curiosity, what is the brain region that is in question here? It's a it's a matrix of brain regions, as it's called, which includes the amygdala areas in the cingulate cortex, areas in
the orbital frontal cortex. It actually maps quite closely onto the the set of brain regions which is involved in pleasure, essentially the regions in the in the brainstem and in the limbic system and in areas of the frontal cortex. I wanted to get back to something that you touched on earlier about perception and this phrase of controlled who's and is a hallucination. You write about this like very fascinating idea that like maybe our perception of reality of the
world's isn't passive. We're not just like receiving data from the world, but we're in some ways helping to create it. I guess my question is like, to what degree are we like truly objectively sensing what's outside of US versus creating a controlled hallucination? Like how much? How much of of our perception is an actual like creative act? Well, I would say it is.
It is creative act and it may seem at first sight a kind of outrageous thing to say, but I think I think there's very compelling evidence for it and it's nicely summarized by my friend, colleague Anil Seth, who says that in some ways perception is is more inside out than it is outside in. The evidence for this comes really from 2 main directions. 1 is kind of set of psychological data and reflections, and the
other more neurological. In the psychological domain, we've all come across illusions in which things, when you measure them, turn out to be different to the way they seem. So for example, in the book there's a nice image of my partner in fact running across a bridge. There are three images, each of them is the same size but placed at different points on the bridge. And she looks much bigger when she's further away. And that's because your mind makes an unconscious correction
for distance. You can't overcome it. When you measure the the image you find it's the same size but it but but it looks looks different. Another example would be the NECA cube. So you this is the just a cube drawn on a piece of paper which as you look at it changes in depth and clearly nothing's changing on the page but but your perception of it is changing. The man in the moon is another example. There is no man in the moon, but I can't help finding him there and then.
As a kind of extreme example, I think I'd I relate the the story in the book of an experience I had as a teenager when I slept in a the garden room One night. I must have forgotten to close the curtains and I woke up in the early hours and there was a burglar standing at the front of my bed wearing a striped shirt.
And he was so compellingly real that I shouted at him and within a couple of seconds he dissolved into a pattern of light and dark shining through the slats of the fence that I was looking, looking at through the through, through the windows. That was an utterly compelling hallucination. So a good example of the generative nature of perception. So there's that, there's that set of sort of psychological observations which takes one to the conclusion that perception
is generative. And then there's the the neurological evidence, which is in a way may much simpler. Our brains are constantly at work. They're constantly consuming oxygen and glucose. If they stop, perception stops. So, so clearly the experience stops. Experience, like human experience is entirely dependent on the, on the metabolic activity of, of metabolic and neural activity occurring within
our brains. So clearly there's, there's some biological process at work which is responsible for experience and, and in particular perception. So I think there are really compelling reasons for regarding our experience as as a generative creative act of a biological kind. When we met, it was 5 or 6 years ago during a conference that you helped put together. I believe it was on the heels of the research that you had started in 2015 about mental imagery when you coined the term
a Fantasia lacking a mind's eye. I was wondering, can you bring us back to that moment in 2015 when you started to study those like 21 patients who didn't have a mind's eye and how that snowballed into incredible amounts of public interest? And yeah, just talk about mental imagery and the variation of it, and we can discuss aphantasia and hyperphantasia as you as you like. It may be worth telling the story from from the beginning, making a little deech.
I first encountered somebody who couldn't visualize in 2003, I think, when I was referred to a patient who had lost the ability to imagine, which wasn't a symptom that I'd ever come across before, and I was intrigued by it. He turned out to be very delightful man, excellent research participant. And indeed, it did seem that he had selectively lost the capacity to visualize following
a cardiac procedure. And we did a brain imaging study in which we showed that when he looked at faces, his brain activated quite normally. But when he tried to imagine them, he failed him to activate those visual regions that most people with imagery activate when they when they visualize. So I thought this was an interesting case.
We wrote a case report. I didn't really expect too much more to come of it. Story was then picked up by Carl Zimmer, an American science journalist who wrote an article in Discover magazine about this patient. And then over the course of the next two or three years, I and my colleagues were contacted by 21 people who said we're just like MX, the person described in this Discover article, except we've never been able to visualize.
