From the Vault: Burned from the Mind’s Eye, Parts 1 & 2

we get into the ring. We talked about some real strange para psychology research. We talked about vision and I remember this being a lot of fun. All right, let's dive right in. Welcome Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Alow your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's October. So we're continuing with our Halloween spooky, ghostly kind of theme, and today we wanted to explore a somewhat ghostly topic that ties into neuroscience to stuff we've talked about recently on the Invention Podcast with the history of photography. But before we get into that, I wanted to start with a question to kind of orient us here, And that question is, what is it that makes somebody skilled at

an art like realistic drawing or realistic sculpture. I should say, by the way, I am not skilled at this at all. I cannot draw realistically for the life of me. In fact, when I try to draw pictures of people, it's the it's a source of great amusement to Rachel. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm the same way. I can. I can draw a pretty mean goblin, but um, I can't really draw a human.

My my son whose seven, is already a better better artist when it comes to depicting actual human beings than I. But obviously so a huge part of what's going on here is is practice, right, you gotta learn techniques. But another part of this I think could just be thought of as some kind of motor power of translation, Like how do you take an image represented in your brain and it's in your brain either way, whether you're currently looking at it or calling up out of a memory

or an imagination. Either way, the images coming from your brain, and then it's being translated somehow through a series of hand motions into a physical object in the world, whether that's a sculpture, painting, or drawing. Like, there's some kind of skill there that I think remains ineffable to us. It's mysterious. Sometimes it's even kind of spooky because we don't understand what's happening with that translation process. But what

if there were no translation process? What if there were no way for clumsy arms and hands and failures of technique to impede the physical manifestation and of what you've got in your mind's I what if we could just project the objects of the mind's eye directly onto the physical world. Would such a thing be possible? And if so, would such a power be in a way terrifying, sort of godlike in the worst and most ancient sense. Ah, And here you're getting into the uh, the Halloween aspects

of this topic. This is the reason that we have decided to approach this during the month of October, exactly because this power does show up in horror fiction. One place that you might have encountered it is in the books or the movies. Uh. There have been several different series at this point, but The Ring, the story of The Ring, the the scary ghost girl who can print media with her brain. She can psychically print images onto photographs or onto o the wall of a barn, or

onto a videotape. She can just make a videotape without filming it, just straight out of her mind's eye. Of course, this played up for horror in the film, and I I sort of stand by taking it in that direction. I think if anybody actually had this power, it would be horrifying, and it would be it would be a little irritating to everyone who's has put a lot of time and effort into honing their craft. Right, Um, so it's possible you're you're familiar with The Ring via Gore

Rabinski's two thousand and two remake The Ring. This is where I saw it for the first time. But you also may have seen it by watching the original Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata. This came out in and I severely hope that if you, if you did see the original Japanese version back in the late nineties, you watched it on a crumb a dubbed VHS, because that would be most appropriate, right, because either way, if

you haven't seen the movies or read the see. The original Japanese movie was also based on a book by by Koji Suzuki, but in any case, the story is about a cursed videotape that is made by this ghost girl. She uses the psychic power of projecting her thoughts directly onto media to make a videotape that kills the people who watch it. Yeah, a curse videotape containing disturbing it's basically a disturbing surrealistic art video kills you in seven days. So there's kind of a uh what do you call

in the medicinal terms, uh, delayed react effects effects. Uh. It takes that alone to work through your system, you know, time to release. Sometimes artists like that it's time released. You know, you go, you want to see it at the museum, and you're like, I don't really know what what I how I feel about this or or you know, how I think about this piece and how it relates to me, and then seven days later it kicks in

and you die. Uh weird, look at it, fist. But yeah, this is basically an update of a very old notion, right of a haunted object, or of haunted media, only instead of a dark and magical book instead of something like you know, the Necronomicon or you know the Book of Sand or any of these other treatments. We have a dark and magical video recording and it unleashes a world of terror and death. It's an inherently compelling idea

in horror. I think actually some piece of media, whether it's a book or now a movie, I think there there's some There's Stephen King's story with like a painting that kills you or something. There's the representage Herror, and it's one of one of King's best short stories. I highly recommend. I agree. Maybe that is what I was thinking of. That is a fantastic story. Um, but yeah, I mean obviously the idea of like a a work of art or something that cannot be experienced without cursing

or killing you. Yeah, that's scary. It's also fertile ground for any kind of metaphor that the artist wants to sew about, you know, about art itself, and art does have an effect on us. I mean, there's an old episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind where Julie and I discussed Stendahl syndrome and some of its related alleged syndromes. You know, it deals with the reality that, yes, sometimes times great works of art, Uh. You know, with great works of art with appropriate priming, UH can overwhelm us,

can have a physical reaction on us. So uh you know it's it's not unrealistic. Um. Yeah, you know. I want to say about the gor Verbinsky remake of The Ring, well, I don't inherently love the idea of just like American remakes of foreign films just to sort of americanize it, because it had only been like a few years since the original film had been made at that point, and they americanized the heck out of it exactly. But at the same time, one thing I will defend about it

is it is a very um visually imaginative film. Like it's got great creepy abstract imagery in it. Oh yeah, great, great visuals, great performances, uh, and wonderful special effects. Uh. That remake I remember really had an effect on it. Was so the last time a horror film like made me sleep with the lights on. Uh. So I look back fondly on it for that reason. However, I have to say certain aspects of the film stuck with me

and others. I kind of forgot about. Like some of you might be like, oh, yeah, I guess that girl did write video tapes with her mind like that I kind of forgot about. I also kind of forgot that it had this that it's essentially adoption sploitation horror, not the only yeah, basically, yeah, basically, because the whole idea is that this this couple that adopts this child, and

the child is troubled, and I forgot that she was adopted. Yeah, So you know, I have a very queasy attitude towards that kind of horror at this point in my life. For sure, totally. But but still those are the things I tend to forget about it. I remember, you know, those scenes with Samara Um climbing out of the television with the creepy walk where they think they filmed her backwards and then made it go forwards. I remember, I think Hans Zimmer did the music, and it's very effective

horror music. Um. And then on and then on the on top of that, you have some performances. Uh, did you ever see the sequel? I did spoil it all as I saw it in the theater even um and I don't recommend it, but but no, it's a it is a film that is still both films are considered classics in their own way, and I think they earned that that reputation just if nothing else, by just scaring us so terribly and really connecting with our relationship with media.

And at that time it was it was dealing with the VHS and UH and and and how we were connecting with with this kind of you know, physical media. And I should say also, you know, getting into that

idea of finding weird things, finding weird footage. And at that point it was most of us through like tape trading or I guess as to a certain extent, downloads, but I definitely remember ordering up like weird dubs of the Japanese laser disc of say um El Topo or Holy Mountain, and there was this weird you know, well, you know, you have you're not really sure exactly how

this got to you. You know, what are the hands that dubbed it from this format to this format and then re dubbed it here and then finally it's in my hands. I think that is actually one of my favorite types of story forms for horror is the the creepy found piece of media. I can remember One of my favorite horror short stories I've read in a long

time was won by Laird Baron. I think it's called Mysterium Tremendum, where the narrator of the story you just finds this travel guide and I think some weird use bookstore or something, but it turns out to be a nefarious sort of magic travel guide that leads to very dark places. So yeah, I love that nowadays though, and maybe they do this, and I think maybe they did

this one of the recent Ring movies. It's like, essentially, it's gotta be on YouTube, which takes the punch out of it because it's like, you have the dark media, but then the dark media is on an even more deplorable social media you know, bum or format. But it also takes away the ironic distance that makes the horror fun because YouTube just will melt your brain and kill you. It doesn't it doesn't need any like horror upgrades. The real actual YouTube is just waiting to destroy you at

the moment. Yeah, though it is. I it is kind of comforting to think that that all the commentators at the bottom of the Ring video then YouTube died seven days later. So like the guy says that WTF is disreal? Yes, yes, as long as we're just talking about the Ring, though the American remake, we should point out again that that cast is tremendous. Um talking about Samara. Her mom is played by Shannon cochrane who plays who played Pam's mother on the Office, and then her father is played by

Brian Cox, the legendary Brian Cox. Brian Cox one of my favorite actors of all time. He he kind of makes the movie and in the the the the young actor playing Samara herself. I don't know if we said Samara is the ghost Girl and the Ghost Girl, she's Samara and the American version, and she's a Sedaco in the Japanese version, so that the name changes. But anyway, in the in the even the remake, Devey case Chase,

I hope I'm saying her name right. Uh. This actor played Samara, and she also voiced Lilo in Lilo in and Stitching Disney film about the you know, the the alien visiting Hawaii. Going to her IMDb page is hilarious because I found out she also is the girl in the Sparkle Dance Troupe in Donnie Dark and she's the voice of the main character in the in the English

dub of Spirited Away. Ah, yeah, the Manzaki film great. Okay, So, first of all, the idea that Samara can create a surrealistic film that she can pour like all the the nihilistic misanthropic visions in her head into a videotape and make it so potent that it can kill people, either just through the sheer power of the art or you know,

probably through some sort of supernatural um you know whatever. Uh. That's a really cool trick and one that I would think could have been put to much more profitable use, right, Um, Like, why isn't there a sequel where like the U. S Military ends up acquiring Samara Like it, that would be great because since she ends up killing all the like the evil mk Ultra gate dudes, it basically rights itself, right, but sort of a crossover with The Ring and Stranger

Things would have been. Yeah. Now to to go a little deeper though, I think in a way this concept really really works though, Like you can think of any creative endeavor, especially filmmaking, as an attempt to bring that ideal image that mentally imagine your head into the world, and of course for a number of reasons we generally don't succeed in pulling that off. And part of the reason, of course, is that is that the idea in our mind is rarely as fully formed as we think it is.

I think that's exactly right. I mean an experience I definitely have when writing, and I think you've said you have this before, is I don't necessarily know what I'm going to write until I start writing, Like if I'm writing a scene in fiction, you know like that it's the process of writing that helps bring out the content. Yeah, exactly. Uh, you know in other issues coming to play as well,

in the final version perhaps feels a bit lacking. So you know, you can forgive a lot of us we we wonder, you know, imagine how perfect it would it would have been if you've been able to simply beam your vision directly onto a video tape. You don't have to worry about casting it where you're gonna film all your weird art, film your artifacts. How are you going to get that that chair to go upside down? No, you can just beam it directly onto the onto the

tape um. And so maybe the power then of your vision would be so pure and uncut that it would just literally slay table. Well, I like that, But on the other hand, I mean, I think it's sort of trying to imagine. This highlights the unreality of what it is you're trying to imagine. I mean, I feel like our image of the thing we want to create is never really fully formed, even when it seems like it is.

I wonder if even people who have extremely vivid mental imagery can actually see a full completed painting that they haven't finished painting yet. Uh and and and not just sort of like see glimpses of little bits of color and shape that that ultimately add up to something concrete and finalized once you've you know, translated through your hand movements into that painting. I kind of doubt that people can actually see a full painting that they haven't painted yet, right.

