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Nostalgia: Aphantasia (Thinking Without Pictures) · Why We Do What We Do

• 0:03
  You're listening to Why we do what we do. Welcome to Why we Do
• 0:16
  what we Do. I am your very literal host, Abraham, and I
• 0:21
  am your non visual host Shane. Where a psychology podcast. We talked about
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  the things that people do and the things that people imagine that they can do
• 0:28
  and in your mind generally sort of kind in Yeah, we're back to mind
• 0:34
  things. That's right. And this week we are actually re releasing a previous
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  episode on a fantasia thinking without pictures, Yeah, which is a thing that
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  when it was described to me that this is a thing that people experience,
• 0:49
  I did not understand how this can happen because I have a very vivid imagination.
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  Yes, and we'll impact that as the as we replay. This original
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  episode aired November eighth, twenty seventeen, six years and some months ago.
• 1:04
  Like, wow, it's been a while. It's been a long time.
• 1:07
  A lot's happened in six years. Yeah, So this was I think Shane,
• 1:11
  before you joined the podcast. I think this was yeah, Yeah,
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  this was BCS. So this was this was that time before changing to Shane.
• 1:22
  Yeah, before changing to Shane. It was a while ago. I
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  mean I think I was I was kind of supporting, but I wasn't doing
• 1:29
  a lot of work on the show proper, so that sounds about right.
• 1:33
  Yeah, that didn't come until later. Okay, So we are going to
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  play the episode in its entirety, and then we are going to after after
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  we played that, we're going to come back and do a little bit of
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  a follow up discussion and just some more sort of unpacking. And this one,
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  you know, it's been on my mind because this came up somewhat recently
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  on some other podcasts, because since we released this, so there has just
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  continued to be a flurry of like new people talking about this and doing research
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  on this, and I think, you know, we are going to come
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  at this from a sort of skeptical perspective and also a pragmatic perspective sure,
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  and at the same time acknowledge that like always wanting to be sensitive to communities
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  who have whatever experiences that they have and be in like everyone's entitled to think
• 2:17
  and feel what they think and feel, and then they don't need our permission
• 2:21
  for that. But yeah, anyway, if you're listening to this on the
• 2:23
  day that it releases, I would like to wish you a happy Coconut tor
• 2:28
  today. That sounds delicious. It's also Donald Duck Day, which I'm a
• 2:32
  big fan of. He's my favorite Disney character. And to be clear,
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  we're also talking about the day that this rerun releases, not that this is
• 2:38
  not November eighth date holidays. This is March thirteenth date holidays. Right.
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  It is ear Muff Day, which I mean it's started to get to be
• 2:47
  spring in most places, so I'm not sure, but maybe in Canada,
• 2:52
  I don't know. Yeah, unless that's specific to profanity and now there you
• 2:57
  go. Yeah, so sure, it could be either either one of those.
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  It's Good Samaritan Involvement Day, which I like, be good, be
• 3:04
  good community member. It's l Ron Hubbard Day, so go check out our
• 3:07
  scientology allegedly episode uh huh yeah, also a real good example of a not
• 3:14
  good Samaritan, el Ron Hubbard. That man, it's National Jewel Day,
• 3:20
  so go play all of our records. I think it's actually specific to know
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  precious stones, but it's fun to think that it's about jewel herself. Right,
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  National Open and Umbrella Indoors Day. Tempting the bad luck gods? Isn't
• 3:34
  that weird? There's like a superstitious day in the middle of March. It
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  is kind of strange. I'd be interested to unpack that more, but for
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  now we're just saying what it is. I'd love to open that umbrella there.
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  It's a smart and sexy day, which means it's my birthday. Ha
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  ha ha. It is a Brain Awareness Week in case you didn't know you
• 3:55
  have a brain surprise, many of you probably wish you didn't. It's a
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  Girl Scout Week. It is also National Green Week. Drink those green smoothies.
• 4:05
  Yeah, I love it, spinach in your smoothies. It's also National
• 4:09
  Sleep Awareness Week, which now you're aware that you sleep sometimes. And Patient
• 4:14
  Safety Awareness Week. We should make sure our patients are safe. I love
• 4:18
  that. It's also Sunshine Week, which is every week in Florida but some
• 4:23
  places maybe not so much. And it's Ramadan. So if you celebrate,
• 4:26
  have your Ramadan, yeah, or maybe not happy. You know, some
• 4:29
  of those celebrations are meant to be more suffering than not. I don't know
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  depending, I guess I hope your Ramadan goes well. Yes, I hope
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  your Ramadan is successful in its goals for you. We're actually not going to
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  talk anymore about any of those holidays. We are instead going to turn to
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  the topic at hand, which is a fantage of this idea of thinking,
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  but without visual imagery and what that could possibly mean. So let's go ahead
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  and get to that episode, and then we will come back with a follow
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  up. Hey, either this is Abraham, your host, and your co
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  host Ryan. Oh, and so this is why we do what we do.
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  So Ryan, before we start, I actually, as we start,
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  what I want you to do is I want you to imagine something. Okay,
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  Okay, this was not planned for listeners. Yeah, So what I'm
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  gonna do is I just want you to think about something. Close your eyes,
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  and I want you just to think about something. Think about your house,
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  Okay, all right, So are thinking about your house, all right?
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  So I want you to just describe it to me as best you can.
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  It's ten It's a part of a couple other houses, like they're all
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  kind of next to each other. It's like the old seventies development, kind
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  of pretty clean maintained outside. I can see the door ish, okay,
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  to the gate that gets me in, and then I walk the same path
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  all the time. So I guess there's two paths either to my door because
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  I have an external door to the house or to the garage to kind of
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  go through that way. Can you see if there's any like dirt smudges on
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  the walls. There's a tree next to it. There's another bush that I
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  have to like duck to be able to get by because I'm kind of tall.
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  To get to the front door, the concrete's kind of rough. I
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  remember that, like walking up to it, and there's a ledge to step
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  into the main gate. Can you imagine hearing the squeaks it like open the
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  door? No, I can imagine hearing the like when I pull the little
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  gate opener handle, because it's like lashed on the inside. I can kind
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  of imagine that sound. But again, I've heard that every day for the
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  last three years, at least once a day. Sure. Okay, so
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  now keep your eyes closed on a confirm for our listeners that your eyes are
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  in fact closed. And so now I want you to try and imagine a
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  monster. It's nothing you've ever seen before. Try and think of something brand
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  that you've never seen, and just describe whatever you come up with. Okay,
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  So I see, I see like six eyes on this weird I don't
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  know, like I'm trying to make up an alien. But I don't know
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  how to make up an alien. That's okay. I've never been creative,
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  So there's like I'm gonna say it's got I'm just gonna make it up.
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  Is that all right? Yeah? Okay, So it's got six eyes because
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  six sounds cool, and Scott talents it makes sounds like the Predator because that's
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  scary, and everyone can relate to it. That's great. I don't know.
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  I mean I feel like I could choose, like is it scaly?
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  Is it slimy? Right, I've never contacted these things. All right,
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  you can open your eyes. Okay, all right, So where were we
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  going with this? Well, you know, I just wanted to to just
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  have you describe your experience with it now as you had your eyes closed,
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  you were you actually seen something as you were describing it. No, I
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  mean like it was. I feel like it's a little bit easier just I
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  use air quotes here. See the first thing I described versus in the second.
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  Okay, but I kind of feel like I'm kind of biased as to
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  like where I'm gonna fall in this topic since I researched it too. Yeah,
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  no, I understand, but were you with your eyes closed where they're
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  like images on the back of your eyelids that you were actually looking at like
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  pictures and definitely not. Okay. So, a lot of people when asked
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  to imagine or put in a situation where they have to pretend to experience something,
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  it can be noises or most of the time it's but they can be
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  like feeling like on their skin, It can be smells, all those sorts
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  of things. There are some people who report that they can't They just have
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  no experience whatsoever when they're trying to visualize these things, okay, And so
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  those people who experience this have been described as having what's called a fantasia and
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  not to be confused with Disney's Fantasia or Fantasia two thousand boom. Yeah.
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  Yeah, and so so what is this thing? Yeah? So it sounds
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  like the opposite of what Temple Grannon likes to talk about a lot, right,
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  Yeah, and has like largely built her career off of, at least
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  on one of her branding aspects of like how she interprets the world and how
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  she solves and creates solutions. Right, those would this would devastate her,
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  I don't know. Perspective, and like, how did she potentially function?
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  It sounds like, oh, yeah, if she had a fantasia, Yeah
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  yeah, yeah, I can see that. Yeah. And so what this
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  refers to, So it's Greek, so it means no imagination. And it
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  really is just these people who they can't visualize mental images in their mind's eye,
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  they can't imagine sensations. Well, it depends on different people have different
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  types of experiences, Like they might be able to imagine sounds, but they
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  can't visualize a picture in their mind's eye. And so it's kind of interesting
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  because this has a this is a pretty new thing, although it does have
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  a longer ish past. So what I saw, and I think you found
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  something a little bit different in your notes, But what I saw was that
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  this was really first described in twenty fifteen, and so that was very recently,
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  you know, at the time of this recording, it's twenty seventeen,
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  so only a few you know, a couple of years ago. Yeah,
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  And so there's a lot of different there's rebrands and things like that, right,
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  And I'm sure this isn't something When I first read your notes in twenty
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  fifteen, I was like, there's no way like it was in twenty fifteen.
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  But then I thought about it more and I was like, Okay,
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  that makes sense, like someone labeled it, or maybe it was relabeled,
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  so we see those things. We actually just recorded and should have released a
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  podcast episode on the rename kind of the restructuring of Asperger syndrome, right,
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  and how these things can kind of shift. So I was like, Okay,
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  maybe that's what it was. But still when I looked back, I
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  saw some evidence that Sir Francis Galton in eighteen eighty had a survey that suggested
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  that it may only be true for about two point five percent of the population
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  that they experienced these sort of lack of or inability to visualize things. And
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  I don't think they had a name for it, at least not the one
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  that they currently have. So it was first described by I want to say,
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  Adam Zemmon that I'm gonna pronounce it. Yeah, let's go with zem
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  Zemon. And so he's a cognitive neurologist at the University of Exeter Medical School.
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  I'm saying that correct, like Exeter. Yeah, okay, so it
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  sounds like yeah and yeah. So he discovered or he heard about these cases
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  of people who could not visualize, and so he started to do some research
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  and explore this and you know, try and figure out how he could sort
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  of describe this, and I guess in a scientific way. Yeah, okay,
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  and so but immediately when I first heard about this raised the question for
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  me, I'm thinking, how do you know, Like, if someone else
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  is they tell you that you know, they can't visualize, how would you
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  know that they can't visual Like I'm thinking of my own I'm like, okay,
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  I can imagine something that is, I would imagine seeing something even though
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  I'm not actually seeing it, But I don't know how someone else would be
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  able to look and tell whether or not I was actually visualizing it. So
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  I was really curious, and so I obviously wanted to look and see how
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  are they testing this right? And what I found was that the first one,
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  and there's some new research now, but the first one was pretty subjective.
