Aphantasia: Missing the Mind's Eye

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus.

So we all know that everyone's different, right?

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Turns out it's not just who loves Tayte and who thinks she's just fine.

And today's episode is all about this.

Not Taylor Swift.

The idea that we're different in these unexpected ways.

It comes to us from Radiolab, and it's a story that we heard and we just really loved it and wanted to share it with you.

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All right.

All right.

I'm Lulu.

I'm Lotif.

This is Radiolab, and today's story comes to us from producer

Sindhunyanasambandan.

Okay, so this story, it sort of found me.

Okay.

Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.

Last year I was working on this episode about memory, and I was talking to this neuroscientist, Mark Whitman.

That's too bad.

And as a sort of aside, you can sort of cut this out anyway.

He asked me this question.

If you close your eyes and you think about, let's say, a red apple,

Now, open it again, your eyes.

Can you tell me what you saw?

What did you see?

There was a leaf on it.

It was two-dimensional.

I didn't think in 3D.

Did you see a color?

No.

I don't know what it would mean to see a color with your mind.

So, who knows?

Wait.

So, even though he told you red apple.

I saw nothing.

But you saw a leaf, right?

I know.

I just, I felt like I had to say something about an apple.

You were lying.

You were cheating on the test.

I mean, I wasn't lying.

Like, this has come up a lot in my life, okay?

People are, like, visualize something.

And so I just always thought it was a metaphor.

Like, I just did my version of that.

Which is what?

Like a word cloud kind of thing?

No, it's not a word cloud.

It's it's like an abstract knowing.

Like I know

I love someone.

Like I just know that an apple has a leaf.

There's a part of me that knows that that is true, but it's not seeing it.

Like if I close my eyes and think about it, like it's, like it's really just black.

Wow.

But of course, the thing that was surprising for me was not what's going on in my head.

Like I know I've lived in that my whole life.

Right.

The thing that blew my mind open.

I'm picturing a red delicious apple.

Was what's been going on in everybody else's head.

It's got a little yellow shine on the bottom left.

Like the ones that are so shiny that they look kind of waxy.

After that interview, I started obsessively asking everybody I came across a red apple to describe their apple.

Not perfectly red, but it's a red with little streaks of yellow and green.

And do you actually see the color?

I think so.

Yeah.

And every time...

What do you mean?

The image is in my head.

How could I not see the colors?

I don't know.

Your eyes are closed.

People would say they could actually

see it.

No, I'm definitely seeing the colors.

Wow.

Do you see it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like a shiny red apple.

Like I am seeing it right now.

In the way that you see things in real life?

Like how vivid is it?

I mean, it's decently vivid.

Like it, it's on a white plate on a kind of cafeteria style table.

Like I went, I went middle school.

I know the grade I went because it's when I had Miss Patcholi, so it was sixth grade.

I threw it into that particular cafeteria soft touch.

You got that from an apple?

Yeah, when she said picture an apple.

How about yours lettuce?

Okay, mine, mine is actually, mine's not that vivid, but mine's like, it's kind of a cartoon of an apple, I think.

Like,

I don't know.

The more I think about it, I'm like, am I seeing it?

Yeah.

Like, what does seeing in the mind even mean?

Right.

Yeah, I guess it is just words.

Like, how do we know?

Maybe I see the same blur as you, but I get all excited and poetic about it.

And you're just like, meh, there's not much there.

You know, how can we be sure?

I mean, well, for a long time, we couldn't be sure.

We had to sort of take someone's word for it that that's what they were imagining.

That's what their experience was like.

But then I found this guy, Joel Pearson.

I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales.

Who sort of like stumbles into this way of showing that there really is a difference here?

It was almost an accidental discovery.

So one day he's in his lab.

He was programming an experiment actually.

He was playing around with this thing called binocular rivalry.

Rivalry.

And it's an amazing illusion where you present very different pictures.

one to each eye.

Basically, you put on these sort of like VR goggles that give each eye a different image.

So let's say your left eye gets a green square and your right eye gets a red circle.

Wait, okay, so each eye only gets one of those.

Yeah, exactly.

Each eye can't see what's going on in the other eye.

Okay, got it.

And, you know, typically when you're just looking around at things, like your eyes are getting slightly different images.

Right, your brain's fusing those two different images together.

