Third Eye Blind

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Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is HyperFixed.

Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them, or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't.

This week, third eye blind.

Hey, Mitchell, how's it going?

Ooh, you sounded, you seem a bit choppy over there.

Hey, sorry.

I just moved into a new house, and I'm still trying to figure out the Wi-Fi situation, so I think

maybe my office is not the best for it.

But hey, we're here now.

This is Mitchell.

He's 30 years old.

And aside from this Wi-Fi situation he's currently dealing with, his life seems pretty good.

He's happily married.

He just bought a house.

He's got an adorable dog named Nala.

And he has a career that he feels very passionate about, writing software for spacecraft.

But recently, Mitchell realized that there was something missing from his life.

And the best way to explain what that thing is is to ask him, when you close your eyes and picture an apple, what exactly do you see?

It's not much, right?

Like, I understand what an apple is.

I could describe an apple, but like, do I actually see it when I close my eyes?

No, maybe a brief flash of like a blurry, low saturation image sort of thing is kind of the best way that I could give it to you.

Like, if I really try to think about what an apple looks like,

you know, it's it's just it's just blackness, right?

For as long as Mitchell can remember, he's been unable to see things in his mind's eye.

Doesn't matter if it's an apple, or the face of his sweet dog, Nala, or the constellation of satellites he's been working on for the last three years.

When Mitchell closes his eyes and tries to picture something, mostly what he sees is blackness.

And because that's all he's ever experienced, for a long time, he logically logically assumed that's what everyone else was experiencing too.

So when he would hear people say things like, how a movie they saw looked different from what they pictured when they were reading a book, Mitchell just assumed that was a weird turn of phrase.

Like when someone says that they ate a sandwich so good that, you know, it made them see God.

He didn't take it literally.

But then, something fundamental shifted for Mitchell.

He learned a new word.

And the more he thought about that word, the more it changed the way he thought about his mind.

The problem is that I seem to have some trouble getting this word out of my mouth.

Aphantasia?

Aphantasia.

Aphantasia?

Aphantasia?

I'm probably saying it wrong.

Dude, maybe, maybe I am too.

You'll probably hear me pronounce it a lot of different ways in this episode, but I have since learned that it is pronounced aphantasia.

And what it refers to, literally, is the absence of a mind's eye.

Since at least the 1880s, scientists have understood that the human capacity to visualize exists on a spectrum.

While some people's minds produce photorealistic imagery, other people report seeing something closer to blurry children's drawings.

But just very recently, scientists have discovered that there's a definitive end point to the spectrum, a point at which there's no imagery at all.

And that condition of living on this edge is called aphantasia.

And so I have heard this term, I don't know, like years and years ago, but never really thought much of it other than like, man, it would suck to be one of those people.

But then, about a year ago, Mitchell heard the term again.

And this time, something resonated with him.

He still wasn't sure if he understood exactly what this whole mental imagery thing was all about, but he understood enough to know that this was something he wanted to investigate.

So he sat down with his wife and he asked her, If somebody asked you to visualize an apple,

like, what does that mean to you?

And it was in that conversation that Mitchell came to realize for the very first time that the way he experiences the world is different from the way other people experience it.

And that realization, it kind of changed the way Mitchell felt about his own experience.

It made him feel like maybe there were elements of the human experience that he was simply missing out on.

And the one that really bothered him was tied to this thing that he often heard people saying after the death of their loved ones.

For the longest time, I did not understand when people said, you know, I can't see his face anymore.

Talking about like a loved one that they've lost and like they can't imagine their like face anymore.

That like expression never sat right with me because like they don't actually literally mean that they could see their face at one point in time, right?

Because that would be weird.

You can't see somebody's face in your mind's eye.

That's a good one.

I totally recognize my friends, family, whoever, the cashier that you see on a regular basis, whenever I see them.

Like, I know people's faces.

I just like,

if you ask me to like think about it, I can't quite pull it up.

And the one that that really bothers me with is like my dad, you know?

I don't know why him in particular, but like I feel like I should be able to think about his face and I just can't, you know?

That's so interesting.

Yeah.

Is your dad still alive?

Yeah, he is.

He is.

He is.