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  It was this visual imagery questionnaire I actually called the vivid Visual Imagery Questionnaire
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  or the vv IQ, And the purpose of this thing is to basically,
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  it asks the person to rate how vivid their mental image is of something.
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  And so I actually have a couple of questions from the questionnaire itself, and
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  so it's ranked on the scale of one to five, where one is perfectly
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  clear, as vivid as you were looking at a picture, and then five
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  is no image at all. You just know that you're thinking of whatever day
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  you're supposed to be thinking of. Okay, And then the first thing on
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  here is think of some relative or friend whom you frequently see but is not
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  with you. Carefully consider the picture that comes to your mind, and then
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  rate the following items the exact contour of their face, head, shoulders and
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  body, characteristic poses of head, attitudes of body, precise carriage, length
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  of step. So I guess you're also imagining the moving and then the different
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  colors worn in some clothes that you commonly see them in. And then it
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  goes on and asks about other things. Has the rising sun a store that
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  you go to frequently, and you just go through and you rate each one
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  of these items from one to five. One you can see it really well,
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  in five you can't. And that was the initial one. And so
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  I saw a video of this. Actually snippet was very a little bit of
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  a snippet. I believe it was zem and he was asking the sunset question
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  okay to somebody. And I mean this was like a highlight reel, like
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  three second snippet. No, I didn't see anything really of substance, but
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  yeah, it's I believe it went from zero to sixty is what they said
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  was the score that I saw. Oh okay, like you could you could
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  get zero? Wait, how would you get zero if you'd write one on
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  everything? There was some sort of aggregate score that went from zero to sixty.
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  I believe it looks like you'd have to be able to at least give
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  a score of sixteen if you give a score of one on every item,
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  or a five. Oh, I get it. Never mind, okay.
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  And wherever the gentleman was, it was like a part of it bell just
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  a little below the average, but around the media, and it sounded like
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  okay, like one of the most frequently answered ones. Okay. So where
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  do we want to jump into Well, I think that we should just basically
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  describe okay. So we have this questionnaire. This might be a reasonable way
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  of investigating this, but we also know that this has got some limitations to
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  it. And I mean the first thing that comes to mind is the basic
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  question of if you close your eyes, and I asked you this when we
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  first started, do you actually see anything? Is there a picture there for
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  you? No chicking your head, No, and there's there's not one for
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  me either, And really anybody there's not an actual image that they see.
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  You are sort of imagining something, or you're recalling it, or you just
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  that old copy theory. Yeah, and so, and it makes perfect sense.
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  Your eyes are not receiving any visual information. You're not like getting photons
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  that are hitting your ret noads that are allowing you to see anything. And
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  so you know, there's you couldn't possibly be seen anything if your eyes are
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  closed, right, And so even if your eyes are open and you are
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  seeing things, is that different Like would you have again, how would you
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  know you'd be seeing something? But you would be seen whatever was in front
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  of you, and you might be thinking about something else. But does that
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  mean that you're actually seeing a picture of it? No? And so that's
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  that's one of the things that comes to mind with this. So I'm thinking
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  of this questionnaire is like, okay, if you ask me to rate like
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  as perfectly clear as a picture as is the first one perfectly clear and as
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  vivid as a normal vision, and I have my eyes closed or they're open.
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  Under no circumstances, am I ever going to say yes? And even
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  though there are things that I think that I can't imagine very vividly, right,
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  even things I can imagine what it feels like to be in a situation
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  where I'm sad. I can imagine what it feels like to get a shot
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  in my arm from like, you know, a vaccine or something like.
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  I know what those things feel like, and I can imagine what it feels
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  like, but it's not as clear as the event itself. And you know,
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  maybe it's maybe I'm part of this population of people who can't sense things.
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  But my guess is, and basically what I've sort of interpreted from what
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  I've was reading from other people, is that most people aren't going to hit
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  one very often. People will have a range of scores where it'll be.
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  It can be very clear, but not perfectly clear, which makes it like,
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  why even have that option if it's never going to be there? You
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  know, maybe you don't have the gene for it. Yeah, that could
• 15:46
  be it. That could be it. We'll get to that. Yeah,
• 15:48
  Because I have some notes on that. That sure was a great point.
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  I think let's get to some ads and we're back. Another thing I was
• 16:02
  thinking about is if someone can describe anything in terms of its visual characteristics.
• 16:07
  So describe to me your car using just like observable features. So it's black
• 16:14
  with blue license plates, say Nevada license plates are Ryan. Oh surprise,
• 16:21
  surprise. Now you can find and track me anywhere Nevada, by the way,
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  although you could probably do that just by watching your social media. Yes,
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  as for I don't know, like there's a crack in the windshield that
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  just got it a couple of days ago, all right, Now, so
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  you're just talking about the visual aspects. But how can I tell, if
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  I'm, you know, looking at this, whether or not you're describing a
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  mental image or you're just describing the visual descriptions of the thing even though you're
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  not seeing it right now? Aren't those the same thing? I don't know,
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  Like it seems like they sort of are r and so I don't know,
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  I'm having a hard time telling the difference. And so again I'm not
• 16:52
  trying to comment on this phenomenon. I'm really looking at this as a method
• 16:56
  for testing that phenomenon because what I did is I asked you to just describe
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  what you see, and you could probably come up with vivid details and even
• 17:03
  that the alien thing that's not even really you were describing. You came up
• 17:07
  with six eyes. You could probably describe the eyes as being glossy and small,
• 17:10
  and even give like precise measurements for how large they are. And all
• 17:14
  of those things are not You're not seeing a perfect image. You are just
• 17:17
  describing visual elements of a thing. Something else I thought was pretty interesting is
• 17:21
  thinking about just considering people who are born blind and never see anything, or
• 17:26
  maybe born deaf and never hear anything. So going to this, the other
• 17:30
  types of senses that you might try and imagine, yeah, because are off
• 17:33
  and also described as like overpowering. Are they overcompensate I guess, oh yeah,
• 17:37
  sure right, yeah yeah, or compensate because of I don't know if
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  over it was the best word. Oh yeah, I see what you're saying.
• 17:44
  It makes me wonder though, if someone who is either born blind or
• 17:45
  born deaf, or born without one of those other senses, if they also
• 17:48
  struggle with imagining or visualizing. You know, if I had a friend in
• 17:53
  high school and he was born blind, he had never seen anything his entire
• 17:57
  life. It wasn't even like the kind of blindness you can see a little
• 18:00
  bit. It was absolutely nothing whatsoever. Darkness just darkness, right, although
• 18:03
  to him it wasn't darkness, it was just normal. It just wasn't a
• 18:07
  sense of bad. And I had the idea one time to try and describe
• 18:11
  to him what blue looked like. And it's just like, there's nothing,
• 18:15
  Yeah, I mean, because it is only it only has visual characteristics.
• 18:18
  I could say it's a lightish color, but he doesn't know what light colors
• 18:21
  look like. I couldn't say it's a darkish color. Doesn't know what dark
• 18:22
  looks like. Yeah, And so there was nothing I could do to try
• 18:26
  and describe to him what this thing looked like. And so it makes me
• 18:29
  wonder if people who are born visually impaired to the point where they've never seen
• 18:33
  anything and they also can't visualize things, would those also be described as people
• 18:37
  having a fantasia or belonging to that community of people that are described as a
• 18:41
  fantasic? Is it a fantagics? Do you think? I do not know?
• 18:45
  I'm just I'm just gonna say having a fantasia then okay, and so
• 18:49
  that makes me think that this is not necessarily mental representations. It has to
• 18:53
  do then, just with the eyes, you know what I mean, Because
• 18:57
  if they can't visualize thing, but then that has to do with their eyes,
• 19:02
  and the other person can't visualize something, but it also has to do
• 19:03
  with the visual I don't know. It just makes me think that it has
• 19:07
  to be one of those two things, and I don't know, maybe the
• 19:11
  other way around. What do you think? So it sounds like to me,
• 19:12
  I would definitely go with the eyes. Okay, That's what I thought,
• 19:15
  you know, And maybe there's a logic in the other way, but
• 19:18
  it just seems like it has to do with with the eyes. If that
• 19:22
  would be the case, maybe the same thing for someone who's Yeah, we
• 19:25
  talk a lot about like all variables are relevant right in these sort of things,
• 19:29
  but there's definitely still a mechanism sometimes of like kind of a key part.
• 19:34
  And man, it sure it seems like the eyes are important here,
• 19:37
  it does. I mean, you know, we're talking about what if you're
• 19:41
  trying to imagine something visually, you then have to know what it means to
• 19:45
  what visual means, you have to know what those tamuly Are. And another
• 19:48
  one I was thinking about, and just again coming back to this questionnaire itself,
• 19:52
  is what if someone is just very literal in their interpretation, and I
• 19:56
  mean you say, I want you to visualize your house, and you're like,
• 20:00
  I don't know what that means, Like I don't see a picture when
• 20:03
  I close my eyes. What's wrong with me? Yeah, well nothing,
• 20:07
  you know, it's that I don't mean that you're actually going to see a
• 20:08
  picture. I mean, just tell me the visual descriptors of your house.
• 20:12
  Yes you can. Yeah, if you if I showed you a picture of
• 20:15
  your house, would you recognize it? You know what I mean? And
• 20:17
  so that's more I think what I worry about what this type of questionnaire is
• 20:21
  that you don't know how people are interpreting those questions, especially when it comes
• 20:22
  to language. These questionnaires that are based just on on language and having you
• 20:29
  try to respond to the question. How the question is phrased is critically important
• 20:33
  to how it's interpreted. And even then not everyone's going to interpret the questions
• 20:37
  the same way. Yeah, and a good old buddy Israel gold Diamond showed
• 20:41
  that in the sixties very well, that you could essentially set it up to
• 20:45
  get your answer, however, you'd like, yeah, good old gold diamond
• 20:48
  coming back. And that's a problem inherent questionnaires in a lot of different settings,
• 20:52
  you know, And sometimes it's something you can get around. Sometimes that's
• 20:55
  not. Another question I had is part of this is not necessarily how well
• 21:00
  you can visualize the image. It's mostly how well can you answer my question?
• 21:03
  Yeah? Yeah, and so like, And I said, to imagine
• 21:06
  that alien, you only gave me a few characteristics. You didn't really give
• 21:07
  me a whole lot of detail about. No, I'm not creative in that
• 21:11
  sense of just making up things like that. Well, but yeah, but
• 21:14
  I mean it does. It comes down to this. It's not necessarily are
• 21:17
  you visualizing it? It's are you answer my question in such a way that
• 21:19
  I can believe you're visualizing it? Yep, yep, yep. And maybe
• 21:22
  you even believe that you're visualizing it, or maybe you believe that you're not.