And maybe we may be part of his linguistic you know, like we we tend to say. A sculptor might say, I see the horse trapped in this block, and I wish to free it. I'm just going to remove all the pieces around the finished piece that I envisioned within it with In reality, it's more like I see the inspiration for the thing that I am going to create, yeah, a kind of fuzzy, low resolution suggestion of the thing that you will create maybe, Yeah, And then comes the

hard work. Then comes the talent, uh, and the skill. One more one more thing about the Ring, and then I'll I'll mostly let it go. But ultimately, what is the message of this film? It's seen because basically the whole plot is, oh, this these tanks are killing people? Why is it killing people? Always? Because of this little girl that died? And then they go on this question like, oh, we can set her spirit free, should be happy, and everyone will be saved, and then you realize, oh, no,

that doesn't work because she can't be saved. She's just evil to the core, and everybody's gonna keep on dying. Right. Well, but they do figure out a way to get around the curse, which is just keep passing it, keep spreading it. So right, if you spread the curse to more people,

she won't kill you. Yeah, basically the plot of of it follows as well, right, but yeah, but ultimately in the Ring, well, you only get temporarily spared, and it follows, right, But then I think in the Ring they acknowledge what happens when like you know that didn't mind come back to them as well. But maybe that's in the sequels. No, No, I think that was it was kind of at least hinted at in the first Yeah. I don't really trying

to think about the sequels. But but ultimately, like the messages, don't try to help people, don't try and fix the world, like everybody's gonna that's so just so bleak and nihilistic. Uh, maybe it's just too bleak and nihilistic for me now. It's the kind of thing I would have loved when I was younger. But but yeah, that's such a harsh way to land it, isn't it. Yeah, Um, it's not an inspiring story on close examination. But but I do still stand by a lot of the visual imagery in

the film, which I think holds up really well. And Brian Cox is just an absolute treat absolutely. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break when we come back. We're going to move on from just discussing the Ring in general, and we're going to discuss this this thing that she is supposed to do, this idea that a mind could somehow imprint an image on something or in

something or in like on Cape on Film. Uh, and it's gonna be one of these topics that I think, you know, draws in from a number of past episodes of both stuff to blow your mind and invention. All right,

we're back. So we're exploring the topic of kick photography, or just generally being able to print the mind's eye into some manifestation in the physical world without going through any kind of normal motor translation process like drawing with your hand or explaining a mental image with your mouth, just printing the mind's eye directly onto film or onto a piece of paper. Yes, and this is a topic that if you're if you're already thinking, well that just

sounds silly. Um, well, hang with us, because you know, ultimately, I I think it's pretty safe to say this is not actually occurring. This is not a power that human beings actually have. But but by looking at it and considering, like how we get to this point of thinking that it's possible in some cases, Uh, you know what it reveals about our relationship with our own mind and considerations of our own mind and mental states, as well as

our understanding of photography itself. Yeah, this episode made me keep thinking back to the series on photography that we did on our other podcast, Invention, which if you're not subscribed yet, go subscribe to Invention. That's right, it's a journey through human techno history. And yeah, we did a whole series on photography, also stuff before photography, like the camera obscura, and then also on motion picture technology afterwards. And really, you know, we can't, uh you know, overstate

the degree to which photography changed the world. It changed the way we thought about the world, how we thought about ourselves. It gave us new metaphors for uh, you know, thinking about our own minds and how we're perceiving the world. And uh also arguably made the modern celebrity possible. Uh so we can lay that crime at its feet as well, but it also lent itself well to a number of pseudo scientific ideas and ultimately downright occult notions about what

photography was and what it might capture. Well. Sure, because if you are, say, somebody who is adamant that there is a type of reality that we can't normally see, a very commonplace to go to try to find bits of evidence of that reality that we can't normally see is some kind of objective recorded media. I mean, I think about the people who do e VP ghost recordings

electronic voice phenomena. Again, this is not something that I think is real evidence of ghosts, but a lot of people think, Okay, you know, I take my tape recorder to a haunted graveyard and I just leave it going, and then I play it back and in through the static and the rustling in the wind, I hear voices saying things. If I can be psychological for a minute, I think what's mostly going on is that drawing from objective recording media like that allows people to generate the

noise into which they can read a signal yes. And of course photography when it was new, provided a whole new way of doing something like this, right, And then other technologies that were coming out around, you know, in the same era we all said the X ray, which we also have an episode of Invention about which deals with invisible um, you know, processes, you know, invisible rays, an invisible world, and and also was a big game

changer and how we we thought about reality. Sure, So I was reading a little more about this, and I ran across a two thousand five book titled The Perfect Medium by Shiro at All, and it it gets into the intersections between the occult and photography, which are numerous, numerous, but the author's point out that they generally generally fall into three categories. First of all, photographs of spirits, in which a spirit entity shows up in the photograph. I

think we're mover with examples of this, uh uh. And then another is photographs of mediums in which the spirit medium, which is a you know, human like us who is leading a seance or something, is doing something supernatural. Okay, so it might be like a photograph that shows that during a seance this medium was levitating, or that this medium, during some kind of session was generating ectoplasm, right, And

that's the next one. Photographs of fluids and and this one is interesting because the obvious subject matter here is exoplasm, some weird substance emerging from the individual, and in reality it's generally wet sheep's cloth or or something like that. Uh. And it's easy to just think of this as ghost slime and a ghostbuster's fashion. Maybe we should explain ectoplasm

just a little bit more so. It was this phenomenon where a medium would claim that they can generate some kind of physical manifestation of the spirit world that shows up when you take a picture of them in the dark. Maybe uh, and it would yeah, so it would look like some kind of weird cloth or slime beside their head or on their body, like like a big like mucus something like. No, it doesn't even generally it just looks like some sort of weird mucasy cloth they got

slimed or slimber exactly. I mean, that's where that comes from. But it's also a bit more more complex in this society and the fluids in these photographs, as Sharrow and I'll point out, you know, it's dealing with this the idea that you're capturing a sense of the vital force, the soul, the thoughts, feelings, dreams, etcetera. All this directly captured on a photographic plate without the use of a

camera in some cases. So it has a strong connection to what was going on at the time and observation of X rays and radioactivity. They point out that in France, so Luis darg and others quote sought to photograph their own vital energy or thoughts simply by placing their fingers or foreheads on the census eze plate. Despite numerous refutations by scientists who demonstrated that the traces thus obtained were no more than photographic artifacts arising out of the experimental

conditions themselves. Attempts to record human fluids continued throughout the twentieth century. And so this these fluids would not just be like blood or something, that would be these these spiritual fluids. Yeah, and it gets beyond just like mere fluids and into also things like horrors. Um so in other words, and then people still do photographing as absolutely

that's like big business. Yeah, so, you know, in other words, in the midst of all this what was essentially future shock, you know, uh, at this emerging technology and the hidden world's exposed through X rays. This idea of capturing thoughts through photography carried a fair amount of weight, no matter what the science said and is still saying about it. So the author's point to to uh to a couple of examples, one of which is the work of Simon

Kurlean in the nineteen forties. Uh. Kurlan, of course, is where we get Kurlean photography. He lived ninety eight, and it's the process in which an image is obtained by the application of a high frequency electric field to an object so that it radiates a characteristic pattern of luminescence that is recorded on photographic film. And it ultimately has to do with moisture and other factors. But but claims were made that it captured some aspect of an individual's health,

their essence, or their vital bodily energy. So there's some kind of like invisible quality they have this showing up when you run this electric current and take a picture, right, And I think it's still factors into some sort of as to some like alternative like new age of systems.

And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I mean, it's ultimately you're you're dealing with something that is perhaps a a what you know, supernatural interpretation of some visual data that you've created, which you know, as long as you're not not you know, claiming that it's scientific, I guess, you know, go for it. Um. It just falls under the domain of of of of of spiritualism and religion. They also point to a man by the name of

ted Sirius, who we will come back to in a bit. Yes, because we before we get to Sirius, we have to explore the origins of this very act that Samara in the Ring is is engaging in. Uh, this idea that human beings are capable not only of photography, which photography in and of itself is an amazing accomplishment. This, this, this much have seemed magic when it was new, Oh, absolutely,

because at least we discussed an invention. You know. It's it's this perfect convergence of of optical expertise and chemical expertise and artistic expertise, all of it coming together in this new way of of of of dealing with the visual world. Um. But then we have this added idea that people can also engage in thought ptography, right, thoughtography. Uh, it goes by several names, now, psychic photography maybe thoughtography, and it's modern origins are I think you could you

could argue that they are in Japan. So I want to talk about a researcher named Fukuai Tomochichi, who is a Japanese psychologist who lived from eighteen sixty nine to nineteen fifty two. He was educated at Tokyo Imperial University in the eighteen nineties. He studied in their philosophy department.

Because this would have been when psychology was brand new there weren't like psychology departments, you know that there there would have been many of the were any at the time, and he received his PhD after doing a dissertation on hypnotism. And according to the History of Japanese Psychology by Brian J. McVeigh, which is my source on most of this about Fukurai, Fukarai played an important role in introducing the work of

the pioneering American psychologist William James to Japanese scholars. Of course, William James would have been a contemporary of Fuguais. James Is The Principles of Psychology came out in eighteen ninety and his lectures which became the Varieties of Religious Experience, which we've talked about a number of times on the show. That those happened around nineteen o one and nineteen o two, I think, But so this would have been around the same time that Fukurai was working and uh and doing

his dissertation and doing his early research. Now, according to McVeigh, Fukarai also published work on the subject of education, and he became a lecturer and an associate professor in the field of abnormal psychology, which today we would just call the study of mental illnesses and he so he was a lecturer at Tokyo and Real University on these subjects. But from here his interests apparently took a turn for the paranormal. So, beginning sometime around nineteen ten, Farai became

extremely interested in spiritualism, especially in the subject of clair voyance. Now, of course, we should note that he would not have been alone in this at the time. Interest in spiritualism, mediums, and the paranormal enjoyed extreme popularity and elite circles all around the world at this time. Now today, clair voyance is usually understood to be a special kind of psychic power.

