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 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 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 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 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 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 human universals. It never even strikes us that other people might be having a different reality.
And this is.
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 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.
I got a lot of emails about this.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Then he said that he felt relieved because he was always a little worried that something was.
Wrong with him.
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.
It's like the mind blind eye.
Which is a phrase that's frequently used when people write about.
It, A blind mind's eye, right.
Yeah, blind mind's eye. So uh. And I never really liked the term because.
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.
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 understood about a fantasia?
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 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 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.
Again.
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 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 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.
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.
And what percentage of population are we looking at? That has a fantastic Yeah.
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
questionnaires is actually under undermeasuring the total number. Yeah, so I think it's a little bit higher. Sounds right.
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.
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 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 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 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
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.
It a clear enough effect that you can just ask somebody when they tell you that there are fantastic you can see, hey picture?
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.
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
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?
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 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 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.
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 why really good artists and animators like a Pixar, maybe why why a fantasics are more likely to become good artists.
This is just the dumb hypothesis.
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 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.
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.
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 you still get a very similar outcome.
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.
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 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. 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 auditory a fantasia are very very rare.
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.
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 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.
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.
And it's just each one.
It is felt to me is sort of a random toss of those. But have you found clustering that.
Yeah, I mean the multisensory across the board is the largest group really that and pure visual but that's probably a bias.
And by that you mean someone who has a fantasia across all the sensors.
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 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.
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 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.
Yeah, nicely put. You should write a book.
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.
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
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?
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.
And one of the questions with literature is if you just read some passage.
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.
Interesting way, independent of how the first person second, how the book's written exactly.
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 just one of you know, eight different ways that you can get through any problem.
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 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
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.
And I assume it's the same if they're listening to an audiobook.
I think, so we haven't done that with the audio yet, but interesting, Yeah, it.
Seems like it would be if the problem is actually visualizing what's going on.
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.
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.
Yeah, and you.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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 to be accurate.
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 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.
Yeah.
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.
A different way to perceive reality.
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.
Sorry, Yes, So alexithymia is this condition where people sort of have a lack of emotional response or they feel less emotion.
And they're not very good at diagnosing themselves others.
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 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, 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. 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.
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.
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 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. 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 spatial layout of things seems almost perfectly maintained despite the object imagery not being there. Yeah, exactly so.
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, 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. I just but I have a clear sense of three dimensional space, and.
Are they points in space or are they just space existing?
I feel like more it's just space existing which is what I assume Ed has as well, because he probably told you.
But you know, he first started.
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.
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?
Yeah, my entire life.
This thing about count sheep to go to sleep.
I didn't understand. But can you do that?
I mean, are you able to picture sheep as such?
Yeah?
I can?
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.
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.
What have you found about creativity?
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
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.
Give us an example of conversion thinking.
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 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 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.
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.
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, 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, 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.
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 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.
I think, so, have you ever done the float tank?
I haven't.
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, 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.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.
On and on.
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 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 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
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.