But like when those images are very different, like this experiment, your brain can't do that.

So instead, you get these beautiful oscillations.

Your brain just sort of like randomly switches between the two.

It's like green square, red circle.

Green square, red circle.

Huh.

So literally your consciousness is changing back and forward in this sort of

really random manner.

So I was programming an experiment to look at that.

And for some reason, and today I don't remember why, I thought, huh, I'm going to imagine one of these two pictures.

Before he turns on like the images and the goggles, he's like, okay, let me just imagine a green square.

And then he turns it on.

And I was like, huh,

I saw the thing that I imagined.

Joel only sees the green square.

What?

No, this can't be.

Let me try that again.

Now I imagine the red one.

Huh, and now I saw the red picture in the binocular ivory.

Oh, it's like just imagining the red circle made his brain actually choose to show him that one.

Like what he thought actually changed what he saw.

Turns out that what we imagine does change our visual perception.

It literally changes how we see the world with the caveat: you know, if you have mental imagery.

If someone like me does it, we don't see that same response.

My mind doesn't linger on the imagined object.

It just kind of switches between the two.

Wow.

It was actually the first first sort of objective method to measure visual imagination.

Since then, we've developed a few other ways.

And Joel's continued to find these like objective ways to see a difference.

Like he did this one experiment looking at people's eyes.

If we look up at the light, our pupils contract, right?

When you're in the dark, of course, your pupil opens right up.

People who have imagery, if you ask them to imagine, say, looking at the sun, your pupil actually constricts.

As if they were actually looking at the sun.

But if someone with no images in their head does this, you don't get these effects.

Not at all.

Not at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

And there's even a name for this for not being able to see in your head.

Aphantasia.

Hmm.

Aphantasia.

What does that word mean?

Just so we really fancied.

Aphantasia means imagination.

Okay.

And aphantasia means no imagination.

Wow.

I know.

So there's like about 1% of us who don't see anything.

Most people see something, like maybe vague lines or cartoons like you letif, or even more vividly, like you, Lulu.

But then there are these other people.

I would fabricate these stories and I would see them.

I would see them like they were movies.

Who say their imagery is as vivid as real seeing.

Create this entire world where I'm like flying on a Pegasus back, you know, and it's as real to me.

It's called hyperphantasia.

About two to three percent of people have it.

And when you ask these people to imagine staring at the sun, they're pupils super constrained.

I can go into the backyard.

I can walk to my friend's house.

I can walk to the Catholic school where we used to play on the tree.

One guy described being able to like walk through his childhood world.

I can run into old friends.

I can just keep walking.

Wow.

It keeps me company.

So like I never actually feel lonely usually.

This woman described reading books being like as if I was watching a film, except that I'm standing in the film.

Being in a movie.

Whoa.

And when this other person reads, the visuals are so strong that he'll sometimes just leave the page.

Like I'm just over here in the saloon and going upstairs.

The story doesn't even take place up there.

Oh, so it's like it's in the world of the book, leaves the page of what the author is saying and just is like, I'm just going to go explore this fictional world.

I just wanted to know what it looked like.

I cannot hear music without having a complete, I guess you could say, music video.

I've had the experience of like trying to find a music video that then I find out doesn't exist.

It was just in my mind.

This woman described having these like images that just constantly play in the background of her mind.

Like in the middle of the interview, I asked her, I was like, Are you seeing something right now?

It's like a really touching like love moment between two characters.

She passes away and visits him before she dies and he thinks it's a dream.

And then she climbs up onto like a unicorn.

She's wearing a most beautiful dress and then he wakes up to watch her ride the unicorn into the wall and disappear.

So you are experiencing that in your head while you're answering my questions.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's just happening.

It's like, it's like I have a TV on in the background.

Wow.

And when you were talking to this woman, like what, like, like what is the are you feeling jealousy are you feeling like like they're getting something you aren't oh my god are you kidding i am so jealous just to know that there is this like

a whole part of being a human that i will just never get to experience yeah

Like I was listening to this old Radiolab episode.

Never heard of it.

What show is that?

Anyway, it's like some old episode called Who Am I with

Robert.

And he goes on this little

actually, you know what?

Do you guys want to hear it?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Okay.

Any human being

can take a white car and make it in their imagination.

But a monkey you don't think can do.

He cannot do it.

And this is so simple for a human being to do.