Common definition of it is quote the supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact. Now, like a lot of psychic concepts, I see claire voyance invoked to refer to a sort of a broad range of things. H So I think it can include all manner of cases of remote viewing. So

like seeing things that are hind physical barriers. You know, you shouldn't be able to see through the closed door into the next room, but you can seeing things that are far away, you know, maybe seeing things that are happening in another country, seeing things that are separated in

time in the future or the past. Uh, And sometimes but less often, seeing things that can't normally be seen at all, such as spiritual essences or the contents of other people's thoughts, or otherwise having knowledge that you just

couldn't acquire by normal means. Now, of course, it's worth noting that all of these things as psychic phenomenon, they are basically exaggerations of things that the human mind does through um, you know, through mental time travel, for instance, imagining what the future will be like, or remembering what the past was. The idea of not being able to see through a wall into the next room and see what's going on there, but perform but you know, conceiving

a mental picture of what it might be like. Like for instance, there's another recording studio here or in the office. I cannot see in there with my mind, but with my mind I can imagine that the guys from stuff they don't want you to know are in there right now recording something. But you cannot imagine what they are doing. But I can form a pretty basic idea that of setting around a table talking it will not fit in your brain. When they're doing it's it's it looks just

like what we're doing. This the subject matter is slightly different. But but at any rate, what I'm saying is I can form a pretty good idea, but I know that that is just my brain creating a simulation of my environment, right. But I mean, I think a lot of this clairvoyant stuff hinges on the concept of generating accurate knowledge. It's like all the stuff we can do with our imagination,

except they can do it to see reality. Um And the kind of clear voyants that Fukurai was most interested in I think would be covered by the first two categories of things I said, so mostly like seeing things that are far away and seeing across physical barriers. According to McVeigh, he was focused on something called toshi, which meant something like seeing through, as in seeing through barriers,

and on syndrigan, which meant the far seeing eye. And in this parapsychology phase of his life, Fukurai was aided

by another Japanese researcher named Imamura Shinkichi. Now Fukuai studied a reputed Japanese clairvoyant named Mfuni Chizuko and another named Nagao Ikuko, and McVeigh writes that in nineteen ten, Fukurai performed a series of experiments in front of a panel of scholars and experts that he believed would demonstrate Mfuna Chizuko's power to read out written messages even after they had been sealed inside envelopes and then placed inside lead containers,

and apparently an attempt to replicate these experiments the following year in nineteen eleven was not as successful as Fukurai and Mfuni had hoped, and a lot of people considered that Fugarais research was clearly misguided After some failed demonstrations and he in his supposed clairvoyant subjects like Nigau and mfune were criticized in the press, and at least I think it's implied that partially as a result of these failures in subsequent criticism, McVeigh writes that both mufuney and

Nigau Ikuko committed suicide in the year nineteen eleven, but before I've also seen another cause of death attributed to Nagaikuko, so I'm not sure about that, But McVeigh says that that she also died by suicide. But before she died in nineteen eleven, Nagaikuko appeared to demonstrate a novel form of psychic power that fascinated Fukurai, and this was apart from traditional clairvoyance. This was the power that Fukurai called ninsha,

which would have roughly translated as thoughtography. The Japanese term ninha comes from the combination of nin meaning like sense or feeling, and shah meaning picture, and in concrete terms, this just means that Fukua I believe that Nigau had the power to use her mind's eye to expose a draw I played a photographic film, essentially burning her thoughts directly onto the physical substrate, the same way that light

prints and image onto a piece of film. After Mifunei and Nagau died, Fukurai continued his research and he published a book about clairvoyance and photography in nineteen thirteen, which was widely criticized as credulous and unscientific, and fugura I eventually lost his university position moved on to other things that he apparently continued to be interested in paranormal research

well into his retirement in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. Um. One weird thing is Before he was publicly ridiculed and ousted from his position at Tokyo University, Fugaray was considered an elite scholar at the head of Japanese psychology. He was not, you know, just some crank writing pamphlets in his basement. He was. He was a top scholar, and

his his academic exile had consequences. I was reading in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology Global Perspectives by David B. Baker that, in action to the Fukarai affair, a new head of the psychology department at Tokyo Imperial University decided that the department could rehabilitate its reputation by only focusing on quote normal psychology, ignoring both of fucharais areas of study meaning parapsychology like the study of psychics

and quote abnormal psychology, which again would amount to the study of mental illness. Uh. Now, of course, saying we're not going to study mental illnesses is a huge limitation on academic psychology, which the authors right in this book a quote stunted the rise of clinical psychology and pre

war Japan. Yeah, absolutely though, because, yeah, studying an mental illness is a way not only of understanding how to trade mental illness, but also to understand, like what, you know, how the mind is functioning in individuals who are are not experiencing mental illness, right, I mean it. It provides

a frame of reference. Yeah, A lot of the For example, a lot of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of psychology have come from studying patients who have brain injuries or legions some kind that like they show you how the brain changes when certain or how the mind changes and how behavior changes when certain physical changes are made to the brain. And of course, I I've seen it alleged by a number of writers that the stories of people like me Funi Chizuko and Nagai Kuko inspired the

fictional ghost in the original Ring by Suzuki Koji. I don't know if that's uh correct, but it's at least been alleged that there's some threat of inspiration there um. And you know, I want to be a little bit sympathetic to Fukurai and consider the historical context, Like in the year nineteen ten, it was only fifteen years previous that X rays and X ray photography had been discovered. We sort of alluded to this earlier right. The German

physicist Wilhelm Runkin. He discovered X rays by accident in the year eighteen when he was performing experiments with a type of early cathode ray tube, which was an electrical device that shoots a beam of electrons across space inside an evacuated tube from one electrode to another. And Runkin noticed when he was running these experiments he'd put current through the cathode ray tube in the darkened room, it

would make this particular screen in the room. It was a screen of barium platinum cyanide, which is like a type of photographic plate. It would make that glow. And this puzzled him, of course, so he tried to run some more experiments, and he discovered that he could use the cathode ray tube to expose photographic plates inside a completely dark room, except the photos were nothing like anybody

on Earth had ever seen. A human hand placed in front of the tube between the tube and the plate would create an exposure almost completely ignoring the fleshy parts of the hand, but showing the bones hidden underneath the flesh. And when Runkin created an X ray exposure of his wife's hand. She reportedly looked at the images of her bones and said, I have seen my death. Uh yeah. And if you want more about this, we talked about

this in our X ray episode of Invention. But the X ray photo was a radically completely new way of imaging the hidden reality inside the body. It had been discovered almost completely by accident, and it had been only like fifteen years before this. Of course, photography itself was maybe like eighty to ninety years old at the time, And so you add to that the fact that people were proposing all kinds of other hypothetical classes of raise at the time. You remember we talked about in rays.

Those didn't exist, but people were just thinking that they were all kinds of rays we didn't detect or understand yet invisible forces beaming out from one object to another. Um Fukurai was wrong. I think he. I think he was misguided, But I don't think it was crazy at the time, or certainly not as crazy as it seems now to think that the hidden anatomy that governed the mind's eye and the brain might leave some kind of print on a piece of film Via raise projected out

of the head. I don't know, does that make sense to you? Yeah? Yeah, I mean we have to put ourselves in the framework of the time and uh and and and really again in the sense of future shock that would have would have still been resonating and to

a certain extence still resonates. Because I think one of the one of the things that we're going to keep seeing in these episodes is that and I think this was revealed again in our our photography series on Invention, is that photography is a complicated process that brings in uh, you know, at least two different fields the third if you count the artistic world as well, but certainly optics and chemistry and not everyone really has a firm grasp on that like it too. For a lot of us,

it's still kind of feels like magic. A polaroid camera, uh, you know where you know, instantly gives you the images sort of magic. Uh. And when we when we don't understand something completely, it it allows us to engage in uh, unrealistic modes of thought about what is going on with the camera, What is going on with photography? All Right, we're gonna keep talking about all this, but we're gonna take one quick break first. Alright, we're back. So I want to talk just a little bit about this idea

of remote viewing, which which Fukarai was definitely involved in. Yeah, this idea that you know, you could just you could see what's going on in another place, either in another room, another part of the world, sealed envelope, sealed envelope, or

another planet. And you know, another example of an accomplished individual in their field who is also a prominent UH proponent of remote viewing is Atlanta's own Courtney Brown, an associate professor in the Political Science department at Emory University. It also works in non linear mathematics. So we see in Fukarai an interest in hypnosis uh. And then Brown is versed in meditation shan UH. Meditation induced light experiences can occur and have been linked to similar experiences in

sensory deprivation uh. And and I've seen things like that in yoga meditation as well, where you will be you know, you're you're you're seeing lights or shapes or or some sort of imagery that feels as if it is it is arising and it is not called forth. You know what I'm saying like, it doesn't feel like it's something that you are consciously imagining. It doesn't feel like something that is dictated by the default mode network, you know, it doesn't feel like the sort of images um or

thoughts that are normally bombarding our brain. Well, I think about how often in psychedelic experiences people talk about believing they have encountered an other where if you just I mean, you know, it's impossible to know for sure, but it seems like probably what's going on is they're having an internal experience with their own brain. But there are some types of experiences that we've just for whatever reason, feel

our exogenous. It feels like it's coming from outside you, right, and so with with the right amount of of priming, expectation, and ultimately consolidation, Like any one of these experiences, be it something that is due to the use of psychedelics or something that is acquired through meditation, hypnosis, etcetera um, because as we've discussed before, like even normal, our normal sensory view of the world is inherently hallucinatory, you know, it is in its in its own way and illusion.

It's not the way things are. It's just like a useful sort of movie that we can interact with the world through. Right. So if you're having an experience like that and it feels real, right, and then you can see how even like certainly very intelligent people, uh can can can come to believe that that they are actually perceiving the reality of a distant location and become very convinced of it. And then certainly if you have a name for this as well, you know, becomes kind of

established in parapsychology. Than than that also helps that gives you even more like priming and conditioning, uh too, in

which to frame this experience. And and also I mean just to go back to psychedelics too, and certainly our episode on psychedelics, like we see that trend uh in the twentieth century, right, this this counterculture emerge, this idea taking shape that secular individuals can have a essentially a mystical experience that is not due to the imachinations of gods or angels, you know, um And and so you know, it's it's not surprising that we see all, you know,

cases like this arising. So I also say on top of that, there's just I think there's a very respectable humility impulse that says like, Okay, you know, we should always accept that there may be forces at work in our day to day surroundings that we don't fully understand. You know, we don't have a scientific theory that accounts for them yet. And I think that's a good thing

to start from. But I think a lot of like parapsychology and paranormal type people jump from there too, because we we should acknowledge that there are lots of things about the world we don't understand yet. Therefore remote viewing is real, you know, or like therefore, you know, you can't discount thoughtography and finding the right balance there, I think is part of the difficulty of living the skeptical life.

You know, you don't want to live a life of denialism where you just like, anytime something is strange, you're unexplained, you just say like, oh, that's nonsense. But at the same time, you want to maintain a high standard of evidence, and that's that's the tightrope walk I guess you've got to do if you want to be a scientific investigator, if you want to try to have the most accurate

view you can of the world. And they're always going to be these edge cases where somebody's presenting you know, evidence that maybe maybe seems compelling for some kind of phenomenon that doesn't really seem like it like it fits with well tested theories that otherwise predict the physical world. And I think that's the case that some of these investigators have run into with psychic photography, especially in the

cases we'll talk about with Ted serious. Absolutely. I should also point out that we always have to remember that the c i A sunk something like twenty million dollars into the Stargate project in the nine nineties and an attempt to ascertain the effectiveness and military potential of remote viewing, and this project was ultimately terminated in remote viewing was found unfruitful to their needs. But maybe it was a conspiracy, No, No, I mean yeah, I tend to think like if there.

I mean, first of all, I've got major objections to remote viewing just on like a plausibility basis. Like you know, again, you can't rule things out just because you don't know the mechanism. But if you've got a pretty good picture of how physics works, and they just you know, their powers proposed that don't seem to fit in any way with any you know, any physical forces that you could identify. That's that should definitely be a red flag to start with.

And then on top of that, I think there are additional plausibility problems with remote viewing, which is like, if it is, if it does exist, why isn't it being

taken better advantage of Yeah? Uh, and that thing said, I do come back to like what I said earlier, like, even though it's not scientifically feasible as far as we understand it, um, you know, that doesn't mean that you know, people shouldn't be interested in it and uh or even you know, practice it, but it needs to be more of I feel like it is more definitely in the line of like a spiritual or religious practice, you know. Um.