• 21:25
  Yeah, And there's no way that you of the US will be able
• 21:26
  to tell in that case, because it's just asking a question. So I
• 21:30
  also found this. I dove into YouTube. I'm all up into that realm
• 21:33
  the last couple of years. That makes sense. I'm going through an excursion
• 21:36
  and kind of led me to this video on using a memory palace as an
• 21:40
  aid for people who have experienced these things that are called apparently affantasia or afantasia
• 21:45
  like okay, So that that was pretty interesting since we released an episode of
• 21:48
  the Memory Palace and someone's out there saying like, hey, there's this thing,
• 21:52
  but you can actually like overcome it or try to overcome it, and
• 21:59
  it was I guess it's stood out because I didn't find a lot of that.
• 22:02
  I found a lot of people like being supportive and relating to being able
• 22:06
  to not see in pictures right. But it was one of the piece of
• 22:07
  information and one of the few that I found that was actually like trying to
• 22:12
  look at it from a different perspective, that's super interesting. So they were
• 22:15
  it was like a how to to try and improve your condition kind of yeah,
• 22:19
  and it was it looked like one of those things. It was probably
• 22:22
  more well put together college level project or something. Did you see if anybody
• 22:26
  like reported that they had that experience of having their condition improved? No,
• 22:32
  I did not. I don't want to take it in the comments. I
• 22:33
  don't dig in the YouTube comments mainly because a lot of the YouTube comments just
• 22:37
  aren't good. Yeah, people I follow, so I should have. I
• 22:41
  had that experience myself. Yeah, sonya, it was. It was a
• 22:45
  different perspective that didn't seem to be of the majority. That's pretty interesting look
• 22:48
  at that. Yeah, and I might even take the plunge and look at
• 22:52
  the YouTube comments and see if anybody reported that it worked for them. I'd
• 22:55
  be very curious about that. So this is probably something we want to cover
• 22:57
  the later time. But there are those who are resistant to treatment of things
• 23:00
  like this because they see it as part of their identity and don't try and
• 23:04
  take this away from me. Yeah, and then you know the respect it.
• 23:08
  Sure, Yeah, that's that's your thing, and that's your things.
• 23:11
  Yeah, all right. So we talked about the questionnaire and gave a lot
• 23:15
  of ideas about where some of the limitations are with that questionnaire. I think
• 23:18
  that initially trying to look at this phenomenon makes a lot of sense to say,
• 23:22
  Okay, how prevalent is this? What are people experiencing? And then
• 23:26
  this is the quickest, easiest way to sort of go down that path and
• 23:29
  ask that question. So it is what it is, and obviously they want
• 23:32
  to say, we are the only ones you've ever recognized that there's some limitations
• 23:34
  with this. Obviously, the people who are doing research on this, especially
• 23:37
  for a career, and they have a lot of lines of research that they're
• 23:41
  pursuing in this, they wanted something better, and interestingly, what came out
• 23:45
  of people who were interested in this was sort of turning to the perception research,
• 23:51
  and you know, they recognized that there was a problem of subjectivity and
• 23:53
  in perception research. Although they still rely on people responding to questions often or
• 24:00
  sort of giving their their own reaction to things, of which I have a
• 24:03
  very funny story I'll till after this, it is at least a lot more
• 24:07
  systematic in terms of how you can observe someone's response to something and then you
• 24:12
  can measure it a little bit more precisely. And so specifically, they turned
• 24:17
  to this idea of what's called binocular rivalry and the way that this works.
• 24:22
  I tried this test on myself, and I didn't have the right equipment to
• 24:25
  make it work appropriately. But the way that it works is that there are
• 24:27
  two images and they're presented to each eye separately. So a lot of times
• 24:32
  we'll have people wear like goggles, and specifically the images can't be received by
• 24:37
  both eyes. And the most common one that's used apparently is where there's a
• 24:41
  there's an image that is like red over top an image that is blue,
• 24:47
  and then they'll be wearing goggles over one eye that's red and over the other
• 24:49
  eye that's blue, and then they look at this image with some kind of
• 24:53
  like divider or something or something like that, and what happens is that they
• 24:57
  are only able to see one of the images. And it might it might
• 25:00
  go back and forth between them, but mostly they will one of the images
• 25:04
  will stick, and then that's the one that they'll see. Okay, and
• 25:07
  so okay, cool. So that's interesting. Why is that related to a
• 25:11
  fantasia? Well, what is interesting about this is that they can prime people
• 25:17
  to see one of those images by saying something like I want you to think
• 25:19
  of the color blue, or something about the color that they want them to
• 25:23
  focus on. And then what happened is if they said, okay, I
• 25:26
  want you to think of the color blue and then show them the two images.
• 25:30
  About sixty sixty to ninety five percent of people, which is a huge
• 25:34
  range, but sixty to ninety five percent of people would see the blue,
• 25:38
  they would see the one that they were primed to see. Okay, okay,
• 25:41
  But what happened then is that for people who were described as having a
• 25:45
  fantasia, if they were primed the same way I want you to see the
• 25:49
  color blue or be thinking about the color blue or whatever the prime was,
• 25:52
  and then showing the image, only about half of them saw the blue image,
• 25:56
  which is basically chance. Yeah, then half of them saw red.
• 25:59
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so this is the most objective way of
• 26:03
  looking at this in terms of if we were to prime this and this wasn't
• 26:07
  a real thing, then we should expect that everybody should see about the same
• 26:11
  rate, regardless of whether or not they have the same fantasia. Yeah,
• 26:14
  and what they saw was that it was different, Like they had fewer people
• 26:17
  who were able to see the one that was primed at the point where it
• 26:19
  could have just been a shot in the dark, you know, yeah,
• 26:22
  you know, and unprimed. And I actually don't remember if in the research
• 26:26
  that I looked at whether or not they saw that people were fifty to fifty.
• 26:30
  If it was unprimed, that would be really important piece of this.
• 26:33
  But unprimed, I think that it was fifty to fifty and primed it was
• 26:37
  higher than that. Okay, so if I understand you're right at this perception
• 26:41
  angle of this perception research, it allows us to kind of rule out some
• 26:45
  of the subjectivity, right, yeah, I mean that was the goal,
• 26:48
  I think. Yeah, but you're still having to like self report. Yeah,
• 26:52
  there is some self report So it moves us out of this mental world
• 26:57
  a little bit, but it houses a still in this visual world, which
• 27:00
  helps, right. Yeah, So it makes me I was thinking about this
• 27:04
  and that it's it's good because it eliminates this how do you interpret my questions?
• 27:08
  And it eliminates this like how vividly are you seeing this? And it
• 27:11
  really gets more at this angle of just is my language having an effect on
• 27:15
  the way that you visually perceive things? That's what it seems to be doing.
• 27:21
  And that is a lot more objective and what people see because presumably they
• 27:26
  should only see one image, and if the only image they see is the
• 27:29
  one when that was primed, or the only image they see is the is
• 27:32
  a random chance, then that tells you how well that prime worked for that
• 27:37
  person. Yeah, there is a lot more objective than just saying like on
• 27:41
  a scale of one to five, how well do you see this imaginary picture?
• 27:42
  You know what I mean? And so, yes, there is still
• 27:45
  that self report thing. And another is that the link between the prime and
• 27:49
  a fantasia is it's actually not necessarily related, you know. And what I
• 27:55
  mean by that is just because they see this correlation between the prime and the
• 28:02
  fifty to fifty shot, that doesn't actually necessarily have anything to do with their
• 28:07
  being able to imagine things visually. That really just does how well are you
• 28:11
  reacting to my prime on this visual test? And so what you might be
• 28:15
  able to I guess derive from this is that what you can say is these
• 28:18
  people are not easily influenced by language to be receptive to at least these types
• 28:25
  of perceptive tasks, if not failing to be influenced in other ways as well.
• 28:30
  And it also makes me really curious about these people, like I wonder
• 28:32
  if these are people, if they're not susceptible to this language task, and
• 28:36
  they're not susceptible to these kind of instructions to visualize things as well as other
• 28:40
  people, if they be really difficult to hypnotize. And again this comes back
• 28:45
  to the idea that This is more of this sort of verbal task where it's
• 28:49
  how well do you understand me? And how well is my language influencing you?
• 28:53
  And you're not necessarily seen how well are you imagining something because you are
• 28:59
  actually having them look at something directly. I'd be curious if people with more
• 29:03
  expansive vocabularies could imagine. That's a really good question, right, I like
• 29:07
  that a lot. One thing Abraham has on me all day every day is
• 29:11
  an extremely expansive vocabulary. There's not an hour that I hang out with them
• 29:15
  that I don't have to ask them to find like one to six words.
• 29:18
  And I'm jealous. I don't put in the time there, but I'd be
• 29:22
  curious, like it allows me do very well at word games. Yes,
• 29:26
  yes, I'm curious if you have a more vivid memory than I do as
• 29:30
  a result. Man, that's a really cool question. I don't know.
• 29:33
  I kind of want to test it now. Haven't looked it up. Yeah,
• 29:36
  I don't know. I know no data, Like I just sorry that
• 29:40
  was unclear. I have not looked that up, so I don't know.
• 29:42
  Yeah, if anyone out there is doing this, let us know, because
• 29:45
  I'm very curious. It are some of the comments, DMS, email,
• 29:48
  or phone. Yeah, all those things. I love the things that you
• 29:52
  say here. But let's go to some ads and we're back, okay,
• 30:03
  So let's go and move on to how common is this about? How and
• 30:07
  I think we actually maybe mentioned before. Yeah, so we actually found a
• 30:10
  prevalence rate of between one point five percent and thirty percent. So that's kind
• 30:15
  of a lot. Yeah, Like that's really like a lot of people.
• 30:18
  Three percent of seven and a half billion, Right, that's like where we're
• 30:22
  at, right, it's not even like I can't even imagine how many people
• 30:25
  that really is. Uh yeah, that'd be on the realm of Yeah,
• 30:27
  we're talking about standing. I mean, that would be every single person in
• 30:32
  New York City. Yeah, that would be up to two hundred and twenty
• 30:36
  five million people. WHOA, there's a lot of people. That's insane.