We've always realized that there's something a little bit different about us. When other people reminisce about the past, they seem to have a visual experience of what they're remembering. We, we don't. And these 21 people told quite a consistent story. We we sent them a vividness questionnaire which just measures how valid your imagery is, asking people asking you to visualize 16 scenes, and we asked them a set of common sense
questions. And when we came to describe them in a paper in 2015, we thought that this phenomenon deserved a name. Up till then there had been some reports in the neurological literature, but the terms were pretty unwieldy, defective revisualization and visual ear reminiscence. So we thought we could do better than that. I asked a friend who had studied the Classics and he said why don't you borrow Aristotle's time for the Mind's Eye, which is Fantasia, and tag an ale at
the end. So that was how a Fantasia, the term a Fantasia was born and it caught on. So there was press interest in it. I gave a a three or four minute interview on a breakfast TV show. When I came back to my room there were males coming into my own inbox faster than I could
count them. And since then I think I've been contacted by getting on for 20,000 people mostly describing aphantasia, so lifelong absence of imagery, but some describing imagery as vivid as we're seeing at the opposite end of the spectrum. So hyperphantasia and it's turned out that these this contrast is really a really rather interesting one. There seems there seems to be a pattern of associations with with adventation adventasia.
They're not if you like, they're not isolated psychological quirks. They they seem to travel with a number of other variations. I don't think of them as disorders. I think of them very much as intriguing variations in human experience. I don't think they're problematic in themselves. I think that they they carry with them pros and cons, strength, advantages and disadvantages. How do you account for the explosion of interest? It occurred to me at the conference that we started at
Mental imagery, for sure. Like, oh, you can't see things in your mind too interesting. It always blossom into a bigger conversation about how we perceive the world, and I wonder if that has something to do with it. We don't really think about how other people think. I think that because we live so much of A life in our heads, we are intrigued to discover that the lives other people leave in their heads may be very different to the lives we lead.
So I think we're fascinated to discover that there are there are these big variations in experience. I think people with aphantasia were pleased that they had a sort of flag to fly under, a turn to describe their experience which had been lacking until then. And they were, they were glad that some attention was being paid to to their experience. And people with imagery were intrigued to find that there were others who lacked it.
It's curious that the topic hadn't been highlighted sooner. So Francis Galton, who was a psychologist working in the 19th century, was the first person to try to measure visual imagery. And he actually recognized that there were people who seemed to like it. He said that there were among his participant, there were participants. There were people whose power of visualization was zero, as he put it. And he thought this was more
common among scientists. But he didn't really pursue the the observation, and nor did anybody else. There was, I think there's just one, one paper by an American psychologist who himself lacked imagery, who sampled imagery and his students sort of over the intervening centuries. So for some reason it was just a blind spot in the in, in
psychological research. There'd been masses of work on imagery generally, but it had focused on, if you like, the typical image and had ignored the extremes, which which turned out to be really interesting. One of the things that interested me as someone with a Fantasia was perhaps the correlation with deficits like poorer autobiographical memory, inability to picture lost loved ones, inability to visualize the
future, whatever you want. But then there are also where, like some perceived benefits worth exploring. And in your book, you write that you say, sad as it is to lack the ability to visualize those we love, people with aphantasia seem to move on more easily than most of us from a breakup or a bereavement. Lacking the clamorous impact of imagery helps them live in the present. And Yep, that did hit hit my personal experience.
And it also was sort of validating in a way because I thought of myself potentially as like less feeling or more on feeling than others. But it was correlated with my inability to picture these things that to picture the traumatic imagery, it didn't catch me and then therefore it didn't hold as much and it lessened the emotional impact. So I wonder, how have you been thinking about the the pros and cons, the benefits and drawbacks of imagery?
Yeah. And just to echo what you say, many people at Fantasia have told me that they've, they've been worried at times that they're cold because they, they don't seem to be as troubled as their friends and relations by, by break up, moving on to bereavement, say. But but then they, they come to the conclusion that it does relate to the lack of imagery. Imagery. Imagery has been described as an emotional amplifier.