But that's my just my two cents on it. And I think that's one of the problems that and we're going to see that with a lot of these these people that are they're claiming these abilities, is they are not presenting them as something that is uh, you know, ultimately like the domain of the spiritual, something that can't

really be proven or disproven. But they're but they're agreeing to test, they're agreeing to uh to uh performances of their ability and in fighting in some cases experts, to to see what they're doing and to to to try and find the problems in it. Uh. So Um, it's something to keep in mind as we've moved forward. All Right, So let's come back to a figure that we've We've mentioned the name already, uh ted Sirius. That's s c

r iOS. Is it serious or Sirios Sirius? With Sirius, well you say that, I'll say Sirius just confusing like serious black Um. So. Sirius lived through two thousand six, and he claimed to be able to create thoutographs on polaroid film. So, um, this is an interesting figure, um

to say the least. So um. I was reading a little bit about this in that in that book The Perfect Medium, paras psychologist Stephen E. Broad writes about him who brought is also a philosophy professor, uh, and he contends that Sirius is photograph fee is perhaps the best documented and perhaps the most impressive. Does he seem a little uh sympathetic to maybe he did have some psychic powers? Um? I mean I encourage everyone to read Broad's work for

themselves because he um. He certainly is more inclined to to criticize some of the the individuals who have been attributed as being like solid debunkers. At the very least, he seems to be saying, look, whatever Ciris was doing, it's not nearly as debunked as you think it is. Um And I'm and he is a para psychologist. He is a para psychologist. So so I want to stress all of that, but it's still an interesting read. He does seem to be more inclined to um entertain the

possibility though. So. Sirius was a Chicago bellhop who had experimented with with hypnosis and uh. He claims that during this time he found that he could use his trying to project images onto camera film in later instant polaroid film. And he apparently demonstrated this to various folks and was quite convincing. And this caught the attention of Denver psychiatrist and researcher Jewel Eisenbudd, who took a strong interest in

his work and conducted numerous trials resulting in hundreds of images. Yeah, and I've read that Eisenbudd is one of the main reasons that people really know about Ted Seriously, he sort of took up the cause like or at least from what I read, Eisenbudd claimed he was initially skeptical of Ted Serious his abilities, but then after spending time with him and seeing his photographs, he he came more and more to believe that these powers were real and that

Serious really could project his mind's eye onto a piece of film. Yeah, Eisenbud at one point believed that Sirius was seeing the essentially remote viewing the surface of the Jovian moon Ghannamede, and then using photography to imply at

that image on onto film. Right, And it gets more complex than that, actually, because I was reading that so Serious apparently made these images that Eisenbudd later said, oh, this is the surface of Ganymede, because he said that Serious was very interested in space exploration and had been thinking about the voyager to probe and that must have been what triggered his generation of this image of the

surface of of Ganymede. But at the time he generated the image, the photographs from the voyager probe had not been taken yet. So I think Eisenbudd is suggesting that if these photos are real, serious actually not only projected his thoughts directly on the film, but also pre cognitively

remote viewed the surface of of wait, precognitively. Well, I guess it wouldn't have mattered whether the voyager probe got there yet he was seeing the surface of the moon before the probe got there, right, And I've seen this in other uh you know, accounts of remote viewing, where they have they have essentially seen other worlds or have

encountered historic figures, that sort of thing. Right now, Another thing worth noting about Cirios here is that is that even eisenbud like points out that that that ted it was definitely an alcoholic and that's sort of part of the thing, but also displayed like a lot of you know, at times kind of like irrational behavior and seemed to have you know, definite uh you know, psychological issues. So

but but anyway, this was basically Sirius is process. So he generally he needed to be drunk, generally very drunk to perform this art, which I mean, I guess that's fair enough, right, I mean, I mean, really even podcasting, I remember when when when we first started podcasting, um, Jerry told us like, have a little to drink before you go into the podcast, but if it'll help. Jerry Ever told me that, well maybe maybe I just look like I needed to drink at the time. I don't know.

But wait, are you serious? Serious? Yeah? I mean I think she's joking. But at any rate, like the idea that you would need a social lubricant to essentially to perform something, um either you know, a legitimate psychic ability, or to perform some sort of a trick, some sort of a um an illusion or even a confidence trick. Right, um, So that's one part of it. Also, he preferred to hold a quota he called a gizmo in his hand to help him focus his powers. And it was a short,

open cylinder about an inch in diameter. And of course this is highly suspicious. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect that the gizmo is either the heart of the trick that he is going to perform, or it's a decoy to distract onlookers from the actual trick.

Because he'd often placed this in front of the camera lens, like he'd get up into the into the camera lens with the gizmo and then also like you know, mugging or the camera, placing his forehead in the way and somehow using the gizmo allegedly to focus his thoughts into the camera. Yeah, he said he needed to connect his body to the camera. Uh. Though there are allegations also that he was able to produce autographs and uh and and actually make images on a camera while being far

away from the camera. That at least is alleged. But he most of the time, it has said, would like put his forehead right on this thing and stick it in the camera camera lyn So, Yeah, raises some red flags, right, But then the idea is that he's essentially taking a snapshot of the mental image that he is forming in

his mind. The be it a mental image that is formed via memory or just sort of general mental imaging, or it's something that is that he has acquired through um uh you know, sending his consciousness to a to the moons of Jupiter. Yeah. And now I read some conflicting reports that sometimes it seems like the images he produced, he claimed, were like not what he was thinking about consciously, but just would be these unconscious kind of associative images.

That's what's suggested by Eisenbud uh, the Galilean moon, right, is that he just had the Voyager two probe on his mind and happened to generate an image of the surface of Ganymede. And so if we're approaching it from the you know, the pro psychic side, we can say, well, that makes sense. The mind is difficult to control. Mental images may form in the mind that you're not trying

to summon. Certainly we can all attest to that. On the other hand, from a purely skeptical point of view, if you're going to be drawn in and put to the test by asking, you know, being asked to think of a particular thing, how convenient would it be if you could say, well, I tried to think of that that that bird feeder that you wanted me to imagine, but I'm just so obsessed with space travel right now,

I give you Ganymede instead, right. I mean that makes that suggests that maybe you've already got an image of something that looks like a moon's surface on hand with you or something, right, And I guess that gets to what the actual trick would be if there is a trick here, which I assume there probably is right now now in that article in the Perfect Medium, A broad certainly focuses on the aspects of Ted's art that kind of continue to mystify, as he mentions, for instance, that

Eisenbudd offered a cash reward for anyone able to replicate Ted's results quote under conditions similar to those prevailing during the during the experiments. Now I've read that there was serious dispute about like them negotiating with skeptics about what would be acceptable for those uh conditions, Like I think I read that James Randy wanted to try to replicate it, but that Eisenbudd said, well, you have to be really drunk,

because Ted is always really drunk when he does it. Yeah, the famous debunker James Randy, who we had the privilege to meet, um but last year. Um. It definitely plays into some of this, And it's kind of if you if you read some of the more pro serious material, Randy's kind of portrayed as a villain. Oh all, Randy is always the villain of some thing written by pro

psychic powers people. Uh so so Yeah, some of these account like brought accountants to highlight the things that were not you know, they're still a little mysterious or or or certainly accounts of replications that don't meet the same degree of replication, Like you weren't able to do exactly what Sirius is doing, therefore you didn't fully debunk him.

I've I've read some of his defenders say, Okay, people have used tricks to replicate what serious was doing, but they couldn't do it without those tricks being evident to people who were watching, right. Um. I mean the other way to think about it is, can I can I paint the Mona Lisa? No? I cannot. Can I demonstrate some of the techniques personally that that that the artists

used to create the Mona Lisa? Uh? Certainly, Uh. We have to take it into account that Sirius, assuming again that he's not a psychic, that he's not a not capable of photography, that he's just a performer, an illusionist, Uh, you know, a trickster, there is still an art to

what he is doing. Uh. There is still a performance aspect of charismatic aspect to it, and their aspects of that that are going to depend in part on like innate charisma, but also in in practice, in in like sheer devotion to to the trick and I think you can't discount that and on likewise, you can't expect a debunker to rise to that level of performance. Well, I

guess you can expect them to try. But I mean that's one thing that you know, as long as we're probing the depths of the unexplained, you could say, well, you know, there's some kind of mystical power that this person has that we just don't have the power to explain it. Or you could say that there's an extreme talent this person has for performing a trick that hasn't

been explained yet. Yeah, because certainly one of the things that would come into play is slight of hand, right, because the main charge is that is that Sirios had it.

Kind of varies. Sometimes they talk of just using the microfilm um or using microfilm affixed to a marble or you know, a film affixed to the end of a tiny tube like inside the quote gizmo that her up against the camera, because that's the obvious, right, is that the gizmo contains something, And if it contains something, some film would be ideal because then you have that pre existing photograph that can be the thing that he imprints.

Um skeptic Karen's Hines also charged that Ted used a secondary tube about one inch long with a tiny magnifying lens that could hold a small slide, and then he would conceal this within the gizmo, but also he could use it when the gizmo was taken away, again getting into that idea that the gizmos not merely useful as something to um to hide the trick, but also can be used as a distraction, can be the thing that, oh, when it's taken away, look I can still do it.

I don't even have the gizmo on me, right, And it was alleged that sometimes he could, I mean usually he used the gizmo, but it's alleged that sometimes he did it without the gizmo. Now, there were a number of expose a s at the time that claimed to show that Ted Sirius was a fraud. The entry in the Skeptics Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll suggests that two amateur magicians and photographers named Charlie Reynolds and David Eisendraft

exposed Serious as a fraud. Basically, they would and spend a weekend with him and jewel Iz and bud and they saw his stuff, and they came to the conclusion that he was a fraud and wrote this up in the article. Uh and Reynolds and Eisendraft claimed to have spotted Serious quote slipping something inside his little gizmo before demonstrations, and they think it was a picture of something that

Sirius wanted to show up in the camera exposure. They also published an article explaining their findings in October nineteen sixty seven issue of Popular Photography. It was a photography magazine. Now, according to the skeptic investigator Joe Nichols account of Serious is confrontation with magicians and sleight of hand experts. Quote. At one point during the session, after an exposure was made, a magician asked to examine the paper tube to see

if there was anything inside. This would be the gizmo, right, the gizmo. Uh. Serious backed away, putting his hand in his pocket. Now that's suspicious behavior. But then, weirdly, during this session, Serious was unable to produce the autographs, so apparently he had been using the gizmo. They said, let me see the gizmo, he wouldn't show it to them, And then none of the pictures came out anyway, there were no autographs. Uh, And he and Eisenbudd blamed the

quote hostile atmosphere for interfering with Serious his powers. This is always a red flag also, I think. But there's still plenty of people, I think, who hold out for psychic photography, claiming that Ted Serious's powers were real and could not be explained. And he's got defenders who say that some of his feats are just impossible to explain.

