Aphantasia: Missing the Mind's Eye

This week's episode comes to us from our friends at Radiolab! Close your eyes and imagine a red apple. What do you see? Turns out there’s a whole spectrum of answers to that question, and producer Sindhu Gnanasambandan is on one far end. In this episode, she explores what it means to see — and not see — in your mind. This episode was reported and produced by Sindhu Gnanasambandan with help from Annie McEwen. Original music and sound design contributed by Dylan Keefe. Mixing help from Jeremy Bloom and Arianne Wack. Mixing for Science Vs by Sam Bair. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton. Edited by Pat Walters. Special thanks to Kim Nederveen Pieterse, Nathan Peereboom, Lizzie Peabody, Kristin Lin, Jo Eidman, Mark Nakhla, Andrew Leland, Brian Radcliffe, Adam Zeman, John Green, Craig Venter, Dustin Grinnell, and Soraya Shockley. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Verses.

• 0:05Wendy Zukerman?

  So we all know that everyone's different, right? We're all special snowflakes. But every now and then you'll hear a story, or maybe if you're a nerd like me, you'll read a scientific paper that makes you realise that we're different in these ways that you didn't expect, that you never thought about. Turns out, it's not just who loves Tay Tay 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.

• 0:49Wendy Zukerman?

  So we're going to jump in just after the break.

• 1:00Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. On this podcast, we sort fact from fiction. So here's a quick truth for you. With Sapphire Reserve, you can spend all around the world. Not only that, but you can earn four times the points on flights and hotels, book direct, and three times the points on dining. Plus, enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges and exclusive restaurant tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Subject to credit approval; terms apply.

• 1:37Speaker 01

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• 3:03Speaker 01

  or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  All right. All right. I'm Lulu. I'm Lotif. This is Radiolab, and today's story comes to us from producer, Sindhu Gnanasambandan.

• 3:21Speaker 02

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

• 3:26Speaker 01

  OK.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  OK, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  You can sort of cut this out anyway.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  He asked me this question.

• 3:40Speaker 03

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

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Now, open it again, your eyes. Can you tell me what you saw? What did you see?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  There was a leaf on it. It was two-dimensional. I didn't, I didn't think in 3D.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Did you have, did you see a color?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:17Speaker 02

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

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Uh huh, yeah, so, who knows?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Wait.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  So even though he told you red apple.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  I saw nothing. But you saw a leaf, right? I, I know, I just, I felt like I had to say something about an apple. Oh, 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 always thought it was a metaphor. Like, I just did my version of that.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Which is what, like, like a word cloud kind of thing?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  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, I've lived in that my whole life.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  The thing that blew my mind open.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm picturing a red delicious apple.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Was what's been going on in everybody else's head. 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. It's her or red apple. To describe their apple.

• 5:42Speaker 05

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

• 5:46Speaker 02

  And do you actually see the color?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And every time. What do you mean? The image is in my head.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  How could I not see the colors?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  I don't know, your eyes are closed. People would say they could actually see it.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  No, I'm definitely seeing the colors.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Do you see it?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a shiny red apple.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Like, I am seeing it right now.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  In the way that you see things in real life? Like, how vivid is it?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I mean, it's decently vivid. Like, 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 Ms. Pacioli, so it was sixth grade. I threw it into that particular cafeteria. Soft touch.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  You got that from an apple?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, when she said, "Picture an apple."

• 6:37Speaker 02

  How about yours, Latif?

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Um, okay. Mine, mine is, mine's not that vivid, but mine's like, uh, it's kind of a cartoon of an apple, I think. Um, like, I don't know. The more I think about it, I'm like, "Am I seeing it?"

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Like, what does seeing in the mind even mean?

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  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?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  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. Was programming an experiment, actually. He was playing around with this thing called binocular rivalry. And it's an amazing illusion where you present very different pictures, one to each eye, and you can... 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.

• 7:54Speaker 01

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

• 7:57Speaker 02

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

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Okay, got it.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And, you know, typically, when you're just looking around at things, like, your, your, your eyes are getting slightly different images. Right, your brain's fusing those two different images together. But like...

• 8:13Speaker 05

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

• 8:18Speaker 02

  So instead.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  You get these beautiful oscillations.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Your brain just sort of like randomly switches between the two. It's like green square, red circle, green square, red circle.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  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.