But like the thought of not being able to kind of bugs you.

Yeah, yeah.

I like that idea of carrying the people that you love with you.

And it seems weird to me that I can't do that in in that aspect, you know?

Like I again, I know who he is.

I can think about my dad, but like, actually, like seeing his face is not a thing that I can call up.

For all intents and purposes, Mitchell says that he's still a very happy guy.

He's happy with his brain, and he's happy with his life.

But now that he knows that there's this other dimension to other people's experience of reality, it feels a bit like living in a world where everyone else is able to see a color that you can't see.

So, when Mitchell wrote to us, the thing he wanted to know was: is there a way for me to fix this?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, is this just a skill that I didn't learn as a kid, or is there something deeper going on here?

Oh, okay.

So, is this like

a mode of thinking that you are born with and it's inescapable?

Right,

or is it something that you can learn?

That's very interesting.

Oh, my god, yeah, like, was i out sick that day in kindergarten

and you know at the end of the day i'm not upset if it's not a fixable thing so to speak it's a thing that i'm curious about like i want to learn more about the world and man like how would my life be different if at all if i could like visualize things like this like interesting would it make me better at my job would it allow me to be better at you know drawing or something is there any way that it's holding me back?

But like, I don't know.

I only have just come to this realization at like 30 years old.

So, hey, you know, maybe I'm doing okay.

I mean, I think you seem to be doing okay, at least from my perspective.

But we are going to do our best to find out for you, and we will reach back out to you and we find some answers.

Okay, so in trying to answer Mitchell's questions, we felt like a good first step was to try and understand what aphantasia actually is.

Not just how it manifests, but the functional mechanics of what's happening, or in this case, what isn't happening, inside Mitchell's brain when he tries to imagine.

So we reached out to the guy who first gave the condition its name.

I mean, when I started out in neurology, which was late 80s, early 90s, brain imaging was still at a relatively early stage, and quite a bit was known about the kind of psychological processes involved in imagining, but very little was known about the neurological ones, very little about what went on in the brain.

Really, this was very unexplored territory.

This is Adam Zemin.

He's a professor of neurology based at the University of Exeter.

And one of the first things he wanted us to know is that these questions that we were asking are actually very new to the field of neurology.

And I mean, it makes sense why that would be, right?

Because unlike philosophy and psychology, which have always concerned themselves with the ephemeral parts of human experience, neurology is concerned with the parts that are able to be measured, the parts that are observable, right?

And imagination, obviously, was not one of those parts until it was.

What's happened is that a variety of techniques, but particularly functional MRI, for example, has made it possible to see what's happening in your brain when you think of an apple in its absence, if you visualize an apple.

So you're probably familiar with an MRI machine, right?

They've been around since the 70s, and basically what they do is take very detailed photos of the soft tissue in your body.

So if you slide your head into one of these things, it can show you all the physical structures that exist within the brain.

What a functional MRI or fMRI machine will do is show which of these structures gets activated when you're doing different tasks, like looking at something or like imagining something.

And the reason you can do that has to to do with the fact that you can...

fMRI is sensitive to blood flow, essentially.

The brain is a bit like muscle.

When we use a part of our brain, the blood flow to it increases.

And that's the basis of the technique of functional mRI.

Essentially, you're looking at changes in blood flow within the brain.

So the fMRI machine comes out in the mid-90s.

It's fully online by the late 90s.

And by the early 2000s, neurologists like Adams start using it to study the mysteries of the mind.

And in this early period of exploration, one of the most fascinating things they learn is that in a typical brain, the process of visualizing an object is essentially the inverse of the process of seeing it.

So when you look at an apple, information enters through your eyes.

Then it gets sent to the back of the brain where it's processed by the visual cortex before it gets sent back to the front of the brain where the semantic region chews it over and says, oh, yeah, I remember what that thing is.

It's an apple.

But visualizing the same apple runs the process in the opposite direction.

What you have to do when you visualize is to make a decision that you're going to imagine what an apple looks like.

Then you have to remember what an apple looks like.

And then you have to use your knowledge, your memory, to drive the visual system sort of backwards, so to speak.

So when you visualize, you kind of start with your knowledge of what it looks like, and you then drive the system backwards.