• 30:40
  Yeah, maybe that's pretty accurate. I don't know. Yeah, okay,
• 30:44
  I mean, just to put that in perspective, I guess as two hundred
• 30:45
  and twenty five million people potentially, well or a minimum of one hundred and
• 30:48
  twenty five million people in the world. The experiences. Yeah, yeah,
• 30:52
  all right, we've kind of described what the tests were and what this is
• 30:56
  and some of the considerations around that test. But there's there's more on top
• 31:00
  of this in terms of just the overall concept of what this is and some
• 31:03
  of the controversy and implications that have arisen as a result of this. And
• 31:07
  this is very new, so there's still a lot to know. So one
• 31:10
  of the implications of this is that it seems to suggest that people who have
• 31:14
  trouble visualizing also wouldn't necessarily be able to remember all that well. And I
• 31:18
  asked you about your car. But if I ask someone who was actually described
• 31:22
  as having a fantasia to describe the car that they drive or the house they
• 31:25
  live in, and they could tell me like the make, model and color
• 31:27
  of their car, they could tell me their house and maybe even the color
• 31:30
  the front door, and add some things inside the house and all that,
• 31:33
  and then I say, okay, now I want you to visualize that your
• 31:36
  house, and they're all of a sudden unable to do that. That would
• 31:40
  be really weird to me, I guess. So I don't know exactly how
• 31:44
  that's fundamentally different by them being able to describe it visually as being able to
• 31:49
  imagine it visually at least, it seems like I can't tell what the difference
• 31:53
  would be there, you know. Yeah, she's saying it's hard to really
• 31:56
  like hard to understand that why they can do one when on the other,
• 32:00
  yeah, like they can visualize and describe it in the moment, but they
• 32:01
  can't do it later. They can describe the visual aspects of it, but
• 32:05
  they say that they can't visualize it. It's yeah, yeah, And so
• 32:08
  again this makes me think that asking to just describe the details is different from
• 32:12
  them actually saying that they have the experience of visualizing it, and at least
• 32:15
  that's their experience with it, even though like we're sort of implying the same
• 32:20
  thing, all right, So this kind of sounds like something else, like
• 32:23
  pretending. Well, yeah, that was another thing that I was thinking about.
• 32:25
  This is more than anything else we're talking about. I want you to
• 32:30
  imagine that you feel something, or imagine that you hear something, or imagine
• 32:32
  that you smell something all these things. Is that you're really asking someone to
• 32:37
  act as if something is present that isn't present, Okay, yeah, and
• 32:42
  so it's asking them to just pretend. If you cannot act as if something
• 32:46
  is not present, then that would be what people are describing as a fantasia,
• 32:50
  but has all these other implications with it. Yeah, and what's interesting
• 32:52
  is that these people who are described as as having a fantasia, they're actually
• 32:57
  no less good at creative tasks, at lafe logical tasks, at problem solving.
• 33:00
  Interesting, they are creative, they can remember things, They have no
• 33:04
  problems with their memories. They do not actually lack imagination in the things that
• 33:08
  they do, and they can they can think of things that aren't there,
• 33:13
  they can describe things that they remember. They can write music, they can
• 33:15
  write poetry. There's I mean, two hundred and twenty five million, that's
• 33:17
  a lot of people that would be pretty inhibited by this if that were the
• 33:21
  implication that they also can't act as if something wasn't really present, which is
• 33:25
  largely what verbal behavior is anyway, And so all of this requires this thinking
• 33:30
  and executive functioning in the brain. This whole Affantasia Fantasia Disney reference actually like
• 33:37
  made me think we should probably kick this episode to people like that to see
• 33:40
  if there's anyone in that realm. Yeah, I would actually love learn in
• 33:44
  that design and creative process. Like that's the idea, right, is like
• 33:47
  you can visualize and see these things and you put them on paper. Yeah,
• 33:52
  maybe maybe it's three percent of the population. That's not an indentation.
• 33:55
  Sorry for this side, Ran, I'm just kind of connecting things over here,
• 33:59
  thinking that's really cool. And something else I found with someone describing this
• 34:02
  is and this is I think this is important point is that imagery is not
• 34:06
  actually pictorial. And that is to say that when we say that we're thinking
• 34:09
  of something visually, or I'm telling you to imagine something and you can describe
• 34:14
  what it looks like, you're not actually seeing any images. You're not seeing
• 34:16
  any pictures. What are we seeing? Because I feel like I see pictures?
• 34:20
  Could be the argument? Yeah, yeah, and maybe it could be.
• 34:23
  Is what you're again, it's it's basically pretending you were acting as if
• 34:28
  you are seeing a picture. And so there's this test that I saw that
• 34:30
  I kind of liked. So, first, if I show you a picture
• 34:32
  of a tiger and you have a so this pictures right in front of you.
• 34:36
  Okay, with the picture that you're actually looking at, could you count
• 34:37
  the stripes if I was actually looking at it? Yeah, totally. Okay.
• 34:42
  Now if I ask you to imagine a tiger. I want you to
• 34:45
  imagine counting the stripes on the tiger? Is it because you just prime the
• 34:46
  answer? Maybe I feel like I have a difficult time. I'd be doing
• 34:52
  things like I did with the alien, like it's got six eyes? Right,
• 34:55
  yeah, I mean you could kind of make up how many stripes could
• 34:58
  be there, but they could also change as you're imagining it. Yeah.
• 35:01
  Yeah, because when you're imagining things, you're doing so verbally because I asked
• 35:06
  you to do it. And so what you're doing is you're using your understanding
• 35:08
  of that language to create what your language would describe as being that visual imagery.
• 35:14
  And so you then can sort of make up what that would be,
• 35:16
  but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's real. And another one that I've done
• 35:20
  that I think is kind of fun is that I'll ask someone to, like,
• 35:22
  all right, if you look at your name and writing, all right,
• 35:25
  so you look at your name, looking at my name on my phone,
• 35:28
  what's the second to last letter and perfect? All right, close your
• 35:30
  eyes. I want you to visualize your last name. Okay, okay,
• 35:34
  what's the fourth letter? Does an impashpekans letter? And okay, I'm just
• 35:40
  messing with you. Yeah, okay, so take a little bit. Yeah,
• 35:45
  it's difficult because you're not actually looking at a picture of it. If
• 35:47
  you're looking at a picture of a word, I can easily ask you to
• 35:51
  rattle off the letters, you can do that, But when you're trying to
• 35:53
  imagine visually, it's much more difficult. Even for people who do not know
• 35:57
  label themselves as having difficulty visualizing. Yeah, and so these aren't really visual
• 36:02
  tasks, they're verbal tasks. It's really important to stay at this point.
• 36:06
  So we've basically been talking about what is difficult about this and how to understand
• 36:08
  it and how to measure it and what's going on with this. And I
• 36:12
  really want to point out here, and I've tried to say this a couple
• 36:14
  of times now, is that I'm not saying that people might not be experiencing
• 36:16
  something here. Of course they are. They're experiencing something, and they're experiencing
• 36:21
  something that they believe to be different from what other people are experiencing. I
• 36:23
  would I totally agree with that, Yeah, exactly. I don't want to
• 36:27
  discount because again I don't know whether you're able to imagine something or visualize it.
• 36:30
  And at the same time, I don't know that someone isn't able to
• 36:35
  do that, you know, and so I can't say that they are or
• 36:37
  not having this experience. I have to believe that they are, you know,
• 36:40
  it makes sense that they're able to report on it. Then something's going
• 36:43
  on. To take standpoint, I think yes, one hundred percent. Yeah,
• 36:45
  absolutely, And so just moving on with a couple more of these implications,
• 36:50
  especially of the research of this. So there are quite a few studies.
• 36:52
  There's some neurology studies, there's some of these more cognitive task studies that
• 36:57
  involve that questionnaire and a bunch of people who've tried to ask this ques in
• 37:00
  a bunch of different ways. And one of the limitations I saw in these
• 37:04
  studies is that every single one that I saw was a group design that had
• 37:07
  about seven people. I did see up to fifteen, and I think I
• 37:12
  saw one that was as high as about twenty. So even not being from
• 37:15
  that world, I know that's extremely low. Yeah, I'm very into single
• 37:19
  subject design, very different approach, right and still yeah, and group design
• 37:23
  that's how most psychological research is done. And so in order to be able
• 37:27
  to test for statistical significance, you have to have a few hundred people to
• 37:30
  really have a good sample size, and you know, a hundred can work,
• 37:32
  but seven, like that's that's very low. And you know there is
• 37:36
  I want to point out, because this is affecting a relatively low percentage of
• 37:40
  the population. Even if you're at like a university setting, you don't have
• 37:44
  a really large pool to draw from. Yeah, that could be one of
• 37:46
  the reasons it's difficult to get a lot of participants in here. Yeah,
• 37:50
  I mean it's even relatively new with it being coined. Yeah, great point,
• 37:52
  interesting to see where it goes. Yeah, So awareness of this is
• 37:55
  still pretty low, and so it's difficult to do this kind of research.
• 38:00
  Just saying that if you look at those studies, having populations that are that
• 38:02
  small in the group design makes it very difficult to derive any meaningful statistical significance
• 38:07
  from that. So okay, Another implication I was thinking about with this is
• 38:12
  if someone had a fantasia and they weren't able to visualize something, Okay,
• 38:15
  and again saying that that is a one hundred percent valid Yeah, one hundred
• 38:20
  percent valid. So I'm saying that that you might have a fantasia. Wouldn't
• 38:23
  that imply that if I were to describe something to you and then you saw
• 38:28
  it, it'd be like, WHOA, I had no idea what that looked
• 38:30
  like. Like everything that I described to you that you hadn't seen or experienced
• 38:34
  before would be like a huge surprise. And it seems just like, you
• 38:37
  know, if I were to say, oh, I drive this red car
• 38:42
  that is a four door Hummer, and then went outside and there was a
• 38:45
  four door Hummer and I went in, they're just like, WHOA, I
• 38:47
  had no idea this is the kind of car you drove, Like, oh,
• 38:50
  okay, you know, it seems like that would be an implication of
• 38:52
  you wouldn't be able to imagine what that would look like, so everything that
• 38:54
  you saw would be a surprise. Or if I would describe what something sound
• 38:58
  like, it'd be the same thing. There's this music it's very gravelly and
• 39:01
  grading, and then you listen to it and you're like, man, that
• 39:04
  was not at all what I thought I was gonna be listening to. Even
• 39:07
  though it's exactly how you you would describe it is describe my favorite genre.
• 39:09
  That's right. And the last question I had on this, and this is
• 39:15
  not necessarily an implication or even in controversy, but it really raises the question
• 39:19
  of is this ability to visualize imagery and kind of conjured up in your mind's
• 39:23
  eye. Is that something that is learned and how would you know? And
• 39:29
  if it is something that's learned, could it be something that is lost and
• 39:34
  could it be regained again? Or maybe someone who is at the point in
• 39:37
  their life when their adult and they are having this experience of having a fantasia,
• 39:43
  could they be able to learn to visualize things? Yeah, I don't
• 39:46
  know. I mean, has there been medically induced to affhantasia? Good segue?
• 39:52
  All right, So actually one of the reasons that this research ever even
• 39:55
  got kicked off was this study. And they use a pseudonym, and I
• 39:59
  saw it different pseudonyms, and so we're going to call this person Johns.
• 40:04
  This person John He was an older gentleman and he had a procedure some kind
• 40:07
  of surgery done to treat some heart problems that he was having, So some
• 40:12
  kind of coronary artery heart surgery thing. After the surgery, he reported that
• 40:16
  he was no longer able to visualize things. It was really kind of funny
• 40:20
  in the stories that I read that it was every day he walked around all
• 40:23
  day imagining these things, and I'm like, man, this is like sounds
• 40:27
  like a crazy person, like practically hallucinating. We're a very creative person.