For example, I was reading claims in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which about a gallery exhibit of Serious as thoutographs which I would like to see that. Oh yeah, I mean they're interesting images, certainly when you know the background for them, especially if you just think about him as works of art, not as like displays

of real psychic powers. Um. But to quote from this article quote, on occasion, volunteers were asked to attend the experiment with a photograph sealed and a cardboard back to Manila envelope. Serious then managed to reproduce the image with no prior knowledge of it. So again, that's like double psychic powers. That's not just the photography, which would be a feat even if he was looking directly at what

the photo should be. Um. But also I guess seeing into this envelope if I'm reading that right, I don't know. That might also be suggesting that they just arrived with it sealed and then showed it to him and he reproduced it. Either way, I mean, if you saw that, I wouldn't say that would prove it was real, but that would be impressive. You know, you'd be like, wow, that that's either real or some impressive trickery. I'd lean

toward the ladder. Um. But in other cases, he apparently managed to produce what appeared to be images of land arcs from up above, like aerial views that his supporters claimed could not be explained through trickery. But it seems like he stopped doing his thing after the late nineteen sixties, which seems a little weird, Yeah, especially consider he lived until two thousand and six. You know, I mean, that's that's a lot of time to not at least not

be publicly doing this displaying this uh this ability. Uh. But then again, UM, you know, we do have to come back to you. The fact that Eisenbud himself wrote that serious was you know, psychologically disturbed. Alcoholic, So you know, you can come up with various, you know, reasons that somebody with that kind of with with those kind of demons would not engage in their art. Now, he wasn't the only one in the later twentieth century to get

in on the psychic photography thing. Over the years, a lot of figures, including Uri Geller, got into psychic photography. One of one of Geller's many demonstrations was that he would leave the lens cap on a camera, placed the camera to his forehead, then take a picture, supposedly saying, you know the same kind of thing. I'm using my mind's eye to imprint upon the film, and then the

photo would reveal whatever he had been imagining. Again, James Randy shows up, as he often does whenever Uri Geller

claims something. James Randy criticized this and other psychic photography is having two main explanations, either using a handheld device to project the image into the camera lens as the photo was taken, or loading the camera with pre exposed film already bearing the desired image, and the latter seems to be the case with a later twentieth century alleged psychic named Matsuaki Kyota, who claimed to be able to produce photographs on film again, and skeptical critics such as

Joe Nicole have pointed out that when Massaaki Kyoto was asked to perform his thoughtography under controlled conditions for a TV crew in London, he couldn't produce the images, and Nicol claims that it was only times when he was able uh to get the film and have it alone one with him, like basically to get hold of the film and have it in a private place before the test, that he could demonstrate his powers, which again makes you think he was doing something to the film before it

was loaded in the camera. Alright, Well, on that note, we are going to have to call it for episode one of this exploration, but we are going to return in a second episode where we're going to continue to explore this idea, like how would it work if this

were possible? Like what what what can we grasp onto in the labyrinth of the human mind and the complexity of our our our sensory perception, but also what can this question reveal about the reality of of mental imagery and how that happens in the brain, Which is fascinating mysterious and even spooky topic on its own, even though we don't necessarily credit the reality of psychic photography. There's a lot of spooky stuff going on when you picture

something right. And we'll probably talk about the Ring a little bit more, and we'll probably bring up a few other film such as Scanners, so hey, be sure to tune in for that episode. Tune in for all of our episodes in October, which are going to be Halloween flavored. Uh and we encourage you again to check out Invention if you haven't already, can find it wherever you get your podcast. You can find the website at inventioned pod

dot com. If you want to support our show, the best thing you can do is rate and review it wherever you have the power to do so, and make sure you have subscribed. Huge thanks as always to our awesome audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact

at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Bla bla bla bla bla bl bl blah blah blah blad. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,

welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two of our discussion of psychic photography the press of the Mind's eye. That's right. We kicked off last episode talking about the ring in which a psychically gifted, disturbed little girl is able to use her the power of her mind to burn images into things, including into the film of a VHS tape. Sure, but all so into all kinds of surfaces, right, Yeah, But but she's

most famous for her her video work is the video artist. Yeah, she's a video artist, true artist and true artist Harrington. Yeah,

so that's where we started out. But we use that then to get into this idea of photography of uh, this this alleged psychic power by which certain individuals were able to use the powers of their mind, uh to either you know, focused mental images into say, undeveloped camera film, or make it so they could like point a camera at their own forehead and take a picture of the interior imaging of their mind. Things of that nature. Yeah.

The idea was that somehow mental imagery, you know, things that you are picturing in your brain, could be projected out onto the world without being translated through you know, you putting them into language or you sketching with a hand. Um. And so I was wondering if you try to take this idea seriously and say, okay, if this really did work, how would it work. I was having trouble coming across

anything that seemed all that plausible to me. Uh, you know, I found one article with somebody's talking about how, well, maybe consciousness is like an electromagnetic field. I'm not sure

if I buy that. But even if you did buy the consciousness as an electromagnetic field, how exactly would that translate into you thinking about an image physically pressing the image onto a thing outside your brain, Because there's no reason to think that the electromagnetic field would be like a two dimensional image that's the same as the thing

you're picturing. Yeah, and then I mean there's so many problems with it's almost difficult to roll out individual problems, like what would be the evolved necessity of doing that? You know why we would have to just be like an accidental byproduct or something, you know, random mutation? Uh? And then would there be a survival advantage to having that mutation? It gets it gets really sticky, really fast. Yeah, and I think it highlights a kind of like shallow

understanding of what mental image rey is. So yeah, and then specifically what photography is concerning those examples of the photography we discussed in the last episode, Yes, exactly. So I thought maybe we should start today by thinking about what is the physical reality of an image in the mind's eye? When you okay, so you stopping, you picture something you picture Garfield Garfield in mind? What is happening

in your brain when you picture Garfield? Like, is there some two dimensional grid of brain cells that's like a screen where colors fill in like pixels on a computer screen and they form Garfield. It seems kind of implausible, but you know, entertained that for a second. If there were a way for a mental image to be projected into a physical space, what would be the physical nature of the original signal in the brain and how would it be transferred to the physical form without being interpreted

through the body. So I was looking at a couple of papers on the subject of like research and thought about mental imagery. And one one of the ones I was looking at was called Unpicturing a Candle The Prehistory of Imagery science, and this was published in Frontiers and Psychology by Matthew mckissicks, Susan Aldworth, Fiona McPherson, John Onion's, Crawford Winlove, and Adam Zema and this lot of names.

Uh In and the authors here focus on the history of scholarship and philosophy concerning visual imagination before modern neuroscience, but they also cover some modern neuroscience with a specific focus on the idea of imagining a concrete object, for example picturing a candle. And so the authors explored the history and so for example, they start by looking at like Plato and Aristotle, and they point out that Plato actually did not hold a very high regard for the

importance of mental imagination uh Like. For Plato, mental imagery is a copy of a copy. It is a sort of imperfect fac simile of an object in the world which is already merely an imperfect copy of a perfect divine form that we're getting into the idea of the realm of forms, the idea that a chair, that there's a perfect version of a chair that exists in the realm of forms. The chair we can build is an

imperfect interpretation of that. But then the then his view is because I'm more likely to think of it the other way, like I'm thinking, then, well, the version of the chair in our mind, that's the realm of forms. But he's saying, no, that's that's even another level removed from the realm of forms. It's an imperfect version of the imperfect chair that is in itself an imperfect version of the ideal chair. Absolutely, your mental image of a pineapple is a flawed copy of some act wold pineapple,

which is an imperfect realization of eternal pineapple nous. Yeah, and I and I think I think he is correct here, because, as we stayed in the last episode, we often we often attribute a lot of detail and accuracy to our mental images when they're when it's really not there. It's it's often a lot more obscure and unfinished than we

give it credit. Yeah, I mean I almost wouldn't think about it in terms of accuracy, but in terms and maybe this is more specific to the way my brain works, but I think about it even in terms of completeness, like that, when I have a mental image of something, it's not the same as looking at the thing, because I'm not I'm only vaguely grasping the totality of the image. When I'm mentally picture something, it's not like it's just not like looking at a fixed version of the image.

It's kind of like a hazy scanning of different little elements of the image that I can picture in a moment against a field of a general impression of the larger image. Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah, I believe. An example that's often used here is that of a bicycle. If I say, hey, imagine a bicycle. Easy done. I'm imagining a bicycle right now. But if we go to the next step and say that bicycle you're imagining, describe for me the functionality of its of the of the

wheels and the gears and the pedals and everything. Explain to me how that works. Oh yeah, This goes back to our illusion of explanatory depth. Episodes where everybody can picture a bicycle, but can you draw a bicycle? And it turns out it's just try it. You might end up laughing really hard at yourself because you think you can draw a bicycle, but there's a decent chance you can't. I don't know where the bars go, which wheel connects to what? You just don't know even though you think

you can picture it right now. So again, Plato, I think was definitely onto something here. I think Plato hit this one out of the park. Yeah. But Aristotle, to the contrary, he thought that not only was mental imagery important, he thought that you literally could not think without it.

They quote him saying, the soul never thinks without a fantasma, and the phantasma is like some kind of mental image, which I'm sure this would come as news to our many listeners who tell us about their experiences with a fantasia, meaning that they say they don't have the ability to form mental images, they can't picture something in their heads. And yet you know, we've got no reason to disbelieve them on that, And at the same time they seem

perfectly capable of thinking. So it seems perfectly clear to me that mental imagery is not necessary for thought, right, it is necessary for choosing the form of the Destroyer. Should Gozer uh the Traveler appear to you. I have to think back of that scene and Ghostbusters. Uh, that's how they choose the stay Puff marshmallow man form. But you have all of the Ghostbusters that had a fantasia, then the the Destroyer would not have been able to manifest.

I think you of that in the original episode. Probably did. I haven't thought about it since then. But that's great unless goes Are the Destroyer is even more nefarious than we imagine, and he can also manifest in the shape of something that you put together through, say words or whatever. Maybe, but I kind of like the idea that it's being an interdimensional entity. It's it's limited, and it really like it.

It cannot venture into this form unless there is a clear visual image that it can draw from, Like that has to be the uh, the foothold for it to climb back in and begin destroying. Well, to tie it back to psychic photography, actually, this is what the case of goes Are taking the form you imagine would be exactly like thoughtography would be the case of mental imagery

being manifested as a physical object in the world. Yeah, but but it would also it would make more sense that a god can read your mind, then your mind can blast a photo, blast an image. John Toison undeveloped sel I agree. Uh So, picking up again with the

history of mental imagery. Uh, Descartes had thoughts about visual imagination apparently placed it on par with the senses as manifestations of the body, which, of course, for in Descartes's view, that makes them fallible because of course they can always

be mistaken, unlike in his view pure logical deduction. If you recall like the fight between Descartes and the the empiricists, you know, the empiricists thought that the senses should be primary, but deck Heart thought, no, you can't ever fully trust the senses. You've got to go on just like pure logical proofs. I'm not quite sure why, for some reason that that seems like a funny belief looking back on it now. Of course, later mental imagery became the domain

of psychology. Uh. And of course you know that that would be treated in different ways depending on the different schools of psychology. One thing that I think is interesting in the history of psychology is the behaviorist school of course, not being interested in mental imagery because it's not an outwardly measurable behavior. So J. B. Watson apparently referred to mental imagery as quote motor habits in the larynx, which I think is a behaviorist way of saying something you

only know about because people talk about it. I am continually fascinated by thinking about behaviorism because we occasionally hear from people, uh we We've gotten a couple of listener emails over the years, people responding to topics from a behaviorist point of view, essentially not crediting anything that's about the inner experiences or consciousness of people. It's only you know, the psychology can only be about outwardly measured behaviors. Yeah,

it's a statement like that. Though. It makes me wonder if J. B. Watson was perhaps perhaps had a fantasia. You know, I mean this idea because we this lines up with what we've heard from a lot of people who's claimed to have a fantasia. And they'll say, oh, yeah, I heard people talking about picturing something in their mind when they read a book, and I thought they were

just being you know, just figurative. You know, they weren't saying that they actually saw something in their head like it's it seems like it is difficult to imagine the mental image if you have no frame of reference for it, you know. Uh yeah, Except I would say that for Watson, it's not just mental imagery. It's all internal mental phenomenon.