There's a kind of echo of perception, if you like.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering, okay, if that's what's happening inside the brains of people who can visualize, what's happening inside the brains of people who can't?

And the short answer is, essentially, that while all these systems may function on an individual level, people with aphantasia seem to lack this top-down control, coordination, integration, neuronal communication that's required to drive their visual systems in reverse.

And I know that this probably sounds like gibberish right now, and I promise that we're going to unpack what it all means.

But before we do, I want to tell you the story of how we came to know any of this, because I think it has some pretty interesting implications for this whole undertaking.

So stick with me.

Here we go.

So the first thing that you need if you want to study a neurological condition is test subjects who are experiencing that neurological condition.

And it turns out that like Mitchell, most people who have this particular condition don't realize that they have a condition at all.

Since they've never had the ability to visualize, they don't know that there's any other way to be.

And what that's meant is that for a long time, neurologists like Adam didn't even know that this was an experience that needed studying.

And it's possible that they may never have figured it out, were it not for the fact that in 2005, something unusual happened to Adam.

That year, a new patient walked into his office, a man in his mid-60s, who claimed that he had recently lost his ability to visualize.

He'd had a coronary angioplasty, so a procedure to widen the arteries in his heart.

And following this procedure, he found that he just couldn't visualize any longer.

Previously, he used to get himself to sleep by visualizing faces of friends and places he'd been.

If he read a novel, he'd enter a very vivid visual world.

If he lost his keys, he'd be able to visualize where he'd put them.

And following this process, he no longer could.

Adam had never encountered a symptom like this, and he found it fascinating.

So he decided to investigate what was happening here, what had changed.

And using the fMRI machine, he started to run a series of experiments.

He showed the man a series of photos featuring the faces of famous people, and the man's brain lit up the same way anybody else's would.

Adam could see that there were normal levels of activity in the parts of the brain that process vision and the parts that recognize faces, which indicated that both of these systems were online and functioning normally.

But when Adam took the photos away and asked the man to imagine the faces of people he'd just seen, the scan showed something very different.

When he tried to visualize, he failed to activate those visual areas which most of us fall into activity when we visualize.

So we thought that might be

the essence of the problem.

Why that was, why he couldn't activate these areas is an interesting further question.

And our assumption was that there was some failure of top-down control if you like.

In other words, even though all of this man's individual processing systems were in perfect working condition, the thing he seemed to have lost was the control required to run the system backward.

Now, obviously, this was interesting because a condition like this had never been documented before.

But what Adam saw on the fMRI machines wasn't super groundbreaking.

Adam suspected that the reason this was happening, the reason this man had lost his ability to visualize, was that he'd suffered a small stroke during his angioplasty, and that that stroke had caused this kind of network connectivity issue that they were seeing inside of his brain.

Because that happens all the time, right?

People who suffer strokes will sometimes lose the ability to speak, or see, or balance themselves when they walk.

And this is precisely because a stroke can create blocked or damaged pathways within the brain.

So again, none of that was very surprising.

What was surprising was all the stuff this guy was able to do without mental imagery.

For example, if I were to ask you the name of all the letters in the alphabet that have a low-hanging tail, like a G and a J, what would you do?

If you had mental imagery, like I do, you're probably picturing each letter of the alphabet to see which of them has a tail.

And frankly, I don't know if I could do a task like that in any other way.

But this man, who had lost the ability to picture the letters, was still able to complete the task, and he got every letter right.

In fact, for every test they gave him, every test that seemed to require mental imagery, the man seemed to have some other way of completing it.

And what this seemed to indicate, or what it very clearly indicated, And I guess what we hope to impress on our friend Mitchell, is that lacking mental imagery is not a deficit.

It's not even a handicap.

For all functional intents and purposes, it is just a different way of processing.

So I just, we described his case in a scientific paper, and I wasn't sure that the story would go much further than that.

But it was picked up actually by an American science journalist called Carl Zimmer, who wrote an article in Discover magazine.

You might know him.

Then over the next few years, people began getting in touch saying, I'm just like this guy.

Except that I always have been.

I've always realized there's something a little bit different about me.

When When other people

think about last year's holiday, they seem to have some visual experiences which I don't get.