• 40:30
  Yeah, we're very creative, but they're just not ever in the real world.
• 40:34
  But I think they was just using hyperbole to try and sell the story.
• 40:37
  Yeah, no, I'm sure that's a lot of strategies used like that
• 40:40
  to keep clickbait rolling. Yes, totally. And so anyway, the way
• 40:44
  that it was described is this gentleman had lived his whole life, had never
• 40:47
  had any issues with this, and then he had this heart surgery and afterward,
• 40:51
  for some reason, was unable to visualize things. And so what's important
• 40:54
  about this is that this gives us a comparison for the first time, because
• 40:58
  most of these people who would describe themselves having a fantasia don't like have the
• 41:00
  experience of losing it or gaining something when they didn't have it. But instead
• 41:06
  we have this person who very explicitly could say that he did have that experience
• 41:09
  of being able to visualize things and then all of a sudden was unable to
• 41:13
  do So that's very curious, and that, you know, that is a
• 41:15
  lot more evidence I think in favor of what might be going on here and
• 41:20
  gives us something to sort of look at, to just describe it a little
• 41:23
  bit more objectively. Yeah, so it still gives us the issue though,
• 41:25
  of like, there was no baseline measure beforehand, right, it's just a
• 41:29
  verbal reports, right, Yeah, so we keep getting hit with this verbal
• 41:32
  report. Yeah, because we don't actually be difficult. Even though he had
• 41:36
  the experience of being able to describe things visually, we weren't measuring that,
• 41:38
  we weren't testing it. It makes sense you're not just go out in the
• 41:42
  world and test people for this and then hope that they have to get open
• 41:44
  heart surgery that results in them losing this ability. Yeah. Now that I'm
• 41:46
  saying that I want that to happen, I'm just saying that's an unrealistic way
• 41:50
  to approach this. Do we know if he ever relearned to visualize? As
• 41:52
  far as I know, he didn't. But I didn't see any follow ups.
• 41:54
  I actually had a hard time finding a lot of details on this,
• 41:57
  Okay, But what was interesting is they did want to look at this neurologic
• 42:00
  because of course, as soon as they heard about this, people are like,
• 42:01
  well, we need to study this, which is great. That's how
• 42:04
  science works. Yeah, and so they of course tried to do an fMRI
• 42:07
  and we talked about that, yep, which means that they were using statistical
• 42:12
  packages to analyze thousands of tiny vossls. If I remember could be, I
• 42:15
  don't recall. It was early so yeah, And what they did is they
• 42:22
  when they had him looking at pictures of people that he knew, they saw
• 42:24
  that he was able to easily identify people from their pictures. But then when
• 42:28
  he asked him to imagine faces of people that he knew when they were looking
• 42:31
  at this fMRI, the part of his brain that was associated with facial recognition
• 42:37
  was far weaker than when he was actually looking at a picture. I assume
• 42:39
  it was also weaker than anybody who was imagining and not just looking at a
• 42:44
  picture. But I don't I don't know. I just didn't see that in
• 42:46
  the description of this, like I said, I don't have any good details.
• 42:50
  Yeah. So this is again a lot more solid evidence of there's an
• 42:54
  effect out there. They don't entirely know what's going on, but it's there.
• 42:59
  You know, the people are having experience. In terms of this as
• 43:01
  a research study, Although we do have that pre impost comparison. We didn't
• 43:05
  actually get that baseline, as you said. And the other thing is,
• 43:07
  this is one person, and we don't really have an experimental condition or a
• 43:13
  control condition or a baseline condition. We really just have a post condition,
• 43:16
  you know. And so what sometimes is described as how Kevin an a phase
• 43:20
  and a B phase where you have your baseline comparison and then your experimental comparison,
• 43:24
  this seems to only have the B phase, which isn't even really experiment.
• 43:28
  It was just the thing that happened. And so this it lacks the
• 43:30
  ability to have a lot of control, although it has the advantage of being
• 43:34
  able to have a lot of detail about his experience, which is kind of
• 43:37
  an advantage of a case study. Yes, we are pre recording these AD
• 43:42
  breaks, well maybe retroactively recording these AD breaks. Anyway, non sequitor insert
• 43:46
  ads and let's get back to that discussion. Okay, So let us can
• 44:00
  this in terms of some of the other philosophies of psychology. All right,
• 44:05
  so this is kind of my take on this in general. I'm going to
• 44:08
  kind of like semi logic through this, catch me if I make any big
• 44:12
  errors. Okay, Okay, So memory has to do with these cues.
• 44:15
  As we've talked about, there's a lot of different cues that are out there.
• 44:17
  You mentioned these the different senses. Any of those can be a cue
• 44:21
  to stimulate and trigger different memories or whatnot. So there's that now because of
• 44:25
  this area now they call it an area of stimulus control. It just kind
• 44:29
  of like what, you know, what influences us and under what circumstances and
• 44:32
  can you teach and those sort of things. Right, So we're I mean,
• 44:36
  I'm talking about the literature of teaching, learning like all of this,
• 44:38
  okay, And because of that, I don't want to say that anything's impossible.
• 44:44
  So like I've learned that there's a lot of things you can teach under
• 44:46
  certain conditions in which someone isn't learning, things that if you go in and
• 44:50
  look at your practices, you actually can teach certain things. So this is
• 44:53
  likely a thing that's been experienced. I want to just come out with that.
• 44:57
  But the question is to what degrees have been experienced and can be influenced
• 45:00
  at all? Thinks a good question. It's also it reminds me of when
• 45:02
  you were talking about the person who was recommending using memory palace to try and
• 45:07
  teach visualization exactly. Yeah, Like they're in line with like my view,
• 45:12
  I guess, and the view I kind of orient to when I look at
• 45:14
  these sort of things, And I would say, theoretically appears that it could
• 45:16
  be influenced as it falls onto the same area of large broad areas of learning
• 45:22
  and teaching and relearning as well, and those sort of areas. And this
• 45:27
  has actually been demonstrated like that you can teach just about every area of life,
• 45:31
  a surprisingly large number of single cell organisms, sponges all included, all
• 45:37
  the way up to extremely complex repertoires with humans or animals. Right, So
• 45:45
  I think it kind of brings us back to this thing where I resonate with
• 45:47
  the personal side and the experience of it and cannot judge on that. We
• 45:52
  can only ask these sort of questions like we were in a scientific way,
• 45:57
  but we have to look at these at an individual and actually test whether or
• 46:00
  not what's going on here. Sure, I mean that's it. I agree,
• 46:04
  So with that empirical question kind of aside, we've provided some other questions
• 46:07
  that are important to you to get kind of for the skeptical listeners, I
• 46:08
  would say, so things like when you're saying like, can you not visualize
• 46:13
  your car or your house? Like those are very interesting in me. I
• 46:15
  didn't think of him beforehand, and it's just like, huh, needed true
• 46:17
  on that sort of stuff. More so, I hope listeners do that.
• 46:20
  Okay, So there's some quotes for people who describe themselves as having a fantasia.
• 46:23
  The first quote I'm gonna read is from a skeptic who does not believe
• 46:27
  in such a thing. And then I think you also had a quote from
• 46:30
  someone who describe themselves as having a fantasia. Is that correct? I'm sure
• 46:35
  he's definitely a supporter of the community. Yeah, okay, okay. So
• 46:38
  the first one that I had, it goes like this, what does the
• 46:42
  person mean when he closes his eyes or ear figuratively speaking and says, I
• 46:45
  see the house where I was born, the trundle bed in my mother's room
• 46:49
  where I used to sleep. I can even see my mother as she comes
• 46:52
  to tuck me in, and I can even hear her voice as she softly
• 46:55
  says good night. Touching, of course, but sheer bunk. We are
• 47:00
  really dramatizing. The behaviorist finds no proof and imagery in all this, we
• 47:04
  have put these things in words long long ago, and we consistently rehearse those
• 47:07
  scenes verbally whenever the occasion arises. And so that was said by John B.
• 47:12
  Watson, the infamous John B. Watson. Yeah, he's well known.
• 47:15
  Yeah, and I had a hard time tracking down this citation, but
• 47:17
  I did find that it was in nineteen thirty two, and I believe it
• 47:21
  was in a book. So that obviously takes the sort of skeptical angle of
• 47:24
  this isn't a real thing, or at least it's not it's not visual imagery.
• 47:30
  It's something else, and people aren't aren't having an experience. Is that
• 47:32
  that's my read on it anyway. Yeah, he's just saying like we're being
• 47:36
  dramatic. Yeah, he's been quoted out of context, even quoting them kind
• 47:40
  of in context here. I mean, he's pretty blunt with the calling it
• 47:44
  out as sheer bunk. Yeah, yeah, he is. I did find
• 47:47
  another one that I think was interesting, from someone who described themselves as having
• 47:51
  a fantasia. And this is someone who said that they had like total a
• 47:53
  fantasia. And that's something where I alluded to the fact that some people might
• 47:58
  have a fantasia for a particular sense. So someone might describe themselves or have
• 48:01
  the experience of having a fantasia just for visual imagery, while someone else might
• 48:06
  have it just for auditory I guess experiences. Yeah, so those are like
• 48:08
  I guess, there's a category of like partial aphantasia versus total apantasia. So
• 48:13
  this person said that she had total apantasia, and she said, quote,
• 48:15
  when I try to picture things, I might see some flashes of light,
• 48:19
  but nothing voluntary end quote. And so she's basically talking about her experience of
• 48:23
  when she tries to imagine things that she kind of gets some visuals something that's
• 48:28
  happening, but it's not really the image itself. And so I think it's
• 48:31
  kind of interesting. Just had a direct quotation from someone who experienced that.
• 48:35
  Yeah, so I was digging in on affantasia. It's a website's avant dot
• 48:42
  Asia. Clever, Yes, very clever. And there's a gentleman, Thomas
• 48:45
  Broad And I'm going to read his quote now real quick. He said,
• 48:49
  in my opinion, a good way to approach any question that relates to the
• 48:52
  subjective experiences of advantasias not to ask how they feel different, but to ask
• 48:55
  why others seem different to them. That may seem like asking the same question,
• 49:00
  but it forces the individual not to reflect on what they experience, but
• 49:02
  to reflect on the understanding of how they perceive other's ability to visualize. Don't
• 49:07
  know if there's any ability into that, if it has anything to what we've
• 49:09
  been talking about. I think it's an interesting perspective. And I think he
• 49:13
  actually is also sort of speaking to when I said, it makes me wonder
• 49:16
  if part of this is how they react to instructions and I guess verbal descriptions
• 49:22
  of things. Yeah, And he goes on to continue to say, we
• 49:25
  know we are different. We can't visualize or form any synthesized sensor experience in
• 49:30
  our mind. However, to deepen our understanding, we must understand how we
• 49:34
  differ from the general public. And I think that's a great place for the
• 49:37
  community to be sitting. Yeah, like they're trying to understand the situation.