And if you, if you like that amplification, it's, it's going to have an impact on your emotional experience and responses. So, so yeah, I think one of the pluses that I had tased you probably is what you might call presentness the the ability to to, to live a little more in the here and now then. Those of us who are being distracted by regrets about the future or longings for sorry, regrets about the past or or or or or longings for events in the future. This is still a work in
progress. But it does look as if having a Fantasia nudges people towards working in STEM professions, science, maths, IT, technology. And that makes a kind of sense because I think other things being equal, people that Fantasia have a more abstract take on on the world, if you like. Craig Venter is an example. He's a very celebrated American scientist, first person to decode the genome and I think to create artificial life. And he got in touch not long after.
The time at Fantasia was kind and said, I've known this about myself for a long time and I'd always assumed that it was a help to me in my scientific work not to have my head cluttered with images. I guess those are probably the two of the principal advantages and, and together with presentness may come some protection from psychological difficulties which are fuelled or fed by imagery like PTSD for example, and you know, possibly psychosis. I think that that again needs a lot more work.
Whether whether maybe imagery is a risk factor for psychosis is is uncertain, but there is a little bit of evidence that it that it is. Yeah, I, I sometimes think of this in the context of PTSD. And if I were to be sort of intercepted by a involuntary image or thought of a traumatic experience, it would be just that, a thought. It would be imageless yet. And if it were not, if it were, if all of a sudden something troubling ripped into my head,
it would be way more powerful. And so I think that people with aphantasia may have some sort of vaccination against ETSD. But there's always the flip side too, because I've heard one friend said they comfort themselves often by imagining someone who's not there. They can put themselves back in into a positive experience in life, somewhere they traveled. They can hang out with old friends during like the golden age of college or something. And this is a source of comfort,
actual comfort. So yeah, while I won't be burdened by traumatic images, I also can't comfort myself and get that emotional payouts. There's definitely interesting implications of the spectrum. No, that's, that's absolutely right. And I guess another consideration here is that you, some people when they first encounter the idea of Fantasia are really puzzled and they, they ask how, how can people think or remember anything
without imagery? And actually, Aristotle wrote, the mind never thinks without a phantasm. But it's, you know, people with that Fantasia really get along very well. In our small, a small study we did quite early on where we compared a group of about 25 people that Fantasia 25 with hyperphantasia and 25 with average imagery IQ was actually slightly but significantly
higher in the athantasia group. So I don't know that that necessarily holds out with huge samples, but it but it just makes the point that certainly it's not an intellectual disadvantage. And one fact that is now abundantly clear is that athantasia doesn't preclude imagination in the broad sense. So there are many examples of authentic people who are highly imaginative, creative, productive. You're a novelist.
I've mentioned Craig Venter, Ed Katmal, past president of Pixar, Disney, winner of the touring prize, Blake Ross, creator of Firefox, Mozilla. So people created in a whole variety of of areas. And 11 nice surprise in our research was that we were contacted by a large number of authentic artists. So actually, I think we went to art school, you would find that on average the imagery vividness is a bit higher than usual. So.
So I think having vivid imagery does predispose you to to traditionally creative activities, but lacking imagery certainly doesn't prevent you from pursuing a career in them. Yeah, I always say that I figured out how to write without a mind's eye. And when I realized I I had something to call that now I could still write because, you know, there's such a bias to mental imagery, particularly in
the narrative arts. You know, there's just the bias that people think that you have to see the scene before you write it. You're just like transcribing some mental image you've already worked out. But it's really not bad. In my case, I can't. So I may have a concept of a scene, you know, 2 and these two people will be in it. They'll be saying these things. And then what I can do is I can arrange the telling details in such a way that I know it will manufacture a visual image in
your mind. So it's like, I don't have to see it to get you to see it. I think and imagine just fine without the mental imagery, but it's taking a long time for people to understand that. That has to be exactly right, but I think conversely, people who do have imagery probably do do kind of do use it creatively. They do. And I'm aware of all the writers I know actually are pretty high on the imagery scale and they see it at, they see it first. So, and I think, wow, that that'd be nice.
You know, it'd be nice to see it first because I think really I'm sort of manufacturing it in a way. But I figured it out. At our conference, there was a visual artist, and he was so troubled by this realization that he didn't have a mind's eye that he said he was giving up art. And I found that really, you know, tragic in a way because, you know, you can still make art without it. Like, now it would have been better for him to have never learned of this at all.