And once about 20 people have got in touch telling us somewhat similar, giving a somewhat similar account of their experience, we decided that this phenomenon deserved a name because there wasn't a term with which to describe this absence of the mind's eye.

So Adam, being the erudite fellow that he is, He borrowed from the classics.

He used Aristotle's term for the mind's eye, which is fantasia, and then he tacked an A onto the front to denote absence.

And the moment the term was released into the world, everything started to change.

Words are very powerful things.

People like the word, the press seemed to like the word.

And since 2015, when we coined the term, I've had about 20,000 people get in touch.

So

the term seems to have unlocked

a good deal of interest and revealed a variation in human experience, which I'm sure has always been present, but which has been hidden up till the

thing about naming.

When you have a word to describe your experience, it suddenly becomes real.

And just like it had with Mitchell, hearing the word aphantasia, it made people interested in their own minds.

And it's thanks to the interest, and to all the outreach that's come along with it, that neurologists like Adam have been able to learn so much more about this condition.

Researchers now believe that anywhere from 3% to 4% of people lived their lives without mental imagery, and that the vast majority of those people were born without it.

Now, as to the question of why they can't visualize, neurologists discovered that there may be a physiological explanation.

It turns out that people who have weak imagery generally have larger visual cortexes than you'd see in the average human brain, while people with strong imagery tend to have smaller visual cortexes.

And while that may seem counterintuitive, because like, shouldn't a larger visual cortex give you better mental imagery?

The problem again seems to be this issue of top-down control.

Because the larger your visual cortex is, the harder it is for the rest of the brain to tell it what to do.

Which is just to say, in case it needs saying, that the reason Mitchell lacks mental imagery is definitely not because he missed a day in kindergarten.

But as to his other question about whether or not mental imagery would make him more successful at his job doing computer things for spaceships and whatnot?

Obviously, there's no way to know for sure.

But what we do know is that people with aphantasia tend to gravitate toward careers in STEM.

So if Mitchell had mental imagery, then statistically speaking, it's less likely that he would have pursued that type of work in the first place.

All right, so at this point, we've answered all but one of Mitchell's questions.

And even though I felt pretty strongly that aphantasia was not something that needed to be fixed, and even though I was pretty certain that it couldn't be fixed anyway, I still had to find out: is this something Mitchell can change?

Can he move the needle on this at all and start using his mind's eye?

So I reached out to a few different experts, and the consensus was pretty shocking.

While everyone had different thoughts about whether or not it's possible to give imagery to someone who's never had it, the thing that everyone, to a person, agreed about was that there were were some very serious downsides to having mental imagery.

That's after the break.

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Welcome back to the show.

So, before the break, we met Mitchell, a 30-year-old guy who has everything he could hope for, except for the ability to conjure images in his mind.

Which, if you think about it, I mean, it does seem like a big thing, right?

I'm just reading this script right now, and I'm like, Yeah, of course.

How could this guy have anything to complain about?

He only can't imagine things.

But that's the reason he wrote to us.

He was curious about why he couldn't do this, and he wanted to know if it was something that he could fix.

So we spent the first half of our investigation focused on the physiological underpinnings of his condition.

But the one thing we neglected to investigate was arguably the most important part of all.

And that is the question of how his life might be different if he had the ability to visualize.

And we didn't even realize that we'd neglected that question until we started asking people if aphantasia was something we could fix.

We can do a thing called transcranial direct current stimulation.

This is Joel Pearson.

He's a neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

And what he's describing right now is a process he's been working on that can improve people's ability to visualize.

You put a little salty water patch here and let's say here at the back of the brain and you run like a really weak current off a little battery through there and it's you can't really feel it.

It just tingles sometimes.

But when you do that, people's imagery got stronger.

I honestly thought this was going to be a harder answer to get.

But hearing this, we were just like, holy shit, there's a cure.

All it requires is hooking your brain up to a battery.

This is amazing.

But just when we thought that we were going to be able to go back to Mitchell and tell him, like, hey, we've successfully solved your problem.

You're about to have some images coming your way.

Joel said this.

In that study, at least, we didn't have any people with aphantasia as participants.

So everyone had some level of imagery to start off with.