• 49:42
  Yeah, I totally agree. Like it's it's the sort of curiosity and also
• 49:45
  the we don't know. Yeah, you know, it's I think the openness
• 49:49
  to learn more. Yeah, so I wanted to. I mean, we
• 49:52
  both found this, but point out the resource that it's out there and anything
• 49:58
  from like the kind of science perspective, like I'm always interested to see people
• 50:02
  writing about trying and understand these things, especially ones that are experiencing it as
• 50:07
  he talks about totally. Yeah, So I guess we can kind of wrap
• 50:10
  this up and just reiterate the point that we're not trying to take away the
• 50:15
  experience from people who have this, and this is part of their experience in
• 50:20
  their lives and that sort of thing, whatever they are experiencing, is at
• 50:22
  least real. It's real for them, it's real for whatever is going on
• 50:25
  for them, and it's possible that this just needs that better research. You
• 50:29
  know, this is pretty new in terms of being described scientifically. Yeah,
• 50:34
  like one of the newest things I've ever heard of, And so, you
• 50:36
  know, more research means better understanding of what this event is. I think
• 50:39
  the good neurology research and perception research is going to be some of the more
• 50:43
  illuminating stuff that we'll see. And the purpose of this episode is really just
• 50:46
  to be able to describe what this thing is and some of the implications of
• 50:51
  it. So we're sorry if it sounds like we're criticizing those people. We
• 50:54
  really absolutely don't mean to be doing that. It's just trying to take this
• 50:59
  what is going on here, what are the implications, Where has the science
• 51:02
  been so far, and how could it be better? Like that was sort
• 51:05
  of why I wanted to tackle this. And so, although perhaps frustrating,
• 51:08
  this condition does not appear to result in impairments that really reduce one's ability to
• 51:15
  function or have a high quality of life. There are people who are in
• 51:19
  this community that have this experience of a fantasia who are very successful, and
• 51:23
  they seem to be doing very well, and they are very creative people as
• 51:27
  well that I've heard of. I'm not going to call any of them out,
• 51:30
  but I did read some names on there that I thought was interesting that
• 51:32
  there were some kind of high profile people that were on this list, and
• 51:37
  for myself, and I'm really curious about this for you too. But based
• 51:39
  on all the research I did on this, I can't even tell whether or
• 51:43
  not I have a fantasia. Yeah, and again I'm inclined to believe that
• 51:46
  I don't, but I can't really tell based on the description of it.
• 51:51
  I kind of went the other way like talking and researching this. Yeah,
• 51:53
  I'm kind of like man do I have that right? Because I re lie
• 51:57
  so much on like visual aids all the time, sure minutes, hours of
• 52:01
  videos a day, pictures all over the place, to do you not,
• 52:04
  It's everywhere, And it's just because that's how I get stuff done, and
• 52:07
  that's how I recall, remember and kind of relive things or at least the
• 52:12
  details. Right, Even with this like the binocular rivalry test, I don't
• 52:16
  know that that would necessarily convince me, because again that's looking at how my
• 52:21
  visual processing is working and not necessarily how I'm verbally constructing that mental image.
• 52:25
  And I feel like I can imagine things pretty vividly, but I don't see
• 52:30
  pictures. I don't see anything even remotely like a picture, you know.
• 52:34
  I just I can imagine it in such a way that I can describe it
• 52:37
  really well. And I've done the memory polace exercise before and it's like I
• 52:40
  have a lot of fun with that living in that space, but like there's
• 52:44
  nothing, there's no flashes, there's no images, there's no anything. Yeah,
• 52:46
  even though I can I can sort of behave as I can pretend as
• 52:50
  if I was having that experience. So I just can't tell whether or not
• 52:53
  based on this description, I would fall in that category, and yeah,
• 52:57
  maybe I just need to get tested. But yeah, so that was kind
• 52:59
  of like sperience with that. And then I think the last thing, and
• 53:02
  I don't know if this is helpful or not, but looking at this from
• 53:06
  sort of the neurological perspective, like, no one can actually visualize things in
• 53:09
  terms of seeing an image with your eyes closed or having an experience without having
• 53:15
  the sensory input because that sensory organ of yours is not receiving the stimulation that
• 53:20
  would right. Yeah, so if I, you know, I could close
• 53:23
  my ears and imagine I'm hearing music, and I can like sort of hear
• 53:28
  music in my head and that sort of thing. I can close my eyes
• 53:30
  and imagine that I'm seeing something, but there's no picture that actually shows up.
• 53:34
  I'm not receiving any auditory or visual stimulation in those circumstances. Our brain
• 53:37
  and our mind they just don't work like that. They don't create stimuli out
• 53:42
  of nothing. But what we can do is we can have our verbal behavior
• 53:45
  our language around this, and we can act with our language as if those
• 53:50
  things were real. And it's one of the great benefits and downfalls of having
• 53:55
  language is the fact that we can do this thing. So if there's anyone
• 54:00
  one who again this is my experience with this, I guess I don't want
• 54:02
  to try and tell people they're not having this experience. But when I look
• 54:07
  at this, because I can't visualize things at least in the sense that I'm
• 54:10
  not seeing pictures, I don't I was not inclined to say that I have
• 54:14
  a fantasia and I'm not now, But I also I am not having that
• 54:16
  visual experience. So I just don't know. Maybe there are people out there
• 54:19
  who are really concerned and maybe maybe you should get tested as well. I
• 54:23
  just can't tell. Yeah, same here, So yeah, I think as
• 54:27
  we said before, if you if you have any thoughts on this, if
• 54:29
  you have the experience, we'd love to hear from you. You know,
• 54:30
  would be more than happy to share your story on the podcast reach out to
• 54:34
  us via email. Also, if you're curious about checking out, there's a
• 54:37
  community of people. As Ryan stated, the website for this is a fant
• 54:40
  so A p H A n T dot Asia and there's a group of people
• 54:45
  who have this experience, and as we said, they seem to approach this
• 54:49
  from this they're curious, you know, they want to know more about this,
• 54:52
  and they want to support each other, and I think that's great.
• 55:00
  Okay, So that was our discussion on A Fantasia, and I think,
• 55:04
  you know, there has been some updated research, and there's also I feel
• 55:07
  like I just wanted to revisit some of those points and just maybe say them
• 55:10
  again or a little bit differently, or try and I think continue to convey
• 55:16
  I think not much has really changed in my understanding of this since then,
• 55:21
  but we do want to get into the research now. Sure. One of
• 55:23
  the things that I found is, and I pulled a lot of this,
• 55:28
  I'm trying to be as charitable as I can to the A Fantasia like community
• 55:31
  and to the resources that they have, and so I pulled a lot of
• 55:35
  today's discussion directly from like an A Fantasia website right right, And I'm really
• 55:40
  trying to characterize their position as charitably and accurately as I possibly can. And
• 55:45
  as I say in the episode, I think where this comes down to is
• 55:49
  I can't even tell whether I have a fantasia based on the way that this
• 55:53
  sort of quiz and the test is set up. So anyway, as I
• 55:57
  was saying, recent research one of the things that they point now and again
• 56:00
  I pulled this from the Avantasia website and looking at evidence for this and maybe
• 56:05
  an explanation of it, trying to understand it. They might turn to some
• 56:08
  tests that are like mental visual imagery tests, and there's this one that's called
• 56:14
  the Vandenberg Mental rotation Test, sometimes just called the visual mental rotation test or
• 56:17
  VMRT is how it's summarized. And in this test, what happens is,
• 56:22
  I think there's like twenty four questions, and in each question it's not really
• 56:25
  a question, it's like individual test items, if you will. But in
• 56:30
  each one, essentially you get this shape that is made up of three D
• 56:34
  cubes stacked in some orientation, and then there are four pictures that look very
• 56:39
  much like that stack of three D cubes, but rotated in a different orientation.
• 56:45
  And the person who's taking the test needs to select the two of the
• 56:49
  four pictures that are the correctly rotated version of that sample picture that they start
• 56:55
  with, right sure, and so they're just trying to discern the match image
• 57:00
  that's just rotated a different way. And so essentially what people were saying is,
• 57:05
  if you can't visually rotate, Like if you can't see things in your
• 57:08
  mind, then you can't visually rotate these images such that you would be able
• 57:15
  to accurately identify which ones matched. Okay, right, And so the question
• 57:19
  is can people with a fantasia even do this test? And the answer is
• 57:22
  yes, they can do the test. And not only can they do the
• 57:25
  test, but in some conditions they did even better than the people who are
• 57:29
  not described as a fantasics and solving this test right. So basically the test
• 57:35
  that to prove that you have a fantasia tells you nothing because it doesn't tell
• 57:40
  you that you have it, because people with advantasia can do it well,
• 57:45
  and it's not even to prove that you have a fantasia. But they were
• 57:47
  sort of saying, like, can we repurpose this test to evaluate the extent
• 57:52
  to which people with a fantasia can perform on similar because like this often shows
• 57:57
  up in IQ tests too, And I think that the advocates are trying to
• 58:00
  make the case that like, we can do all these important things too,
• 58:05
  like we're not bad at thinking, is I think where they're coming from.
• 58:08
  Maybe that's a fair way to dispel some stuff now there are a couple assumptions
• 58:13
  from aphantasia dot com that are worth unpacking. And this is kind of like
• 58:17
  I guess the idea, like sometimes people think that this is what people with
• 58:22
  advantasia experience, right yeah, and this is this has to do specifically with
• 58:27
  the assumptions that someone with a fantasia won't be able to do this visual mental
• 58:32
  rotation test. Right. So, assumption one, or as they label A
• 58:37
  one, is that the quasi perceptual experience is essential for the visualizer's strategy.
• 58:43
  Assumption two is that the visualizer's strategy to solve this test is the only viable
• 58:47
  strategy for the task. And that assumption three, which is labeled as A
• 58:52
  three, is that affantagics cannot visualize. That's what they're basically saying. So
• 58:57
  at this point in time, the perceptions experience is essential for a visualizer to
• 59:01
  strategy for the strategy, the visualizer strategy can only be viable to complete the
• 59:06
  task. A fantagious cannot visualize, so as a result, a fantagics cannot
• 59:12
  actually use visualizer strategies. So that's kind of what the conclusion is with all
• 59:16
  three of those assumptions in place. So that one specifically sort of follows from
• 59:21
  the A one the quasi perceptual experience is critical and A three that a fantagics
• 59:25
  can't visualize. And from those assumptions you also get a second conclusion, which
• 59:30
  is that a fantasics cannot solve the task. Right, and so you have
• 59:36
  to have those assumptions to draw those conclusions is sort of where they're coming from
• 59:40
  on this discussion. Right. They also came up with this idea this week
• 59:45
  rejection, which is that there is only one way, or there's not only
• 59:47
  one way to solve this, and there are other strategies. And this actually
• 59:52
  in itself negates conclusion two, which this basically says you don't need that visual
• 59:57
  strategy to be able to solve these problems. Right, So that's what they
• 1:00:01
  call the weak rejection of this sort of hypothesis. And then they have what
• 1:00:06
  they call this strong rejection, and this is what the case that they're making
• 1:00:09
  is that not only can a fantasics solve this without using a visualization strategy,
• 1:00:17
  but people who aren't a fantagic or that don't have a fantasia may also not
• 1:00:23
  be even using a visualizing strategy to solve it. And so that's sort of
• 1:00:29
  where they're coming from on this idea of that's why a fantasics can solve this
• 1:00:35
  is that assuming that the visual mental rotation test is a good one is a
• 1:00:38
  problem by itself because you may not need to do any visual mental imagery to
• 1:00:44
  solve it. And I think that on that point they are completely right.