And let's run through a quick exercise.

Okay, imagine for me a bird in your head.

Got a bird in there?

I'm just going to cut forward a little bit.

Only a human being could do this because only humans can take images from the real world, pull them into their heads, divide them into parts, and then start turning those parts into abstractions.

Monkeys, says Ramachandra, can't do that.

And you're sitting there like, ah.

He basically just called you a monkey.

No, like monkeys can visualize.

Like most of them just can't change the image.

Robert says I'm worse than a monkey.

And like, I know it's funny, but like it's just, it also makes me sad.

I want to disappear into books.

When a book is like really descriptive, I'll just read the same paragraph again, like five times and nothing will enter my brain.

Right.

Dense wall of words.

And also,

yeah, just thinking about, oh, I don't get to,

I just don't get to hold memories the way that all of you get to.

Like my memories aren't places I go.

Like I don't get to see or feel or touch them.

I don't know.

I almost want to make you guys

like picture someone you love right now.

Got it.

And just like share

what you see and how it feels.

Yeah.

It's weirdly like intimate, but just yeah, because you're just picturing, I mean, I'm thinking of Grace, my wife, and I'm thinking of like the little peach fuzz on the, on her high part of her cheek and like a little crinkle, like the crinkles around her eyes.

And

yeah, I'm just kind of imagining her like

softening after a long day.

Like I could picture the bathroom door light on behind her, and she's turning back, like that moment where like the stress of the day melts, and it's just like a little like ha, like a laugh, a little

face shifting, duties are done, quick moment of connection.

And yeah, it's very vivid.

It's just like her face at a three-quarter profile.

Okay.

I had this flash to my

great-grandmother.

Like she has bright red hair because she would like Hannah dye her hair.

And

I can picture her sitting on a chair, just sort of sitting there and like kind of laughing.

Like that, like I want that.

Yeah.

You know?

And it's like, ah, hmm.

And at one point in that conversation with that scientist, Joel.

Can you give someone who has aphantasia imagery?

Yeah.

With with the right approach?

I think it would be possible, yeah.

He said he thinks he can give it to you.

Whoa, wait, how would he even do that?

Yeah, so Joel found that when he ran this like very low electrical current through people's visual cortex, their imagery actually got stronger.

Whoa.

Now, he does think it would be more complicated for people who are starting out with no imagery.

I can't stimulate your brain and you can start speaking a new language.

You have to learn that content first.

You have to learn how to connect your frontal cortex with your visual cortex to drive visual cortex.

But I think there are ways we can do this.

With practice.

Training with brain stimulation over some time could probably do it.

Have you tried?

We haven't done that yet.

If you took someone who'd never had imagery and you gave them imagery, let's say in a week,

I think that could be quite a dangerous thing.

What?

Why?

I'll tell you why

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If I want to

experience flying, I can imagine it and it's kind of like really flying.

There were stars coming from the center of my vision to the outer edge of my vision.

Or even planets.

it depends on what i'm passing by

large clouds uh that are like pink and yellow and maybe a little bit of blue mixed in there

i can feel the coolness of the air as it as it hits my skin kind of like a

sound

Lulu?

Lutth, Radio Lab.

We've been talking to our producer Sindhu, who cannot make images in her mind.

That's right.

Yeah.

And the person you just heard, his name is Derek, and he is the opposite of me.

Like when I asked him to describe his apple, his description was wild.

I could make it red or I could make it green or golden.

I could make light radiate off of it.

Like right now, I think it's interesting to like make a cloud of thunderbolts coming off of the top of the apple.

And now there's like a village with people and they're like running away from the storm because there's a tornado dropping down from the cloud.

And there's one guy that jumped off of the apple, and now he's falling into this ocean down below the apple.

Wow,

what?

And earlier, we learned that there's a scientist who like maybe could give me that ability to be a little more like Derek.

Right.

But he said it could be dangerous.

Yeah, exactly.

And the reason I'm telling you about Derek

is because he's actually the one that helped me understand why.

Huh.

Okay.

So Derek.

Let's see.

He's about my age.

I'm about to be 30.

He was born in New England.

Massachusetts.

Moved to Texas when he was eight.

And he says as a kid, he loved having this supercharged imagination.

I could just live in my head and imagine whatever I wanted.

It was like living in virtual reality or whatever you want to call it.