• 8:48Speaker 02

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

• 8:56Speaker 05

  And then.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  He turns it on.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  I was like, huh, I saw the thing that I imagined.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Joel only sees the green square.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  What? No, this can't be. Let me try that again. Now I imagine the red one.

• 9:15Speaker 05

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

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Whoa. 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.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  Turns out that what we imagine does change our visual perception. It literally changes how we see the world with a caveat, you know, if you have mental imagery.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  If someone like me does it.

• 9:38Speaker 05

  We don't see that same response.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  My mind doesn't linger on the imagined object. It just kind of switches between the two.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  Wow. It was actually the first sort of objective method to measure visual imagination. Since then, we've developed a few other ways.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  If we look up at the light, our pupils contract, right? When you're in the dark, of course, your pupil opens right up.

• 10:07Speaker 02

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

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Your pupil actually constricts.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  As if they were actually looking at the sun.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  No.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  But if someone with no images in their head does this.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  You don't get these effects.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  None at all?

• 10:23Speaker 05

  Not at all. Yeah, yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 10:27Speaker 02

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

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Aphantasia.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  What does that word mean? Just so we really.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Fantasia. Means imagination.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  And affantasia means no imagination.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  I know. So there's like about 1% of us who don't see anything. Most people see something like maybe big lines or cartoons like you, Latif, or even more vividly like you, Lulu. But then there are these other people.

• 11:03Speaker 06

  I would fabricate these stories and I would see them. I would see them like they were movies.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  It's called hyperfantasia. About 2% to 3% of people have it. And when you ask these people to imagine staring at the sun, their pupils super constrict.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  That when this other person reads, the visuals are so strong that he'll sometimes just leave the page like. So I'm just over here in the saloon and going upstairs. And the story doesn't even take place up there.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  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,

• 12:11Speaker 02

  And explores.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna go explore this fictional world.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just wanted to know what it looked like. Like I cannot hear music without having a complete, I guess you could say, music video.

• 12:24Speaker 06

  I've had the experience of like trying to find a music video.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  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. Oh my god. 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.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  And, and when you were talking to this woman, like, what, like, what is the, are you feeling jealousy? Are you feeling like, like they're getting something you aren't?

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Oh my god, are you kidding? I am so jealous. Just to know that there's this like, whole part of being a human that I will just never get to experience.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Like I was listening to this old Radiolab episode.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Never heard of it. What show is that?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Sounds boring. It's like some old episode called Who Am I?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  With Robert. And he goes on this little, uh, actually, you know what? Do you guys want to hear it?

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Any human being.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Can you hear that?

• 13:58Speaker 05

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

• 14:00Speaker 02

  He can paste red on it in his imagination.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  But a monkey you don't think can do. It cannot. And this is so simple for a human being to do. And I, just, let's run through a quick exercise. Imagine for me a bird in your head. Got a bird in there?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna cut forward a little bit.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  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 abstraction. Monkeys, says Ramachandran, can't do that.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  And you're sitting there like, ah!

• 14:28Speaker 05

  He basically just called you.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  A monkey.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Dense wall of words.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I don't know, I almost want to make you guys, like, picture someone you love right now.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  And just like, share what you see and how it feels.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  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, um, 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, huh, like a laugh, a little face shifting, duties are done, quick moment of connection. And, uh, yeah, it's very vivid. It's just like her face at a three-quarter profile.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Okay, um, I had this flash to my, um, my great-grandmother. Like, she has bright red hair because she would like Hannah dye her hair.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Um, and, uh, and I can picture her sitting on a chair. She's sort of sitting there and like kind of laughing.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Like that, like, I want that.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  You know, and it's like, ah.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And at one point in that conversation with that scientist, Joel. Can you give someone who has a Fantasia imagery? Yeah. With the right approach, uh-

• 16:51Speaker 03

  I think it would possible, yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  He said he thinks he can give it to me.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Whoa, wait, how would he even do that?

• 16:57Speaker 02

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

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 17:07Speaker 02

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

• 17:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  But.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  I think there are ways we can do this.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  With practice.

• 17:25Speaker 03

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

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Have you tried?

• 17:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  What? Why?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  I'll tell you why after the break.

• 17:58Speaker 02

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• 20:02Speaker 03

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

• 20:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:25Speaker 03

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

• 20:35Speaker 03

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

• 20:42Speaker 03

  sound.

• 20:45Speaker 04

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

• 20:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  I could make it red, or I could make it green, or golden. I could make light radiate off. 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 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 and

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Wow, what?

