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