It seems it, it very much occurred to me that we could have talked about mental imagery for like, 90 minutes. But this book is about imagination. Another big part of your book is imagination in the context of creativity. The way we traditionally think about it, imagination is like the creative act. And I kind of wanted to talk about some of the things you touched on, one of which is maybe like personality traits that lead to creative thought, one of which is openness to
experience. The part of the Big 5. I wonder if you can talk about how that you know tendency leads to more creative creative work. How does how does that interplay happen? So openness is rather difficult to to define, isn't it? It seems to be a kind of amount of intelligence and openness in the sense of attentiveness to 1's own experience and and a willingness to undergo new experiences and and explore new territory of of every kind.
And certainly that kind of openness does seem to be important in the creative process because good ideas often come to people from unexpected places. I have a little mnemonic for the psychological capacities which I think underpin creativity in the book, which is skids. So the first 3 letters ski stand for skills. So I think there are very, very few, if any human creative achievements which don't presuppose considerable skill in
a particular domain. Next D detect D for detachment, which is really a meld of the ability to control our thoughts and behaviour and our ability to detach ourselves from from the world by using symbolic technologies of various kinds. But then the final S in skid stands for spontaneity, and there is a kind of wild card in creativity which plays into openness. We have to be open to to take
advantage of this. Many, many creative people describe their creative ideas, sometimes in their entirety themes from musical composition just arriving in in their in their minds. And they clearly don't arrive from nowhere. But they aren't the outcome of the kind of deliberate, controlled, voluntary process.
And one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that I think we understand something, though, from neuroscience of what it is that makes possible these creative moments, these moments of spontaneous creation, when when an idea appears in in someone's mind. I won't give you examples of spontaneous creativity of this kind.
You there are many to be found in the book, but I'll say a little perhaps about the unless you'd like me to, but I'll say a little about the, about the neuroscience. Probably the the area which is most relevant and least well known is the, the study of the resting brain, which has been a really fascinating area of neuroscience over the last
couple of decades. So for a long time when people performed brain imaging studies to see what, what what happens in the brain when people are are thinking, if you like, they would compare one condition with another. So what's different between reading a word and looking at a number? Over the last 20 years there has grown an interest in what happens in the brain at rest.
And it turns out that if you if somebody simply lies in a brain scanner, you can detect activity within all the networks of the active brain. So for example, there's a set of real visual regions of the back of the brain in which all the areas talk to one another. Their activity is synchronized within the mass as you'd expect really. There's a set of motor areas which contain control movement.
And again, even when my lying still, there's activity within these areas, they're into communicating. A particularly fascinating set of areas came to light about 20 years ago, which has been called the default mode network because it's actually the set of areas which is most active in the
resting brain. It turns out that when you examine the function of this network, it is particularly active in circumstances in which people are remembering the past, anticipating the future, thinking about other minds, so thinking about other people's thoughts and thinking about
moral decisions. So just the kinds of things we do when we are daydreaming really, you know, you'll you'll think about something you enjoyed yesterday or someone who offended you yesterday or some slightly problematic decision about what you're going to do tomorrow. So this is the set of areas that's most active at rest in the brain set of set of regions which seems to be involved in,
if you like in, in daydreaming. And it turns out that when people are actually performing creative acts, when they're engaged in creative activities, this network is, is active because I think one has to kind of dip down into the, into one's past one's, one's memories to generate creative ideas for the future. And the default by network is very much involved in, in recollecting the past.
But this default by network during creative acts is in an unusually harmonious relationship to an executive network, a set of regions which tends to switch on when the default node network switches off. So if I give you a task like telling me as many words with the letter P as you can in the next minute, that will engage your default mode, your engage your executive network, switch
off your default mode network. So normally they are anti correlated, but in creative acts they are in a a more harmonious than usual relationship and they are also interacting with a network that's been called the salience network, which is involved in attributing importance in attributing value to to things in the world and to our own pursuits. So these networks are all at work in the resting brain. They are in a kind of harmonious relationship during creative
acts. And I think understanding this autonomous dynamic activity within the brain gives us a much better understanding of the spontaneous processes which are involved in creativity than we than we had before when the brain was regarded as really a reactive organ. And the the most common analogy was with a computer.