• 1:00:46
  Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and I think that I think that makes
• 1:00:49
  perfect sense. Is that when you have you have to know, when you
• 1:00:52
  have these tests that there are other humans are really complex and interesting creatures,
• 1:00:58
  right, and they're neurological processes are so complex and so fantastic that there are
• 1:01:02
  they will find a way to solve problems beyond a singular path. Right,
• 1:01:07
  So it makes sense that like whether you have a fantasia or not doesn't matter,
• 1:01:12
  like there is a way to solve it outside of having or not having
• 1:01:15
  that diagnosis. And it's possible that referring to this test as a possible way
• 1:01:21
  to assess a fantasia was almost like a bad faith argument in the first place,
• 1:01:27
  because if you look at the test, you really are just visually matching
• 1:01:31
  an item to another item, right, There's no reason to believe that you
• 1:01:37
  have to be able to mentally rotate that image to be able to solve this
• 1:01:40
  right, although a lot of I think IQ tests would suggest a contrasting view
• 1:01:45
  with that one. But I think you can easily just look for can I
• 1:01:49
  match this point to this point on this shape such that I can adequately say
• 1:01:53
  this is the same shape, just rotated a diferent direction, and to that
• 1:01:57
  you just don't. You don't need a visualization strategy. G So I mean,
• 1:02:01
  honestly, going into this from the position I had in the original version
• 1:02:06
  of this episode, that is the point I would also make, right,
• 1:02:09
  is I completely agree. I think that people are not using a visualization strategy
• 1:02:14
  to solve that. Also, I mean, aside from the fact that they're
• 1:02:16
  looking at pictures, they are using their eyes. But anyway, as another
• 1:02:21
  quick update, the famous author John Green is now discovered a Fantasia and has
• 1:02:27
  joined the a Fantasic community, So another member in the ranks. I guess
• 1:02:30
  there you go. Okay, so we talk about this in the episode,
• 1:02:35
  but again I think it's worth unpacking and talking through the actual sort of just
• 1:02:42
  trying to really objectively look at the scenario in which you try and determine to
• 1:02:47
  the extent to which someone can visualize something in their mind. Okay, and
• 1:02:52
  so let's just let's break down the steps of what happens in this general test
• 1:02:58
  of trying to ask someone to visual something. Right. So, the first
• 1:03:00
  thing is you ask somebody to imagine a thing when that thing is not present.
• 1:03:05
  So imagine an apple or imagine a book and say it's not here,
• 1:03:09
  but think about that thing. Yeah, and try and see a book in
• 1:03:14
  your mind. And person A says, I can't see anything, right.
• 1:03:19
  I know what a book is intellectually, I could describe the features of a
• 1:03:22
  book, but I do not see a book in my mind. Is what
• 1:03:25
  that person says, right, And then person B says, yes, I
• 1:03:30
  can see that. I can visualize that. I can picture the book in
• 1:03:32
  my mind, the textures, the cover of the book, the structure,
• 1:03:37
  all of that stuff. Okay, so so far we've had someone says imagine
• 1:03:39
  something, someone says I can't, and the other one says I can't.
• 1:03:44
  Those are just the things that have happened so far. Both the people person
• 1:03:47
  A and person B are responding to a language Q imagine thing X, right,
• 1:03:53
  not a tangible thing. They're not actually looking at a picture. They
• 1:03:57
  didn't look at a picture and then take the picture away. No point was
• 1:04:00
  a tangible visual image there. They just got language thrown at them, and
• 1:04:06
  then they tried to behave with respect to that language. One of them says
• 1:04:11
  they can do so effectively, they're the one says they cannot. Right,
• 1:04:15
  So in this space, neither of them are responding to anything visually, and
• 1:04:17
  that is ultimately the issue is they're responding to a language cue, not that
• 1:04:23
  tangible thing. So all that says is that, you know, when we
• 1:04:27
  start kind of asking the question of how this gets tested and how people evaluate
• 1:04:30
  this, it's all under these language cues, and it's all under words.
• 1:04:33
  It's all under verbal behavior. And what power can words have to evoke visualization
• 1:04:41
  objectively? None? Whatsoever. Words cannot conjure images just out of thin air
• 1:04:47
  into existence, right right now? Can you behave with respect to the quality
• 1:04:54
  of a thing described, assuming you and the speaker have a shared language?
• 1:04:59
  Yeah, yes, right, true of a fantasics and not. It goes
• 1:05:02
  back to the VMRT test and also like these ones where they say, imagine
• 1:05:08
  a thing, can you assuming that we understand the reference of this language can
• 1:05:14
  we behave with respect to the imagined thing, whether or not you close your
• 1:05:18
  eyes and you see an apple in front of you, or you say that
• 1:05:21
  you see an apple in front of you. Can you can you like describe
• 1:05:26
  an apple? Right? Can you imagine what it would be like if there
• 1:05:30
  was an apple even though you don't actually physically see it. Yes for both
• 1:05:34
  people on this condition, and I think that the a fantasic community would say
• 1:05:39
  yes as well. They sort of say, intellectually, we are responding to
• 1:05:44
  the properties of a thing we understand intellectually, we just don't see it in
• 1:05:47
  our mind right, And that kind of brings us back to the original point
• 1:05:51
  we made in this episode, which is nobody does. Everybody who says that
• 1:05:56
  they can is essentially they're interpreting the question of can you visualize this as can
• 1:06:02
  I behave with respect to the thing that's not there? And they say yes,
• 1:06:06
  right. And the people are who are interpreting it more literally of imagine
• 1:06:12
  an apple in front of you, They're like, I don't see an apple
• 1:06:15
  in front of me. They're like, yes, got that, imagine it's
• 1:06:17
  there, right, And they're like, no, I don't see it,
• 1:06:20
  and like yep, you're not going to see it because it doesn't exist.
• 1:06:23
  I want you to behave as if it were there, And they're like,
• 1:06:25
  okay, I mean I can do that part. And so essentially it's just
• 1:06:28
  interpreting the again. I really I don't want to come out of this sounding
• 1:06:31
  like I'm trying to pooh pooh this whole community and say that I know what's
• 1:06:35
  going on in their minds. I don't. I don't know what's going on
• 1:06:39
  in the minds of people who say that they can visualize things. I don't
• 1:06:43
  know what's going on the minds the people who say that they can't. But
• 1:06:45
  what we do know is both of them can respond to the abstracted features of
• 1:06:51
  a thing as described by language regardless, and they kind of seem to do
• 1:06:58
  so pretty equally. Absolutely so, I think when it comes to some of
• 1:07:02
  the processes and kind of understanding the brains of the situation, kind of like
• 1:07:06
  some of the discussions. There's a study done in twenty twenty one by Milton
• 1:07:10
  and all and they looked at a recall task and fMRIs now people reporting higher
• 1:07:15
  visualization did better on recall tasks than had more activation. In what they described
• 1:07:20
  as the quote visual network. Our question to that is what does that mean?
• 1:07:29
  Yeah, I mean, like essentially what they're saying is like parts of
• 1:07:32
  the brain that could be associated with visual processing information. Because they didn't even
• 1:07:40
  say which parts of the brain, they just said visual network, right,
• 1:07:43
  it seemed like there was more activity generally going on for those people who were
• 1:07:47
  described as having hyper fantasia, not even just normal like not not on this
• 1:07:53
  you know, the sort of the middle of the spectrum, I suppose.
• 1:07:56
  But people who are like have a vivid they report having vivid visual mental imagery.
• 1:08:01
  They did sort of show up slightly better on that. They did show
• 1:08:04
  up slightly better on recall. So that I think is something to consider.
• 1:08:09
  And if I were to say to you and Shane, if I were to
• 1:08:13
  give you instructions and Mandarin to visualize a thing, the likelihood of you being
• 1:08:17
  able to do that is basically zero because you don't speak Mandarin right right,
• 1:08:21
  at least not yet as far as I know. So what I'm going with
• 1:08:27
  that is that the words that I could use, say visualize an apple,
• 1:08:30
  or think of your a picture of your house or something like that, you
• 1:08:33
  are responding to words that you have learned. Okay, right. And our
• 1:08:38
  brains are shaped by our experiences, by our language, by our shared language,
• 1:08:42
  by our social environment as we go through life. And so if we
• 1:08:46
  think about that, then the idea of visualizing very much is related to learning,
• 1:08:53
  because we're simply talking about responding to language cues, right, and you
• 1:08:56
  can only get that from having experience with a language. So, right,
• 1:09:00
  if the question is like, is this a learned thing? Almost certainly,
• 1:09:02
  how could it not be if it was unrelated to language and the development of
• 1:09:08
  arbitrary language, then our brains should do it regardless of language, And we
• 1:09:13
  have no evidence that they do or don't, Like, we don't have evidence
• 1:09:16
  that our brains like just conjure images in sans language, or that they don't
• 1:09:23
  conjure images sans language in terms of the fact that they're just hypothetical mental things,
• 1:09:29
  right, right, it has to be a thing that's learned, and
• 1:09:31
  that then kind of implies it's just how you're responding to words that ask you
• 1:09:38
  to visualize something and not anything mental that is actually an image or not.