I mean, that's everything that's not outward behavior. So it wouldn't be just I think he would probably think that mental imagery is not the only thing that's just a motor habit in the larynx. That uh that, I don't know, imagination that, like anything inside your head, is a motor habit in the larynx. Do you think Ether would have changed his mind at all? I don't know. Then again,

maybe I'm not being fair. I don't want to put words in Watson's mouth, but uh yeah, So I think we don't need to feel bound by the behaviorist view of this thing, and we can entertain the idea of mental imagery. You experience it, other people say they experience it. You've got no reason to disbelieve them. So I think humans probably have mental imagery. But but long in history, it has clearly been assumed that there is some kind of physical representation space and perceiver within the brain for

mental imagery. Uh. And one thing I'm thinking about that I came across while preparing for this episode is an illustration by the sixteenth seventeenth century English physician and occultist Robert Flood spelled f l U d D kind of like Elmer Flood Flood with an L flood, also like Randall Flag. Oh yeah, that's true. Maybe this is one

of the incarnations of the Man from the Desert. But anyway, And one of Robert Flood's tracts he illustrated the eye of imagination or the oculus imagination onis, which was this third eye inside the brain which, getting it wrong and backwards in multiple ways, projected mental images onto some kind of screen or representation space in the back or like in the back of the head or behind the head, where mental images would take form after being projected by

this third eye. And now, of course we know that the eye does not project a beam of seeing, but receives incoming light. So even yeah, I think we're we're confused in more ways than one here. Yeah, Like if there really were a tiny viewing screen inside the brain and an eye to see it, it would be too dark to watch the movie, right, so that would be a problem. But but yeah, I mean, like I think

third eye views are are popular throughout history. People kind of think there's an observer in the observer, right, And and granted, we do have a pennial gland, which is essentially an atrophied photo receptor with some connections to the parietal eye of reptiles. But but it produces uh a melotonin, a serotonin derived hormone, and is not involved in the generation of mental images, or at least I don't think

there's any evidence that, not that I've ever seen. Uh. This is funny because I was reading that deck Cart believed that the pineal gland was the point of interaction between the body and the immaterial soul. That did you know this, um? And may we did. We did episode on the pineal gland way back in the day, so it's possible, Okay, I came across this. Yeah, but I'm thinking back to this idea of having, yeah, a viewer inside the viewer, like an internal I inside the brain

for mental imagery. And there are reasons I think that there are problems with this because if in order to see mental images we have to project them physically somewhere inside the brain. What is the part of the brain that is looking at the image? Is that another brain with eyes inside the brain? Uh? Incognitive philosophy. This is sometimes called the homunculous theory. That's a you know, a name of ridicule for it, like the idea that there has to be somebody inside your brain to see what

your brain is seeing or thinking. Right, as with like the homunculous ideas and human reproduction where there's a tiny little version of you inside of a sperm cell. Yes, And like the homunculous idea of of reproduction, it's an infinite regress, right, because if there's a little eyes and a brain inside your head in order to see what you're thinking, then that brain must have little eyes and a brain inside that brain to see what that brain

is thinking about. And it goes on forever. And another version of this, extended to total brain function, is what Daniel Dennet calls the Cartesian theater. Again, this is something he's he's ridiculing. Basically, it's uh imagining or implicitly assuming that the brain has some sort of little pilot inside who witnesses all of our sense data and controls our reactions. Um, and again it's basically a reduct, you ad absurdam because

it leads to this infinite regress. Who's seeing the images inside the brain, and the homunculus or the pilot or the Cartesian theater must be another smaller one. So I don't think it can be that inside the brain mental images are seeing the same way our eyes see things in the world. So what actually is happening in the brain when you're asked to imagine a concrete image. Maybe we should take a break and then explore that when we come back. Yes, everyone think of a bicycle during

this commercial break. Alright, we're back, and hopefully you still have that bicycle floating around inside your mind. We should give them something more interesting to picture concretely, something with details. Picture a democorgan democgorgan is good. Yeah, It's just interesting how many like fabled unreal entities are good things to focus your mind on. And I think it perhaps it's because there are there are combinations, they're they're hybrids with

different elements. So you you're you're you know what, you're kind of thinking of a list and compiling that list into this single mental image and ultimately gives you something to focus on, right, but the details are provided to you. Whereas the bicycle, you're just saying bicycle, we're not saying, imagine a contraption with two wheels and its etcetera. Two wheels and nine tentacles and three baboon heads. Yes, yes, and in one hand the sun and in the other

hand and move. Okay, Now, when you do picture the demogorgon, what is actually happening in your brain? Has modern neuroscience discovered any answers to this question? Actually the answer is yes, we do know a decent amount. We don't know everything, we know a decent amount about what happens in the brain when you picture mental imagery. Um, So, brain cells in the temporal lobe, and this is the temporal lobes are at the bottom and sides of the brain, sort

of around the ears. They become activated. And previous research has shown that the temporal lobes are involved in attributing and storing information about the visual characteristics of objects. So normally, like when you see something, uh, information might there might be activity in the temporal lobes that seems to be creating associations with the thing you're looking at right, like the foam on the walls in our studio, they look

like tiny pyramids. So I can look at one of those, and then I can I can't help but imagine a great pyramid. Yes, And so what's happening there when you're using your eyes is probably the lights coming through the eyes. Signals are passing from your optic nerve, from your retina's the optic nerve, and uh, they're ending up in the visual processing areas and the back of your head, and that's known as the occipital cortex, the back of the head, and then that start signals that cascade out to other

brain regions. Where you form those associations probably has a lot to do with your temporal lobes. But when you're asked to picture something concrete, like I say, picture the great Pyramids of Gizah, we seem to be starting with activity that involves visual memory. So there's stuff going on in the temporal lobes, and the excitation of these cells then triggers activity in the visual cortices of the occipital lobe.

Again that's the very back of the head. And of course this is the same part of the brain that receives and begins to process visual information received by the retina transmitted by the optic nerve when you normally see something. And the authors of this paper I mentioned earlier, they they point out that when you conjure mental imagery, it's not exactly but it's sort of roughly an inversion of the process of seeing with the eyes. Basically, it's similar

cascades going in opposite directions. And it also, i would say, seems to suggest that if it were possible to project an image from ted serious head onto film, if anything, he should have been holding the gizmo and the camera on the back of his head rather than the forehead. Because it seems like the activity is going from a sort of beginning with uh, with executive function. Of course,

that's uh, you know, intentionally causing the memories. Then there's memory stuff in the temporal lobes, and then it's going to the occipital lobe in the back of the head. I'll see, if you'd only known that, it would have worked every time. Now, why do you need executive function in the front of the brain as well? Well? Apparently that's involved in intentionally trying to call up and hold

mental images. So like conscious management of what's happening in the brain tends to be thought that that's executive function. It's deliberate thinking and maintenance of attention, and that entails activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain.

So stuff up front and to the front and sides. Uh. And mental imagery may also involve executive function because it requires the suppression of incoming imagery from the eyes, or at least the diversion of visual processing resources from quote signals based on light entering the eyes. Right now, two

images generated from memory. It's crazy to think about the and I'm thinking about it in this terms because we're also researching an episode that has to do with driving and the what's going on in your mind when you

drive an automobile? And isn't it crazy that we can engage in the cognitively demanding job of say, driving up a speeding automobile down an interstate, watching what all the cars are doing, and you know, reading an occasional sign looking up for speed traps, all of these things that we're doing, and at the same time, we might have an audio book playing that is filling our head with like with a you know a rich visual world, and

we're entertaining both of these at the same time. I would say that that is, while I accept that we can handle those things both at the same time, I would say it is not without costs to uh to either one. Like I would say that you probably have a more rich experience of the book and mental image reassociated with the book if you were not driving, and you'd probably be better at driving if you were not listening to the book, because there is actually a competition

for resources going on. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I mean, of course that I think a lot of us tended to read in environments where there are other distractions. Maybe not is cognitively demanding as piloting an automobile, but but still, this would be an interesting one to get some feedback from listeners, because I know that we have a number of listeners who who are on the road a lot and listen listen to us on the road and listen to to other bits of audio as well. Yeah, that's

a good point. Please only listen to our podcast if if it is safe to do so. It's don't devote too much mental resources to us. If if you're piloting a dangerous vehicle. But then again, even if you're not listening to a podcast or an audio book, oh yeah, your mind's want your mind's gonna wander. And then I mean, it's not even going to necessarily be a situation where

you're consciously choosing things to imagine. You know, you're you're gonna be subject to the visual summonings of the default mode network where uh, you know, mental images from the past or the physy future are going to you know, venture into your mind like Victorian ghosts. But speaking of ghosts, I mean, I do think it's a little bit spooky that once I read this, this does in fact seem true to me. I just had never really thought of it this way, that when you mentally picture something, you're

you are intentionally using your brain. You're performing some kind of internal brain resources management with the executive function mostly in your frontal lobe. I think to say, turned down resolution on incoming mint visual imagery and devote some of those resources to mental imagery. And if you, if you practice it right now, I think you'll probably notice the

same thing. You just like, look at something and then try to picture something mentally, and you'll notice that you're looking kind of gets downgraded in like quality and and arrested. Are are you feeling this? Yeah? I mean, but this is also kind of the It kind of goes both ways, right, Like both cannot have have complete dominance at the same time. So you might be able to to dim the thermist that you're staring at by allowing mental images to you know,

to to be summoned into your mind. But on the same level, if you feel haunted by various visual imagery ghosts, you know, the visualizations that are in some way troubling or traumatic, uh, you know, one of the exercises is to focus your awareness on something, uh that that is a physically present be at the ambient environment or a specific object. I think that that would probably absolutely work, at least based on what I've read, that you can that you can greatly lessen the power of mental image

ory just by using your senses. Yeah, Like it reminds me of meditation practices. Like, certainly they are closed eye meditation practices, which in that environment you're really opening it up to the visual way of seeing, you know, uh, to to the mental image alone. But there are plenty of open eye practices where you know, the instructor will say, you know, pick something in the room, doesn't matter what it is. It can be an electrical socket. But stare

at that electrical socket. Stare long and hard at that electrical socket, and that becomes kind of the you know, the visual mantra that will force out the other other ghosts. Yeah.