We now have an understanding of it has a highly dynamic living Organism, if you like, or organ which spontaneous activity of the kind that underpins creativity is quite occurs quite naturally. Another example which I discuss in the book is the phenomenon of replay. Turns out that if you explore a new environment, cells will become active in your hippocampus as you explore the environments. The campus is a region in the temporal lobes which contains a kind of spatial map of the
environment. That's interesting that there should be such a spatial map, but what's really fascinating is that after you've explored at times of rest or during sleep, the cells which became active during exploration replay your your journey, replay the the pathway, if you like, which you took through the new environment, both forwards and backwards, as if you were learning how to how to escape from the destination, so to speak.
There's evidence even that the order in which the the cells become active can be reorganized spontaneously, as if the brain were trying to make better sense of what you'd experienced. So here is here's another example of spontaneous activity within the brain, which is probably mostly, if not entirely unconscious, but which is important, probably plays a particular role in consolidating memories.
But it's just the kind of spontaneous activity which one can imagine might give rise to the ideas which people make use of in in creative work. I'm working on a short story. There's, there's really two processes that I'm always toggling back and forth within my brain, which is, you know, the default mode network and the, the executive functioning.
So the executive prefrontal cortex work is like, you know, at the computer willfully moving things around and banging things out and solving problems essentially. But then it's, you know, you hit, you hit an impasse, you don't know where you're going and, and you just back off and you go for a walk or have a shower or just live your life. And that's when the more unconscious process sees the
default mode network. That's when it starts to kick off things, connections, patterns, and you just write them down and then you go back to the computer for work work. Something about the creative life is developing like a facility with the that toggling back and forth, being comfortable with it and kind of knowing that if you are stuck, just throw it to your unconscious, you know, and it'll work itself out and being able to work.
You talked about working with uncertainty a lot too, and, and the John Keats's negative capability, that that's a big part of it too. Yeah. I had a lovely interview with the musician David Gray, which I talk about in the book. And he he says that when he's in a particularly creative phase, he has the sense that his mind is both more objective and more subjective simultaneously than it normally is. And I think, I think he's talking about just what you describe.
There can be kind of alternation between those two states, but there are times on there where where you're in, you're in both kind of drawing from from the depths and but you're also controlling from above. Right. And you kind of know when to turn those on and off.
You know, being a creative person is being receptive, but also willful, going back and forth, you know, and knowing the kind of limits of both the other the I feel like, you know, if your next book's going to be a Fantasia, you got to write about, write a book on creativity. You know, I think that would be fascinating.
And it always does. Well, any book on creativity does extremely well with the business community with, you know, there's a lot in this in your book too, about like an appreciation for art and artist work. And you you taught, you said the task of art is to kind of evoke the living texture of experience, which I thought was really interesting. You met with a writer, Philip Pullman, and you talked you visit his home and talked about
his writing process. And I want to just read this this short portion here where you got some insights into his process. He said, he told me, that he rarely needs to stop and think, entering A mild dissociative state during his productive hours. He plans only minimally. He attributes this to like lifelong cultivation of the part of the brain that asks what if? All of us ask this question once in a while.
But like Philip Pullman, Sandy, another character you talked about, believes that his well trained subconscious is constantly exploring narratives. When he writes this subliminal process finds its voice. It's interesting. There's so much to say there. I think that training is
crucial, isn't it? I mean, I think there's no discovery favours the prepared mind as, as I think Pastor said, Hugh, there's a lot of prep, a lot of training, a lot of preparation has to has to have happened in the background. But once it's happened, yes, then then there's the spontaneous unconscious processes are are key. Yeah, and it's something they don't teach you in MFA programs too, but you can learn craft. That's great.
You need to know it, but how to actually create is another thing that you have to get on your own. I. Don't know if you're a Philip Pullman fan, but those those who have read the Northern Lights will know that one of the heroes of the book, Lyra, has a strange instrument instrument called the alatheometer she uses to. I can't, I forget whether to see future events or to see distant events. But so there's a kind of precognitive telepathic function.
And the allythometer can only be used when you're in a certain state of mind. You have to, you have to clear your mind to make it possible to, to use this instrument. And I, I think this is, it's, it's just a metaphor for the imagination. Your book is so comprehensive. One of the things I want to talk about is, you know, mental disorders in the context of imagination.