• 21:34Speaker 02

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

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Right, but he said it could be dangerous?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And the reason I'm telling you about Derek is because he's actually the one that helped me understand why.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Huh, okay.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  So Derek

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Let's see.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  He's about my age.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  I'm about to be thirty.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  He was born in New England.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Massachusetts.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Moved to Texas when he was eight. And he says as a kid, he loved having this supercharged imagination.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:14Speaker 02

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

• 22:19Speaker 03

  My mom and I, we 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 I never got to know people. And it was very, you know, here and there.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  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 out into the physical world.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you can always tell that it's a projection and not reality?

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can tell it's a projection.

• 23:30Speaker 02

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

• 23:36Speaker 03

  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'm into computer programming.

• 23:55Speaker 02

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

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Couch surfed for a while.

• 24:00Speaker 02

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

• 24:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:17Speaker 02

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

• 24:22Speaker 03

  I remember I had these coins.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  He picks up two dimes he has lying around and he decides he's gonna 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.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  They land the same. He does it again, the same.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  I was flipping over and over again.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  And he starts to believe that he can control them.

• 25:04Speaker 03

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

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Like using his mind.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:16Speaker 02

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

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Heads up.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  And he'd see they were both.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Heads up.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Do it again.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Heads down.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  And they'd both be.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Heads down, heads up. I remember feeling like. Heads down. It was some superpower. Heads up, heads down, heads up.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Derek says what happened next gets kind of foggy.

• 25:52Speaker 03

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

• 25:59Speaker 02

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

• 26:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  I see. So you stop being able to tell the difference between an imagination and reality.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  And at some point later that night.

• 26:22Speaker 03

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

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Derek's roommates kicked him out.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Derek wandered around all night and actually ended up living on the street for several years. 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.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Is the hyperphantasia a common symptom of schizophrenia?

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Or like common co-occurrence?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  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 imagerys of events that have been traumatic in the past.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Right. Okay.

• 27:59Speaker 02

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

• 28:07Speaker 06

  Remembering stupid stuff you said when you were like in third grade or eighth grade or, you know, times you were bullied.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  And the people at Hyperfantasia that I spoke to, they also told me about these other ways that mental imagery actually makes their life harder.

• 28:20Speaker 06

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

• 28:26Speaker 06

  You know, when there's a mass shooting, when the, the boys were trapped in the mine in Thailand. Like I am like in the mine, you know, it's just like sound of the water dripping off and, 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.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  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, before I had stacked up layers and layers of trauma.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  So whether it's looking back in sort of like PTSD or looking forward in anxiety, like a potential worry, like a, it's just so visual that it, it, it kind of like drums up the body's emotional.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Like imagery can really turn up emotions.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I, 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.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 01

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

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Well, and that it's kind of a control. Like if you can control, this is an amazing superpower. But if it controls you.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  That's, this is terrifying.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  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 or turn it green and 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.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  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?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  I mean, after all my reporting.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Honestly, no.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Really?

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I have no practice with it. I feel like it could be kind of a bad trip that I can't get out of.

• 30:48Speaker 04

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

• 30:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:03Speaker 04

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

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Not having them, yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, I am not gonna 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.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  More stuff to sweep out of there, yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  So, I think I'm good.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  You're good with where you are. You reported your way out of lust. You were like, actually, I don't want it.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  But also just beyond myself, I really do think it's a good thing for the world that there's a spectrum, and, you know, there's all these different brains thinking in all these different ways. You know?

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Hmm. But there's also a kind of like,

• 32:06Speaker 04

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

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 04

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

• 32:20Speaker 01

  You can't read the description of a rhododendron bush.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  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 is something sad about that.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  And that probably leads to like so much miscommunication and misunderstanding.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  And conflict.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:46Speaker 02

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

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Why can't you see this?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  But I think for that problem, it's like, we all just need to understand better, I think, just how differently our brains work.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Wait, can I tell you guys one last thing? Yeah. Of course, go for it. Okay, so you know, I was just talking about meditating, 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.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  What is harsh metal vocals?

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Do you want an example?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Okay, prepare your eardrums.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Or.

• 34:24Wendy Zukerman?

  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, and sharks, and Arctic squirrels, and loads more, so go check it out. Besides Versus, we'll be back next week. I'm Wendy Zukerman, back to you then.

• 34:56Speaker 02

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