I like this metaphor for thinking about it, that there's this war in your brain, this war for control of the resources in your brain, and one of them is things in your immediate surroundings, your sense perceptions, and the other is things conjured by the void, which could be good, things could be bad, things could be useful, things could

be debilitating things. I mean, it's just what comes up out out of you know, either the intentional use of mental imagery by the executive part of your brain, or just you know, things that are subconsciously arising from the depths. And your brain has to have some kind of partitioning

system for this, this sort of visual processing, right. Uh. It uses regions in the occipital lobe to process image data coming from your eyes, but you also use some of the same regions to process images generated based on your memories or based on your imagination, which I think involves the memories, and these two processes are just constantly going on simultaneously and competing for the same neural resources. Yea, most of the time, most people, uh, this is an

interesting thing. Most of the time, most people manage not to get confused. Isn't that interesting too, Like what kind of partitioning must be going on in the brain, because you can picture a pineapple on the desk in front of you right now, and you can picture that, But most of the time you don't become confused and think

you're actually seeing a pineapple there. Yeah, not even awareness is focused, you know, certainly, certainly we all have those those situations where you walk into a room and out of the corner of your eye you think, for a second, there's a there's a goblin standing in the corner, or there's a cat, or or something's out of place, and then you know a second glance, you realize, oh, it's just the way that the shadow is following, or it's

the way that the drape is positioned, etcetera. Like we come back to it again, like our awareness doesn't just do a single take. It as a double take, and it you know, you confirms or denies the presence of the thing you thought was there initially, right. I think the the persistence of the stimulus is one key there that like, you can keep looking at something and your you know, your imagination will fluctuate, but the light coming into your eyes is going to stay about the same.

Um and some beautiful lyrics there that could be an eagle song. I just tried to sing some eagles. But we don't want to get night cheese, so we're not gonna leave it in. Uh Now, Now, it does appear that there's a possibility for some bleed over in the visual processing between mental imagery and actual uh uh seeing with the eyes. For example, this thing called the Perky effect. This is named after the American psychologist C. W. Perky.

So how does this work? Well? Uh Perky She she would have somebody try to visualize something like a leaf or a banana while looking at a blank screen, and then meanwhile she would project a very faint, soft focus image of something like a leaf or a banana onto the screen at just about the threshold brightness of visual perception.

And in these experiments, Perky found that subjects would incorporate visual features of the actual image that was faintly projected thinking that these were features of their imagined image, for example, the type of leaf or the orientation of the banana. And there have been various attempts to replicate this finding, some successful and some unsuccessful, so I think we're not

totally sure how robust this effect is. But I think now a common assessment of what of this effect is that what's really being detected here is the fact that using visual imagination steals processing resources from normal visual perception, like we were talking about earlier, So if you're trying to imagine something, you're less likely to notice consciously than an image is being faintly projected in front of you, even though you might pick up some visual cues such

as color shape from that image and just hold them in mind to think they're part of your imagination, which again is creepy. I mean, this isn't the only finding like this that that you can like give people cues from the outside that people come to believe or just

part of their own imagination. But I guess maybe it's needless to say that after looking through all this, I don't think there's any evidence at all that representation of an image in the mind involves the brain building a physical two dimensional picture of the image which could be

projected onto an external substrate like film. It's kind of like imagining that you could save a JPEG of Garfield, to say, got Garfield and a jpeg, and that's not an old computer floppy disk, and then you could somehow you're trying to project the image of Garfield physically from the floppy disk onto a photograph or a piece of paper. The two D pixel layout of Garfield is not found

anywhere on the disc. You know, it's broken down and encoded as information which can later be read by a program to create a copy of the same original image on a computer screen. But the image of Garfield can be seen anywhere on the disk. You can't pull it out by projecting something through it, even with the strongest microscope. It's encoded as information that only yields the image when decoded correctly, and as best I can tell, imageries works

a similar way. In the brain. It's somehow coded through neuronal activity. It's it's not an image that you could find anywhere in the brain. You've touched on. One of my big problems with David Cronenberg scanners, which is a movie I love otherwise. Uh, there's a lot to love about Crona about about scanners and not just you know, people's heads exploding and Michael ironsides of you know, fabulous

you know, psychic facial strains. But but there is this with this one section of the film where the character Cameron Veil can cyberpath thickly scan a computer hide hard drive with his brain. Uh. And that always bugged me because I'm like, Okay, it's one thing to imagine one brain speaking to another brain, you know, even though there's you know, there's no defined way that that would actually occur, uh, you know, at least in terms of like the human

mind talking to another human mind. But but it's even a greater stretch than to imagine that he is scanning a computer hard drive. Yeah, because his brain does not it can't execute the code right, Like, in order for the data on the hard drive to be read correctly has to be executed somehow. There's like a decoding procedure that yields the text or the sound files or whatever it is he's trying to discover, and presumably his brain

doesn't have that decoding function within it. Yeah. Yeah, so it's the same problem with this idea of photography, that that somehow you could you could put the mental image in your mind onto the film. That's why I prefer one. A great example of a far more believable system of telepathic communication would be that used by the Gelflings in the Dark Crystal and also in the the new so far really fabulous Netflix of prequel series. Oh I also

started it, haven't finished great loving it so far. But the the Gelflings are able to to dream vast where they're able to u to to like touch grasp hands, and in doing so, they share their mental images mental images of you know, their memories with each other so that they can share an inexperience and uh, you know, that's a version of mental image sharing that you know. I'm not sure exactly what the you know, the biological

explanation would be for it, but it's conceivable. It's conceivable that these two um you know, you know, neural systems in the same species could link up to share information and that would also have that would have a survival that would be a survival adaptation as well. Like that's something that would be uh, you know, supported through natural selection. Well, you can think about it as another form of language. I mean, we've got language to code experiences and share

them between each other. So you could imagine creatures could I don't know, project electromagnetic symbols or something to each other, you know, pulses of stuff that would encode and decode information across brains the same way. I don't think there's any good evidence that humans can do that, but you could imagine a species that did do that. Right. Likewise, it's and perhaps there's a science fiction Surely there's a science fiction or fantasy treatment of this out there somewhere.

You can imagine something with the chromatophores along the lines of cuttlefish, or you know, an octopus being able to take a ntal image in its head and recreated on its body. Oh, I love that that. Somebody has surely done that before, and that would be that would be an interesting way to do it. And of course humans have a similar ability through language and uh and and an artistic skill. We can take a mental image and we can recreate some version of it outside of our

body in a way that that stays stationary. But it is not uh, it is not the you know the art of of of telepathy. Or or or the thoughtography or whatever it is. It is the the the it is the arts themselves. It is that it is the use of language. I think that's dead on. I mean, we're used to it, so it seems less astounding to us. But I try to make people remember all the time that language is like magic. I mean, the language is the most is the most astounding, strangest thing you can.

You can use words, you make sounds with your mouth to change what's in somebody else's brain. And it works. It works almost all the time. Now quickly, before we go to another break, I just wanted to mention I was looking at another paper about a recent research in mental imagery, and this is called mental imagery, Functional Mechanisms and Clinical Applications. This is in Trends and Cognitive Sciences from but Joel Pearson, Thomas Nasa Lauris, Emily Holmes, and

Stephen Kostlin Um. And one of the things that they said in the paper it echoes a lot of the stuff we were talking about already. But um, one thing they say that stuck with me is that the authors conclude that the existing research suggests mental imagery should be considered quote a weak form of perception. And that's interesting because you don't normally think about mental imagery as perception. Normally, perception is what you know, your five senses, or maybe

the other senses, if you know about the weirder ones. Um. But here they're saying, no, it is like a form of perception. It's almost like a lower resolution form of seeing. Now, why is it a weak form of perception? Well, visual regions in the brains show less blood flow and less excitation of neurons during the generation of mental imagery than they do in the actual viewing of images with the eyes, even though you use some of the same regions for both.

And I also just wanted to mention some interesting questions that the authors bring up as sort of unresolved in this review. Again, this was from so there maybe development since then. But um. One of the things they ask is, we know that there are strong similarities between normal visual perception seeing with the eyes and mental imagery. What are the major differences. Another thing that I was really interested in is they asked the question of can mental imagery

be unconscious? And if you try to understand that for a second, is it possible to picture something without being aware that you're picturing it or is mental imagery something that only occurs consciously? Can you only picture something if you're aware that you're picturing it? So? Well, what would be what would be an example then, based on that logic of someone picturing something without realizing they pick drink something. Well,

I don't know. I mean that that's sort of the tough question, like is because it would be difficult to measure that. I think it. Would it be like an hallucination? Well, no, because you'd be presumably you'd be conscious of an hallucination. So the idea would have to be that, you know, you can show unconscious things going on in the brain just by like asking people if they're aware of things, but tracking their behaviors that realize, you know, the show

they are aware of this thing or that thing. But it's difficult to say, can people imagine a picture of something without knowing that they're picturing it? I would think, you know, I would say the default answer would probably be no, because it's hard to imagine what that would be. Like you tend to think, Okay, the only times I know that I'm picturing something or when I'm conscious of it, Well, for that matter, is it possible to unconsciously look at

something with your visual perception. Like I think maybe that is possible, Like because if I'm but I'm looking at something, I am looking at something, right, I mean, it seems

like it follows the same process. Well, I don't know what about Like there could be some stuff along the lines of like the Invisible Guerillas experiment that indicate that sometimes you can see things without being aware that you're seeing them, right, Or certainly we've already touched on what happens if you are looking at something in the physical world but focus focusing far more intently on something that

is just a mental image. But yeah, I mean I can see why it's an unanswered question, but it is kind of it's a tricky question too. Yeah. Now, I think what does seem pretty clear is that there can be unconscious reasons for the generation of mental imagery. I mean that this is a huge thing in mental imagery research. Is like the origins of mental imagery, for example, intrusive unwanted mental images. Yeah, I think that's that's that's an example that I imagine a lot of us can relate to.

But also in terms of say meditative states, you know, the idea of encountering an image that isn't at least consciously summoned. You know, not to say that it comes from the outside. It's still coming from sort of the the internal contents of your your psychic library, but but not in a way that feels um lately you assembled it hands on. Uh And then likewise, there's a domain of hallucination and dream. Yeah, I've got another maybe weird question about mental imagery. See if this makes any sense.