So really fascinating aspect of your exploration where you talk about the placebo effect, you talk about hysterical symptoms, psychosomatic disorders, really nice science writing. You weave in stories of of patients and and research and bring it to life. And I want to talk about hysteria first. This is something that's always fascinated me, even myself. I've had what you could call
psychosomatic symptoms. Talk a little bit about how these how psychosomatic symptoms or hysterical symptoms when they're not a neurological illness, How is it, how is it happening? What is the What is the mechanism of hysterical blindness? Or yeah. This is a really common phenomenon for neurologists, in fact for doctors working in all areas of medicine, but but it's certainly very common for
neurologists. So getting on for 1/3 of what we see in clinic and and in the emergency room turns out not to be explained by disease, but to have a broadly psychological explanation. And many cases will will fit within the the remit of what used to be called hysteria. That's that's become a somewhat pejorative term and the politically correct time is now functional neurological disorder, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
But to give a specific example, somebody who appears to be having a an epileptic fit who may even be admitted to hospital because the the initial impression has been of of a prolonged seizure may turn out not not to be, but to be having what's called a dissociative attack or what is a psychogenic seizure. An attack which looks looks very like an epileptic seizure but but simply isn't when you record
brain activity you don't see. The the signature of epilepsy, you see essentially normal, normal wakeful activity. I describe in the in the book a patient I encountered when I was a young urologist who had a disabling spasm in in one leg, which one of my senior colleagues then induced by rubbing one shoulder and relieved by rubbing the opposite
shoulder. So often suggestion is quite powerful in the, in the context of, of these disorders, but they're, they're common, they're often disabling and they are really rather mysterious and they, they often excite strong emotions in doctors. So when doctors discover that there actually isn't an underlying disease, the response
can be one of, of indignation. There is a risk and it's a risk that has to be avoided at all costs really, of blaming people for having such disorders because all the current evidence suggests that people are not aware that they are manufacturing them. They're not aware that they're putting anything on, though it is rather as if they were. So that's so they're, they're a puzzle, these disorders.
And in the book I suggest that that three key elements are involved and the third of them is relevant to imagination. So first of all is often a disturbance of attention. So if you focus your attention very intensely on any normal activity, it's quite likely to go wrong.
If you try to remember how to walk and, and focus very intensely on your walking as you're walking, it'll trip you up. It's, it's, there are all kinds of things that we do very successfully automatically that we find really rather hard to do when we focus our attention on them. So one of the sources of psychosomatic symptoms seems to be excessive attention to a process that that that happens perfectly satisfactorily until we start paying attention. There's often a kind of
emotional components. So many people who develop such problems have a background of anxiety or depression or trauma. Sexual abuse has classically been one of the sources of hysteria and functional neurological disorder. And indeed that that, that that is the case. It's not by any means universal, but it's but it's certainly in the mix. But then there's a third element, which was very nicely described by a 19th century
neurologist as illness. According to IDEA, you have a, a notion of an illness which perhaps you've seen because we're close relative has suffered from it, perhaps a friend has had it and you're terrified that you may develop it and you kind of bring the disorder into being as a consequence of your imaginative preoccupation with it.
So I, I, I tell the story or I, I report a case in the book described by that 19th century urologist who was called Russell Reynolds of a, of a young woman who had cared for her father, who'd fallen on hard times, had to return to work unexpectedly and had a stroke. And she then had to living and look after him. And she became preoccupied with the, the possibility that she might have a stroke.