Now, would that work with someone who has no mental imagery?

We don't yet know.

We haven't done this yet.

I'll explain why we haven't done it yet.

So there's an interesting ethical issue there about giving people imagery that they may not be able to control.

So that's one of the caveats there.

It turns out that once researchers discovered aphantasia, they started to ask a lot of the same questions that Mitchell himself had been asking.

They wanted to know how our lives are impacted by the ability or inability to visualize.

What role does it play in our sense of self and in our sense of others?

And although they found that, functionally speaking, the lives of people with aphantasia are the same as the lives of people with mental imagery.

They can do all the same stuff, they make all the same stuff, solve the same kinds of problems, they also found that there are some stark differences in the way that they feel about the experience of their lives.

There are pros and cons of both, in both ways.

So, one of the interesting pros of having visual imagery is empathy.

There's some studies out and stuff we've been doing showing that if you have strong mental imagery, you are much more empathetic.

There are ways of measuring this where you have a description of some sick children and how much money you would donate to that cause.

And when people have strong imagery, they'll donate more and they'll show more empathy.

Which, if you think about it, makes sense because it's does make sense yeah yeah you start imagining oh the poor kid and then you start feeling it and that's one of the big clear things we have found is that if you can imagine a scenario and it has emotional content to it you will feel more emotion if you have mental imagery it's almost like think of it as like a virtual reality glasses where if you imagine you know a shark in the water when you're swimming you're going to start freaking out because

the imagery almost tricks the emotional parts of your brain the limbic system into kind of thinking it might just be real so we see more emotional responses to a range of things if you have imagery and i'm sure that you can already see where he's going because this sounds great if the emotional response you're experiencing is positive but if it's not having mental imagery can produce some really negative effects on your mind and your body If you have strong mental imagery, you're way more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, after going through some kind of trauma and we know that anxiety generally speaking is more is linked to mental imagery because like I just described if you you're getting on a plane you start imagining the the turbulence or the plane going down it's going to drive your anxiety and one of the defining features of PTSD is these uncontrollable traumatic sort of flashbacks which are memory and they're imagery so you can have PTSD without imagery without these flashbacks but most people will have those flashbacks and they are one of the sort of

more troubling components of PTSD.

Listening to Joel talk about this, I couldn't shake the sense that I, a person who has lived with pretty vivid imagery, might be wrestling with the consequences of my own processing.

With very little effort, I can conjure up every indignity, every embarrassment, big and small.

Breakups, friendships dissolving, the hot sting of embarrassment when I was four and I hugged someone who wasn't my dad at the grocery store, and thousands of other little uncomfortable, or shameful, or heartbreaking moments I've experienced in my life.

And each time I remember those incidents, it's like I experienced them all over again with almost perfect fidelity.

So, if you had the choice of having very, very strong imagery, even though everyone seems to want that because I think it'd be cool to relive memories,

it does present its sort of own realm of potential problems there as well.

Ultimately, this is the reason why nobody is really trying to find a way to give imagery to people who don't have it.

In fact, as far as the researchers can tell, it seems like aphantasia might provide a kind of emotional buffer against living your worst memories.

I mean, does that come at the cost of reliving your best memories?

Maybe.

But again, the reason they're reluctant to find out is because when you set out to change somebody's brain, you have no idea if it's going to change who they are.

And my worry would be if we took a bunch of people who had never had imagery, never learned to control it, and let's say in a week or two, two weeks of brain stimulation and training, we gave them imagery.

And that may be non-reversible.

Then all of a sudden they go, oh man, well, I'm not enjoying this.

I can't stop.

I can't sleep anymore.

All these images are bouncing around my head.

I'm finding it, I'm getting anxious and stressed.

And they regret the whole thing.

So there's an interesting ethical issue there about giving people imagery that they may not be able to control.

If experts in Afantasia weren't willing to try an experiment like this for fear of inflicting incredible emotional distress, I certainly wasn't going to do it.

But now we were finally in a place where we felt confident answering all of Mitchell's questions.

So producers Emma Cortland and Amore Yates joined me on my follow-up call with him as he was getting settled in his new home.

I was going to show the camera of the room, but you know, anyway, it's a mess.