Um So, the authors in these studies find strong links between visual imagery and things like working memory. But I wonder does the ability to recall visually recognized features of a thing always or even usually rely on mental imagery? And uh? So? For example, if I ask you to picture a character from a movie, you've seen a picture the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal or let's see, Actually, uh, I think I screwed that up. Okay, No, actually, don't,

don't picture him yet. It's too late. I've done it like twice. Okay, Well, I just want you to list

physical characteristics of the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal. Okay, um, bird like, um, sneaky, serpentine um, splendid, decade, I guess I bring this up because my question is, when you recall visual characteristics of a thing you've seen, do you recall them exclusively by calling up a mental image of the thing and examining it like you would a thing you're looking at currently, or do you have other ways of remembering the visual characteristics of something other than by

picturing it and then examining what you're looking at in your mind's eye. Well, with the Chamberlain, I think I draw specifically on just visuals. Now, it would be different if I was described, if it was asked to describe a literary character in which the character is is like initially build out of language, but that the Chamberlain is all is all visual and does not, at least in

anything I remember, describe itself. So because there are characters that one encounters visually where that the character is going to describe itself or there's gonna be some voice to describe it, but there's no language attached to it. So yeah, I would say almost purely visual. Yeah, I noticed most of the time when I'm trying to recall visual characteristics of something, I picture it first. But yeah, it gets especially complicated when you're thinking about characteristics of something that

you've imagined from writing but not from seeing. Yeah, Like when you asked me to think of the Chamberlain, too, I found myself doing it in two ways. Like basically a mental image of a scene from the film, like where I'm seeing in my mind not only the character, but the backdrop, the lighting, everything. And then there's kind of a mental image of, say, the head of the creature, as if it were in the room with me, you know. So that makes me wonder too, Yeah, do we have

different different sorts of mental imagery. Mental imagery that's more based on thinking. Maybe in a way, it's kind of like thinking about the way we uh we think about the past and the future, a way of thinking about the way something was and then imagining the way something would be, what it would be like if it were here or if I were encountering it in the near future. I wonder if that plays into it at all. All Right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, but

we'll be right back. Thank alright, we're back. Okay. So we've been talking about psychic photography or thoughtography, this alleged ability that some people have to project the contents of their mental imagery onto film or onto objects in the

external world. And I think we're probably in agreement that even though a lot of people have claimed to have this power or claim to have demonstrated this power, this probably is not really going on in in some ways, the mechanism of it seems incoherent, right, And that's what it basically, the mechanism is in going are It's it's again like imagining the psychics and scanners being able to

read hard drives, like this just doesn't make sense. But there are a number of experiments that sort of would find a way around this incoherence. We're talking about through another layer of encoding and decoding of brain activity that that could be learned through brain computer interfaces and machine learning. And this we're getting into into the creation of a

of a technological translator. Yes exactly. It kind of the same way that you would use language to translate the contents of your mind's eye into something in the outside world. A computer could potentially translate the brain activity that it reads off of your scalp or in blood flow in your brain through fm r I into something in the outside world that could be trained to correlate with your

mental imagery. Now, I think I've got lots of questions about how accurate and how realistic this project actually is. But there are at least these experiments that that have purported to get part of the way there, and they're they're kind of freaky. I won't lie. I would say this starts to get me a little bit worried. I want to start with a news piece in Science from January.

The news piece was by Matthew Hudson and it covers the brain computer interface work of a group of researchers including uh u Kiasu Kamitani, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University in Japan, and a computer scientist named Zoe ming Lu at Purdue University in the United States. And this work is focused on it's using brain computer interfaces to directly read and record mental imagery, which is the imagining of a picture. So you try to imagine, like, why would

anybody be doing this? You know, what would be the supposed benefits of a technology to read people's mental imagery. Well, we're asked to imagine in this article, maybe being able to search through a collection of digital images simply by mentally picturing the image we want Okay, that might be a thing like I bet you've tried before to Google an image that you've seen before, but you didn't know what search terms to use and couldn't find it. Yeah, yeah,

there's I could see where that could have an application. Well, granted, it's not something that is really life or death, and it would be more like, Oh, I vaguely remember a really cool advertisement for a community college on television in the summer in my childhood, and they played a song on it that kind of sounded like Boards of Canada. I wonder if it was actually Boards of Canada. Like that is a legit thing that I think about from time to time, and there's no way for me to

look it up. But true enough, if a machine could look at my mental imagery of that memory of watching that TV spot, then it's conceivable that it could then look into some vast database and find that footage for me. Yeah. I'm not saying that will necessarily ever get there, but that that is the kind of thing they're asking you to imagine. Another one, this is probably more straightforward drawing without the hands, straight from imagination too, recorded two D

media that might be interesting. I mean, I wonder if I could open up whole other realms of visual art for people who are not good at drawing with their hands, right, or or for people who are disabled to some degree. Right that I could see that being advantageous as well. And it can go further than that. I mean, technically, you could imagine something like this allowing people without the

power of speech you're writing to share their thoughts. Uh, you know you can't Maybe if you can't speak, you can't describe your visual imagery, maybe you could share it with something like this. But I want to say, Okay, those are the positive versions of what we're imagining. We

could explore negative versions later on. And so the researchers here have been working on computer algorithms that are trained through machine learning to match patterns of brain activity recorded through things like fm r I with imagery that a

subject is looking at. And because actually looking at an image and then mentally imagining the same image are sort of similar in the brain, They're not exactly the same, but there's some similar stuff going on, researchers have experimented with measuring activity in the visual processing areas of the brain with f m R I while person is looking at different images and then using that data about blood flow in the brain to later guess what a person

is looking at without knowing now ideally what you would have at the end of this kind of research. Multi stage process is an algorithm that could read the activity of a person's visual processing center and materialize an image directly on the screen that corresponds to what the person is either looking at or imagining. Uh and again, to whatever extent the technology will ever fully be realized, it's

still in the very early stages. Um. But in the example sided in this article, I should say that the image generation portion was not carried out on real brains. The data acquired from human subjects was instead used to train a deep neural net work that stood in for an actual brain while they tested their image generating program.

And to quote from Hudson's article here quote the system starts with something random similar to TV static, and slowly refines its painting over the course of two hundred rounds to get closer to the ideal image. The system calculates the difference between the deep neural network activity and the templated deep neural network activity. Those calculations cause it to nudge one pixel this way and another pixel that way

until it gets closer to the ideal image. Now, apparently at the stage, the algorithms are not very good at all at guessing what imagery people have in mind when they're imagining realistic photos, but they are pretty good at picking out when people imagine abstract shapes. And that makes sense because I think those would be like clearer signals in the brain probably. But yeah, there's some images along

with this article that are the paintings generated by this algorithm. Uh, and then they're they're compared with the images that originally gave rise to them, and the comparisons are wonderfully creepy. Yeah. They look like like psychedelic entities that have come to convey some sort of occult knowledge under the listener. Like there's a there's one that's originally a picture of an owl, and then the approximation of it is some kind of

like like primordial worm walrus from the center of the earth. Yeah. Yeah, a red mailbox becomes this kind of alien burning crimson pillar. So there are some patterns that seems like they're picking up in in this version, where like some basic shapes emerge, some color patterns seem like detectable. It seems like you

can detect when something is basically a face. But I have questions about the ultimate potential of this technology, like the versions that exist today have limitations such as relying on training and feedback. And also I wonder about the rules for reading mental imagery, like how transfer are they from one person to another? How idiosyncratic is your brain looking at an image versus somebody else's brain looking at the same image. It makes me think of the holophoner

from Futurama. Do you remember this instrument? It's a musical instrument that Fry attempts to learn at one point and at one point masters thanks to the parasitic worms living inside his gut that have made him super intelligent. Uh, but then he pleases that ability. But anyway, it's it's this. It's basically like a small musical instrument, like a woodwind instrument, but it has the technologically capability to take a mental image in your mind and projected into the air for

others to see. But it takes It's like it's notably difficult to learn and takes a lot of intense training and concentration to even form a very vague image in the air, and so some of the like the initial images that Fry is able to summon using the holophone are basically as abstract as these examples we've discussed in this study. Uh. But I mean, so on one hand, you could say, well, maybe this kind of thing will just never get very accurate in any way that's applicable.

That's possible. But also if this technology ever does get more accurate, can you imagine this would I mean, I'm thinking about the way it would be incorporated into machine

learning user feedback mechanisms that serve us content on social media. Um, you know, imagine a Facebook news feed that could not only fine tune itself based on what you do with your mouse cursor and how you scroll and what you click on and how long you look at things, but based on neurofeedback that allows it to detect how you're using your visual imagination, you know, so they sell you on the good stuff, right draw without your hands, and you get this kind of interface that that hooks up

to your brain and then it can sense patterns and what users are picturing in their mind's eye and reaction to media stimuli at a massive scale. Even if this can't be used to pull images accurate directly from your brain. Just imagine what it could do based on the brain

activity correlations across populations alone. Uh. And also I'm imagining if it ever did get good enough at reading brain activity, the brain activity underlying mental imagery, and turning that directly into physical images outside the brain, what kind of crazy cyber feedback processes could that lead to? Yeah, I mean, anyway you shake it, it's a it's a nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. I really don't like the idea of machines being able to look inside our head and do anything with our

our mental images and draw them out. I mean, that's that's just pure dystopia juice right there. Anyway, anyway you shake it, I mean, it seems like even the positives I have to like really construct an artificial scenario where it's like, okay, there's been a kidnapping and we have to draw the mental images out of the the only so you know, you get into ridiculous scenarios like that, which, okay, yes, given that very particular scenario, perhaps it would make sense.

But then you get into just basic considerations of of privacy to like, would you ever have the right to look inside someone's head and draw out their mental images. Depends on who writes the laws, and I would think it is the big corporation with all the lawyers that

will write the laws. And I guess looking at the like sort of certainly the social media examples too, it's like, are you It depends to are you born into a world in which it's normal for your machines to look inside your brain and draw from your mental images, probably with some sort of an agreement. Uh. In the same way that you know, our emails are read by machines, but they're not actually read by people, there would be this idea like, oh yeah, nobody's actually watching your mental images.

It's just our algorithms are keeping track on them so we can better serve you content. I mean, I think a lot of times we have overestimated our people's desire

for privacy. Uh. Like, I just think about how years ago if you had told people here's all the things people will be sharing on social media and all the kinds of privileges they will be allowing these companies to have and learning about their lives and learning about their data, people will be like, no way, nobody will ever surrender that amount of you know, privacy and autonomy about their lives and their data. But people just gave it up so willingly. Yeah, and so many are still seemingly fine

with it. Yeah. So I wonder if I don't know, maybe it has to do with something about the advertising, the marketing, how these things are are rolled out to the public that that breaks down our defenses and and has us ending up being like, ah, yeah, you know whatever, I'll get the brain device. You know, Jeffrey's got one. He likes it, you know, Yeah. Yeah, Well, I hold out hope that it would be a you know, the bridge too far, and that that humans would would rise

up and reject it so as well. But but I also feel like we're already at that point where humans should rise up and reject what is being presented to them. Uh, you know, certainly by the large social media companies and um and uh, I don't know. Some people are rising up, but we're not quite rising up in the numbers so

far to limit their power. Protect your mental imagery instead, if you want to have more power in sharing your mental imagery in the cases where you actually do want to share it, when your powers of translation, that means practice becoming better at language, better at drawing, better at

art of whatever kind. Yeah, and indeed, I don't want to in this on a you know, too pessimistic note dystopian and note is, etcetera, because ultimately, like what all this reveals, it's just like just how incredible our brain's capacity for mental imagery really is. Because you know, certainly, these technologies that attempt to understand it or even replicated these uh pseudo scientific or outright superstitious ideas about what a mental image is and how it might be you know,

inflicted on the world, they all get. They're all circle circling the mystery and the wonder uh that we all experience every day. It's yet another case where you know, there's a purported magical ability that is actually maybe less fascinating than the reality that we're just so used to of the fact that we have something like language. Absolutely all right, Well, there you have it are two part look at the mental image and various ideas surrounding it.

And I think we we crammed a fair number of of horror film and other uh you know, horror related ideas in there, so I think it's it's firmly implanted in our October offerings, but if you're new to the show, we do this every October. Every October is wall to wall Halloween related content. Uh So, if you want to you want more, you can go to stuff to Blow

your Mind dot com and check out past October's. Likewise, if you want to check out some of our Invention episodes that are October theme, go check that out as well. That's our other show. It's a journey through human techno history, and indeed we are rolling out October episodes as well over there, so help both shows out. Make sure you have subscribed and rate in review huge thanks as always

to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works for more podcasts from my Heart Radio is a the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. By No No No