Which was nice for him because real reality was pretty hard.

My mom and I, I,

we were pretty poor.

We stayed in a homeless shelter for a short while.

We didn't really stay in one place for very long, so I never got to know people.

And it was very, you know, here and there.

But whenever Derek got sad or scared or like even just bored, he would close his eyes and just go into his imagination.

Or sometimes he'd even do this thing where he would take something from his mind and plop it out into like physical space, like out into the physical world.

Yeah.

So I would be in a car and I'd be looking out the window.

I would imagine this man.

He would look like a superhero or something.

And he would just be running really fast along all of these cars and then jumping and flying and like doing flips.

And by focusing really intensely, it's almost like I can switch to primarily the visualization and it can start to replace what I'm seeing more fully.

Yeah.

And you can always tell that it's a projection and not reality.

Yeah, I can tell it's a projection.

But at a certain point, he said that started to slip.

I graduated high school a year early

and I didn't really want to go off into university.

So I ended up moving to Seattle.

I was really wanting to be somewhere more open-minded where the tech industry was prominent because I am into computer programming.

But the first job he got was at the Dollar Tree.

Couch surfed for a while.

And a few months in, it wasn't going great.

Yeah,

I was sleeping in a bed in someone's laundry room in their basement.

So it was very much just like being on the sidelines of life, really badly wanting to find some kind of escape.

One day, he's sitting in his room and he has this idea.

I remember I had these coins.

He picks up two dimes he has lying around and he decides he's going to play a little game with himself.

Flipping both coins, trying to get them to land the same way.

He flips them in the air.

Looks down at the coins and they're both the same.

They're both heads or tails.

He doesn't remember which.

And then he flips them again.

They land

The same.

He does it again.

The same.

I was flipping over and over again.

And he starts to believe that he can control them.

That I could make them land on whatever I wanted them to.

Like using his mind.

If I wanted them to both land heads up, then they would land heads up.

If I wanted them to land heads down, they would land heads down.

So he'd flip the coins and think to himself.

Heads up.

And he'd see they were both.

Heads up.

Do it again.

Heads down.

And they'd both be.

Heads down.

Heads up.

I remember feeling like.

Heads down.

It was some superpower.

Heads up.

Heads down.

Heads up.

Derek says what happened next gets kind of foggy.

Unfortunately, I don't remember much from the night.

I don't remember much from the psychosis.

But he now knows that as he was flipping those coins.

Whenever they would land, I would project onto them whatever I wanted them to look like.

So I would see them heads up if I wanted them to be heads up.

But whether or not they were really heads up, I don't really know.

I see.

So you stopped being able to tell the difference between an imagination and reality.

Yeah, basically.

And at some point later that night.

I couldn't tell you what time it was, but it was dark.

Derek's roommates kicked him out.

You know, I wasn't hurting anyone.

I wasn't harmful or anything like that.

They just didn't know what to do with me and they didn't want to, they didn't want it to be their responsibility because they couldn't get me to go to the hospital or anything.

Derek wandered around all night.

and actually ended up living on the street for several years.

Wow.

He does eventually get a diagnosis, schizophrenia, and he gets on medication for that.

And he says that things are better,

but he still sometimes experiences psychotic episodes.

Is the hyperphantasia a common symptom of schizophrenia?

Or like common co-occurrence?

Yeah.

So according to neuroscientist Joel Pearson.

You see this link between very strong imagery and schizophrenia.

They do seem to be correlated.

And it's not just schizophrenia.

It broadens beyond that.

This is clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Holmes.

People who are highly disposed to think in images may be slightly more anxious.

She brought up certain anxiety disorders, things like phobias.

For example, if you were afraid of spiders, you might experience bits of imagery of spiders with terribly big teeth and fangs.

And also.

Perhaps the Hallmark disorder is post-traumatic stress disorder in which people relive vivid mental imageries of events that have been traumatic in the past.

past.

Now, of course, having strong imagery doesn't mean you're going to have any of these disorders, or not having it doesn't protect you from them.

Right, okay.

But it does seem that being able to make really vivid pictures in your mind makes them more likely.

Laying in bed and remembering stupid stuff you said when you were like in third grade or eighth grade or, you know, times you were bullied.

The people with hyperphantasia that I spoke to, they also told me about these other ways that mental imagery actually makes their life life harder.