And then lo and behold, suddenly she loses the power in her legs and she's successfully rehabilitated by by Russell Reynolds using sort of a 19th century approach, which is essentially a kind of multidisciplinary rehabilitation with a mix of physiotherapy and, and, and psychotherapy. And that's certainly a kind of imaginative preoccupation with an illness, a set of symptoms can bring it into being. You kind of you. You predict your own your your
affliction in into existence. I remember reading a book by a neurologist I think recently it was called Is It All in My Head? And there was a big exploration on on like social contagions. And I think there was recently, like on TikTok, there were like influencers who were, that had Tourette's syndrome and they were kind of exploring their Tourette's, their symptoms. And then like users who didn't have Tourette's started developing Tourette's symptoms, which is a like a psychogenic
disorder in that case. Yeah, we're very good learners, aren't we? We're, we're, we're, we're very, we're we're a highly imitative, highly mimetic species. It's it's, it's often to our advantage. But in this particular context, it can be to our disadvantage. And just to re emphasize, most people with functional neurological disorder are just as puzzled as as their doctors
are. So it's, you know, it it, it's not a deliberate simulation, it's the the processes which give rise to it are happening somehow below the threshold of consciousness as as a rule. Yeah, I mean, I remember it was like 10 years ago when I developed low back pain for several months, and it was beyond my understanding. I got through everything at it, you know, from physical therapy to psychotherapy. And it turns out just the intense preoccupation with it, with my back, with the pain was
driving the disorder. And I wonder too, if you want to talk about some curative elements here which you've explored, which is just the power of distraction, pulling yourself out of the preoccupation, the fixation, the focus can in and of itself be curative. I, I've said this before to someone, to a friend where they had always had like GI symptoms, very much like irritable bowel syndrome. They said, like they are always very kind of aware of their guts.
They're all, they're always just kind of focused on it, you know, and, and I wondered out loud, like, could that have something to do with it? Could you try to forget it? Could you try to break that? Could you try to uncouple that? And that in and of itself might be helpful. And that just more or less falls on deaf ears, unfortunately. You know, it is a it is a good insight and actually could be very therapeutic, but it's just not helpful.
I'm sure you experience this all the time in clinic, which is. You need to find some positive strategy. So there are many examples in in treatment of a functional
neurological disorder. I think 1 I mentioned in the book a colleague treated a patient who had become honest unable to to walk but forwards, but when asked to walk backwards, found you could do so and asked to imagine skating, found you could do so. I have a lovely video of of another the young teacher who'd become unable to walk but when she was put on a treadmill found she could run. So as soon as, as soon as the activity was very little in a way which. Did that break the spell?
Yeah, it broke the spell. It broke the spell. And they could walk again. With with a bit of from a physio yeah yeah. So full recovery is entirely, entirely possible, but you need, you need skilled help from people who understand the, the mechanisms of, of this kind of process and, and you, and what you don't need is to be told that it's all in your head and you should put yourself together
because that doesn't work. That's very invalidating, and it tends to drive people away, I think, from the healing process. Yeah. The last part of the conversation is, is, you know, you putting together a book, You said you thought about this many years ago before you even started studying a Fantasia. I just wonder, you know, how was the experience of going from clinician and research scientist to writing Popular Science? Like, why not everybody makes that leap. You did.
How was it and and why did you want to do it? So I, I love writing. I came, I, I have a way of background in literature that was a particular interest at school. So I've always been very, very happy to, to have opportunities to write. I've written a couple of books previously, one about consciousness and another kind of introduction to the brain level by level from atom to psyche with a case history at each level of description. So I knew, I knew that I enjoyed
writing. This particular book had been in my mind probably for 20 years and I've had one or two full starts. And I think actually COVID was a help with it because I, I had a little bit more, more time than usual and was able to focus on it in a way I'd, I'd not before.
As you say, the Adventasia Adventasia work wasn't the initial trigger, but it, but it helped, I think, because it, it meant that I was thinking about imagery and imagination in my research as well as in my sort of more philosophical moments at leisure. And I, I enormously enjoy writing. I'm always happiest when I have something to tinker with. I think it's a bit like having a shed at the bottom of the garden, isn't it?
You can, you can take yourself off and lose yourself in in the project in a very therapeutic way. Even if we don't get all the things we want, like we can only make art for money or that's all we can do, or we don't achieve the level of, you know, notoriety that we might want, we have something to do. We have somewhere to go to put our mind to forget about our problems.
That in and of itself is medicine, and perhaps one reason why we make art is to make life a little easier to live and or at least forget about how hard it can be. It allows moments of flow which which are very rewarding. It's, it's intrinsically rewarding, isn't it? Yeah. And I think it was the creativity researcher Mikhail Chiksen.
Yeah, he wrote a famous book on creativity and this Ted talk, he talked about how the more moments of flow you have, the happy you are scientifically to kind of close, maybe close with a bit of lessons you learned from exploring human imagination. So much of this exploration is like the double edged sword nature of it all.