I can imagine.

I can imagine.

Shit.

Just a little aphantasia humor for you.

So after we got the technical logistics sorted, we started telling Mitchell about everything we'd learned.

We told him visualization was not some lesson he missed in school, and in all likelihood, aphantasia was something he was born with.

We told him that research suggests that he can do literally everything that people with imagery are able to do, and that there's no evidence to suggest that living without imagery has been a detriment to his life or career.

In fact, aphantasia might actually have helped him by minimizing the amount of anxiety he experiences at work.

Finally, we stressed the message that had been stressed to us.

which is that aphantasia is not something that needs to be fixed.

It's a variation on experience that actually comes with some major upsides.

But as we were taking off the answers to each one of Mitchell's questions, we started to get the sense that the problem wasn't totally resolved for him.

And in the moment, we really didn't understand why that was.

So we just started kind of throwing things at him to see if anything else we'd learned would land.

And the one thing that seemed to excite him was a thing that we'd learned offhandedly from Adam Zemin.

If you have a vivid auditory imagination and you can imagine a rock band or a symphony, your auditory brain is going to be active.

If you're one of those people who can imagine the smell of a rose or the taste of a red wine, again, your smell regions and taste regions will become active.

What Adam's saying is that there are a lot of other types of imagination that people are able to access on demand.

And while a lot of people who have aphantasia have the same kind of sensory blindness applied to their other senses, not all of them do.

So he asked Mitchell, Can you hear songs in your head?

Can you hear a tune?

Mitchell thought about it for a minute, and then his eyes went wide.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes.

Can you hear baby one more time?

In the moment, it was just nice to be able to give Mitchell something that felt exciting to him.

But after we got off the call, it dawned on us why this might actually be exciting.

Because we remembered that the whole reason Mitchell was bothered by aphantasia was this one specific thing that other people could do and he seemingly could not.

I like that idea of carrying the people that you love with you.

And the one that that really bothers me with is like my dad, you know?

I don't know why him in particular, but like, I feel like I should be able to think about his face and I just can't, you know?

The whole reason Mitchell wanted to fix his aphantasia was because he wanted to do that magical thing everyone else seemed to be able to do.

To carry their loved ones around with them.

And in particular, he wanted to carry his dad.

So after our interview, Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland sent him this message.

Hi, Mitchell.

One thing I forgot to mention on our call earlier that I wanted to share with you.

You may not be able to see your dad's face.

If you can hear his voice,

Then I think you should make a point to memorize it.

Pick a a phrase that he says often and listen to it as often as you can until you can hear it in your mind.

I say this because my stepdad, who was really the dad that raised me,

he died about a year and a half ago.

And one of the wildest things about that experience is that I can still hear him singing to me.

He used to call me Emmer, and so when

he saw me, he'd sing Strawberry Fields for Emmer.

And it's super duper silly, but I can hear it so clearly.

And I wanted to give that to you because it seemed like

just because you can't see your dad's face doesn't mean you can't carry him with you, you know?

So just focus on the things that you can carry and he'll be there.

Okay, bye.

When Mitchell responded, he told us that there is one thing that he can hear in his head when he thinks about his dad.

It's the sound of his father's voice when he says goodbye at the end of a phone call.

Something he can hear whenever he wants and carry around with him wherever he goes.

Hey, Mitchell, it's dad and mom.

Just we're driving back from Norfolk,

Heading up towards Freddersburg.

We're not going to pull off and see you, but make me think about you.

Anyways, we'll talk with you later.

Love you very much, son.

Say hi to Kate Force and of course Nala.

Keep the most you won't respond.

Love you.

Bye.

Hyperfixed was produced and edited by Amore Yates, Emma Cortland, and Sari Saffer Sukenek.

It was engineered by Tony Williams.

Fact-checking this week by SariSafer Sukenek.

It was hosted by me, Alex Goldman.

The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and me.

You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, support the very existence of this show, and much, much more at hyperfixpod.com slash join.

We're working on some amazing merch that's going to be available to members only that should be coming out in the next couple of months.

So join up, keep your eyes peeled.

Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts.

Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm.

Thanks so much for listening.

See you soon.

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from PRX.