Very difficult to listen to news where, you know, there's a war going on,

you know, when

there's a mass shooting,

when the boys were trapped in the mine in Thailand, like I am like in the mine, you know, it's just like the sound of the water dripping off and falling into water below and like the boys being stressed and their breathing and the humidity, like anybody suffering at all.

I cannot not see it.

I can visualize, you know, being yelled at.

I can see the looks on everyone's faces.

My muscles will tense up.

I think when I was a child, I think I was a little bit more in the moment before

I had stacked up layers and layers of trauma.

So whether it's looking back in sort of like PTSD or looking forward in anxiety, like a potential worry, like a worry, it's just so visual that it

kind of like drums up the body's emotional.

Yeah, exactly.

Like imagery can really turn up emotions.

It is, I mean, it's like it's the whole blessing and a curse or like a gift, but not without a cost.

Like you get an escape hatch, like Derek can just fly off into space.

Yeah.

And that can be a gift, but then it sounds like you get this sometimes these hauntings that then you can't escape.

Well, and that it's kind of a control.

Like if you can control this, this is an amazing superpower.

But if it controls you,

this is

terrifying.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And actually, like, part of what Emily does is teach people how to gain some of this control.

So if we take the spider example, you could shrink it or turn it green, then push it away like it's more distant, like literally, visually.

And it's a way of showing I'm controlling you, you're not controlling me, and you're not real.

Wow.

Wow.

It's like she's like the real life,

you know, Professor Xavier teaching the X-Men how to control their powers.

That's so cool.

But what about you?

Do you still want imagery?

I mean, after all my reporting,

like honestly, no.

Really?

Yeah, I mean, I have no practice with it.

I feel like it could be kind of a bad trip that I like can't get out of.

Well, what if you could just get like a little bit?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Although, you know, the more I've been thinking about it, the more I'm like, I just have such a clean, empty

space inside of me.

Oh, so it's like, it's not the fear of having the pictures.

It's like appreciating.

Not having them.

Yeah.

Huh.

Yeah.

Like I, I

am not going to see poetry the way you see poetry or, you know, experience my memories in some sort of like rich sensory way.

But, like, I do have a meditation practice, and I was like, whoa,

like, there's so much more to quiet if you're dealing not just with words and like ideas, but actually, like, images.

Right.

More stuff to sweep out of there.

Yeah.

So I think I'm good.

You're good with where you are.

You reported your way out of lust.

You were like, actually, I don't want it.

But also, just beyond myself, I really do think it's a good thing for the world that there's a spectrum and

there's all these different brains thinking in all these different ways, you know?

Hmm.

But there's also a kind of like

the diversity means we're more like marooned in our own heads a little bit.

Yeah.

Like where there's a novel that you'll love and I'll like look at it and I'll be like, I haven't like, I just, I can't even even, like, I don't know.

I can't read this description of a road desert bush.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or, or even a memory.

Like, it's like we were both in the same place at the same time, experienced the same thing.

And then a year later, we're talking about it.

And it's like, we remember it in a totally different way.

Yeah, I don't know.

Like, which is, there's, there is something sad about that.

And that.

probably leads to like so much miscommunication and misunderstanding and conflict.

And conflict.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, it's like being like, why are you so obsessed about this thing that happened?

It's like, why can't you see this?

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think for that problem, it's like we all just need to understand

better, I think, just how differently our brains work.

Right.

Wait, can I play you guys one last thing?

Yeah, of course, go for it.

Okay, so you know, I was just talking about meditating.

It's something I love to do.

Well, when I was talking to Derek, the guy with that super intense imagery, I asked him what he likes to do, like what he does for fun.

And I just need to share it with you.

I also practice harsh metal vocals

just for fun.

People have told me I should try and get into a band, but I don't think that's really my goal or anything.

What is harsh metal vocals?

Do you want an example?

Yeah.

Okay.

Prepare your eardrums.

Okay.

Whoa.

Or

That was an episode from Radiolab.

Full credits are in the show notes, and the team at Radiolab actually have a new family-friendly show, which is called Terrestrials.

There's episodes about stumps, sharks, and Arctic squirrels, and loads more.

So, go check it out.

Science Versus will be back next week.

I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you then.

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Mutine, adjective, used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly.

They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions.

They know the rules but behave as if they do not exist.

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