We can dislocate ourselves from the present, which allows us to plan and, you know, you know, imagine future scenarios, but it can also lead us Into Darkness. We can become preoccupied with traumatic events and so on and so forth. So how do we get a better control on our imagination? How can we get the best of it without while avoiding our our pitfalls? I wonder if you thought about
that in the process. Yeah, I mean, that's really a general question about mental hygiene really, rather than imagination specifically. I think, I think we just, we, we all of us have somehow to, to walk this, this tightrope. We need, we all of us need satisfaction in the present. We all of us need to enjoy the here and now. But I don't think any human life would be complete if we were entirely immersed in the present. We need to have a a sense of where we come from and where we
are going. So we somehow need to apportion our lives between present enjoyment and long term
possibility. I agree with what you said earlier about the, the kind of toggling that we all learn to achieve in, in creative pursuits between a receptive state in which we, we, we kind of lower a bucket down into the, into the well of our unconscious and a more active state in which we, we examine what comes up and see what kind of use we, we, we can make of it. And I guess we have to toggle in the same way between present enjoyment and longer term projects. So I think it's a it's a big
human challenge. I don't think there's any simple simple answer. Oh no, you've picked a very complicated topic so there is no simple answer. It kind of makes me think of maybe what meditation is for. It's the idea of just getting a like a look at your own mind, watching it, so to speak. Watch the watcher.
Developing that awareness of yourself and your own thinking processes maybe is a goal here so that you can see, oh, maybe I've been spending a little too much time dislocated from the present, or maybe I should be in my head a little bit more using it, using its powers. But to just see both, to just see where you are in the proportions and if I had. Any key takeaways, insights from from the the the research that the book involved? And I, I think there, there were
two things really. One, I am, you know, as we all should be hugely impressed by the astonishing creativity of human minds. It's human creativity is irrepressible and we're surrounded by it. And it's, it really is, is something to celebrate. And at the same time, I, I'm, I was impressed by the, the ubiquitous creativity of our experience moment to moment.
So I really, I, I really do believe that even if we're not at all engaged in, in creative pursuits, we are performing a kind of active creation in every moment of our lives. And I was, I closed the book with a, a graffiti which I came across as I was jogging through London. I was sort of musing on, on the book's themes. And I just found this on, on a wall.
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in distress, the shining light of your own being written, I think, by an Iranian poet in the 15th century or so. So I I do believe all of us contain a kind of shining light which underlies our creative experience of the world from moment to moment. And if we had a better kind of complexity detector in our heads, we'd be astonished by the complexity that each of us contains within. Within his head, or her head I
should say. I literally was going to read that that quote out. It's great. Great way to to conclude it. It makes me think of the Camus code. I think, you know, in a, in a, in a winter, there is a, an infinite light or infinite summer or something like that. Yeah. And what are you working on next?
These imagery extremes. So I'm I'm planning to write a book about Adventasia and Adventasia, which have opened all kinds of interesting windows which which I want to decline through very much enjoying my conversations with people who lack imagery or or have it in in abundance. I think it's it's a topic which takes you rather quickly to a quite intimate place in people's lives. In how they perceive the world and how it differs and that there was variation we we weren't aware of.
Basically we thought we all thought the same. Turns out that was that was not right. Let us know where we can get your book. Let us know where we can follow your work and find you online. I think from from next week it's it's the the shape of things unseen. A new Science of Imagination will be published in Pick back in February. You can't visit a personal website.
I have an academic one. The work on extreme imagery has been under the auspices of the Eyes Mind Project as we've called it, so there is an Eyes Mind Project website, University of Edinburgh, so if you're interested in finding out more about that particular line of work, you'll find plenty there. Well, I'm looking forward to your next book. I, I can't wait to read it. And thank you so much for coming on to talk about The Shape of Things Unseen. And I really appreciate your time.
I. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Doctor Adam Zeeman. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with someone and starting a conversation. And if you've got a minute, I've got a new survey up and I'd love your feedback on the show. Just head to www.curiouslypod.com/survey. Tell me what you like, what you don't like, what you want more of, what you want less of, or read every response and there's a good chance your feedback will shape future episodes.
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