• 1:09:44
  Right. So there's a really great quote from the Advocate group from somebody called
• 1:09:49
  Arkaningelly. That's how ar congeally maybe or a condually, So this is the
• 1:09:56
  quote. Intuitively, it may seem that we cannot have a normal life without
• 1:10:00
  the possession of imaginative abilities. Yet a fantagics do not seem to be much
• 1:10:04
  affected by their condition. And that's directly from the advocates that's saying. Basically,
• 1:10:10
  there's an assumption that people who can't imagine or visualize or have that experience,
• 1:10:15
  there's an assumption that they can't have a quote unquote normal life. But
• 1:10:20
  for the most part, it doesn't seem like and according to folks that experience
• 1:10:24
  it, or from folks that are advocates for it, doesn't seem like there's
• 1:10:27
  much of an effect. There's no deficit in thinking or completing tasks or anything
• 1:10:32
  like that. There's not really any sort of disparity in those spaces. Yeah,
• 1:10:36
  and I think that essentially they're trying to come from the place of like,
• 1:10:41
  don't think that we are bad at cognitive tasks just because we can't imagine
• 1:10:45
  things, right, And I sort of I have a response to that,
• 1:10:49
  and when I think the implication of this is and I think we do need
• 1:10:54
  to take one more quick ad break. Okay, So, as we're saying
• 1:11:05
  the idea here being that like people who have a fantasia can live these totally
• 1:11:11
  normal lives, right, And so that I think there's a big wormhole discussion
• 1:11:15
  that is not for today's episode because this is just a nostalgia release, and
• 1:11:18
  I think that I do want to unpackt this more. And we have actually
• 1:11:23
  talked about this a bit. We had a whole episode called Diagnosing Mental Health
• 1:11:27
  Problems that I think got into this a bit, and we've talked about this
• 1:11:30
  in various diagnoses. And I'm going to keep hitting this point until the world
• 1:11:34
  changes, because there's always the question of what is the point of a diagnosis?
• 1:11:42
  What is the point? Right, what is the purpose of a diagnosis
• 1:11:45
  like this? Because I think what some people will say is for most diagnoses,
• 1:11:53
  let's go to the medical field. The point is that it suggests that
• 1:11:58
  there is a treatment that is needed because this is a problem that will have
• 1:12:01
  adverse outcomes, and it often will even prescribe what that treatment is. That's
• 1:12:06
  what a diagnostic system is meant for. Right, here's the problem, which
• 1:12:11
  means here is a potential solution. If you run diagnostics on your car,
• 1:12:15
  like something's going wrong with your car, is identifying the problem to identify a
• 1:12:19
  possible solution. Right, that's the point of most of the medical model.
• 1:12:23
  So in this situation, we have a problem that's not a problem that doesn't
• 1:12:28
  entail a solution. So what is the actual point of labeling it? Right?
• 1:12:33
  From like a practical standpoint, You've got a community that's telling you.
• 1:12:38
  And that's not to say that people aren't directly impacted by this, but you've
• 1:12:41
  got a community and advocates and like information sites that they're saying it's not really
• 1:12:44
  a problem, Like, it's just a different way of thinking about things,
• 1:12:47
  and not even a different way of think about things. It's a different experience
• 1:12:49
  that people are having. And so not that the experiences aren't valid, not
• 1:12:54
  that people right, because again I'm not in those heads either. But it
• 1:12:57
  doesn't seem to lead anywhere or or it just it seems just that it only
• 1:13:00
  gives a little bit of information and doesn't give much more than that. Yeah,
• 1:13:04
  and arguably I think it's more a misunderstanding that it is in any way
• 1:13:09
  informative about anything. Right. I think some people might say, well,
• 1:13:13
  it's nice to know that there is just a name for what I have,
• 1:13:16
  first of all. Okay, but the thing is like everybody has their own
• 1:13:21
  individual experiences through life, and they've kind of got their own stuff going on,
• 1:13:26
  their own unique perspective where they are situated in the evolution of humankind.
• 1:13:32
  They will have their own sort of unique evolution that will be its own point
• 1:13:39
  in time, and no one else will ever be that person. No one
• 1:13:42
  else has ever been that person. And so like I have Abraham syndrome,
• 1:13:46
  right, if you want to give it a name, it's just kind of
• 1:13:48
  who you are, I guess. And it's like people want to like be
• 1:13:53
  called something like you just we don't need a name for it because it doesn't
• 1:13:57
  affect anything, like you just you're just you coming at it from whatever experience
• 1:14:01
  you're having, and that is true of everyone who has ever lived or ever
• 1:14:06
  will, So like coming up with names for these things, like what's arbitrary?
• 1:14:11
  Categorize this thing and give it a name because fun, I'm like,
• 1:14:14
  I just don't I don't see any practical utility in this sure, and so
• 1:14:18
  that's I don't know, And I'm sort of like even even if that,
• 1:14:21
  I'm like, I don't think it's worth spending the time. And I'm going
• 1:14:26
  to make so many people mad here, but like it's not worth spending the
• 1:14:30
  time even discussing whether it's point naming these experiences. We could just keep subdividing
• 1:14:33
  them infantly, like this person's got Abraham version Avantasia, and you've got Shane
• 1:14:40
  version a Fantasia, and our groups just get smaller and smaller and smaller because
• 1:14:44
  we can just label anything anything we want when it's not linked to any objective
• 1:14:47
  criteria. And so it's like, again, I'm just I'm just trying to
• 1:14:51
  come back to the point of like there is does not seem to have a
• 1:14:56
  reason to exist. And that's the part that confuses me the most about it,
• 1:15:00
  is like why, And so I think this brings me back around I'm
• 1:15:02
  sorry, I've been talking for so long, but no, you're good.
• 1:15:05
  It brings me back to a thing that I wanted to say, which I
• 1:15:08
  said in the episode, which is that before learning about a Fantasia, if
• 1:15:14
  someone asked me to visualize something, I would have said I definitely can.
• 1:15:17
  And if you say, like, visualize an apple, it's say, okay,
• 1:15:20
  I'm visualizing an apple. And then I learned about this and I'm like,
• 1:15:24
  well, I don't actually see an apple. I just know how to
• 1:15:28
  behave with respect to the visual properties of an apple, right, And that
• 1:15:30
  makes me think that again, the main point is that that nobody is visualizing.
• 1:15:36
  Everybody is doing some version of behave with respect to imagery of an apple.
• 1:15:43
  Right, Because the more and more people think, like, if we
• 1:15:45
  push people hard enough, nobody, I think, or not nobody, because
• 1:15:49
  everybody's gonna say random stuff to stand out from the crowd. But like,
• 1:15:54
  if you push people hard enough, I think we're going to find that everyone
• 1:15:57
  or most people who are going to engage with this authentically will say, well,
• 1:16:01
  no, I don't actually see anything. My visual field is not occluded
• 1:16:06
  by this mental image you forced me to conjure, So I now can no
• 1:16:10
  longer walk forward because Apple's just in my field of view. Thanks jerk,
• 1:16:13
  Now I can't get around. You made me think of an apple, and
• 1:16:15
  now all I can see is a giant apple that blocks everything I do.
• 1:16:18
  And I'm like, sure nobody does that because nothing actually pops. Like,
• 1:16:23
  we don't have a projector in our mind. We don't have a screen on
• 1:16:26
  which that projector sends its image in our mind. We don't have eyes inside
• 1:16:30
  of our brain hole looking at images that are somehow being manufactured. It's all
• 1:16:34
  arbitrary and hypothetical, and so again, it just brings me back to I
• 1:16:39
  don't think anybody's visualizing, and what is the point? I couldn't summed it
• 1:16:44
  better myself. I did want to share. I think this is probably the
• 1:16:45
  best time to share. Okay, I don't have affantasia, but I did
• 1:16:50
  recently go to the doctor and I was diagnosed with Abraham syndrome. I'm sorry,
• 1:16:57
  that's terminal. Now I'm vegan, and I really really really like between
• 1:17:00
  the bear to me, so so anyway, I'm I'm really really sorry if
• 1:17:09
  I pissed a bunch of people off. I just keep thinking about this and
• 1:17:13
  wondering, I'm like, why are we still having this conversation, Like nothing
• 1:17:15
  has actually changed in the world about this, because essentially what we have is
• 1:17:19
  a disagreement about how we interpret the request to imagine something right, some people
• 1:17:25
  taking it very literally like no, but I can't see it, and some
• 1:17:28
  people taking it more abstractly thinking yes I can. And we don't have any
• 1:17:31
  evidence one way or the other that they are or are not doing that.
• 1:17:34
  And in the episode, I gave an example of like, imagine your name
• 1:17:38
  written backwards. If you can see it, I could ask you about any
• 1:17:42
  point in your name and you'd be able to give me the answer right away.
• 1:17:45
  And shane backward, what's what's the third letter? Too late? Like
• 1:17:47
  you should be able to tell me that if you were looking at a picture
• 1:17:49
  of it, right, like you to me a second. I couldn't even
• 1:17:51
  tell me. I couldn't even tell you. I don't even know how to
• 1:17:54
  spell my name, I mean, And if you took a second to think
• 1:17:57
  about it, you would just reverse it, think backward and you land on
• 1:18:00
  the right letter. But so with someone who has a fantasia, because they
• 1:18:02
  can do the same tasks, because that is not that's a language task.
• 1:18:08
  Right. So anyway, again, I really do want to be advocates for
• 1:18:12
  communities. I want to support people who have whatever diagnosis that they have.
• 1:18:15
  And I think it's also just worth understanding where it comes from in this position
• 1:18:20
  of thinking, like if a fantasia is a thing, then humans got it.
• 1:18:25
  It's being a human, right, And if it's not a thing,
• 1:18:28
  then humans got that too, right, Yeah, there you go. I
• 1:18:30
  think that's fair. That's a fair place to land for sure. All Right,
• 1:18:33
  that was so much if you are still around and you're not angrily writing
• 1:18:38
  hate mail to us or sending us packages in the mail, then thank you
• 1:18:42
  for being here. I hope that you've got something out of this conversation and
• 1:18:45
  we really appreciate you taking the time to listen and join us in this today.
• 1:18:48
  If you would like to support us, I hope please feel free to
• 1:18:53
  come up and join us on Patreon. If you do, you will get
• 1:18:56
  access to behind the scenes stuff and all this kind of bonus content, all
• 1:19:00
  that sort of thing. And we really appreciate the team of people who have
• 1:19:02
  really helped us do this podcast for so long, and that includes Mike,
• 1:19:05
  m Meghan Leyla, Mike T, Justin, Kim, Joshua, Brad,
• 1:19:10
  Stephanie, Olivia, Brian Ashley, Kiara, Christy, and Michelle. Thank
• 1:19:15
  you all very much, Love y'all. Also thanks to my team of people
• 1:19:17
  who helped me make this podcast, Shane, thank you for recording with Kat
• 1:19:21
  today and time. Shaneon and I do writing and fact checking. Our audio
• 1:19:26
  production comes from Justin, and our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson. You
• 1:19:30
  can also leave us a writing and review. You can pick up some merch
• 1:19:33
  you can subscribe you can tell somebody about our podcast. All those are the
• 1:19:36
  ways that you can support us. Is there anything that I am missing or
• 1:19:41
  anything you'd like to add before we get to recommendations, No, I don't
• 1:19:44
  think, So Okay, let's do recommending some things recommendations so I can go
• 1:19:58
  to recommend at studio. I might have recommended this tattoo studio before because we
• 1:20:02
  did in October. We did Friday the Thirteenth Tattoos, and I thought that
• 1:20:06
  was really fun. But I just got tattooed at this place last night,
• 1:20:11
  and it is called Electric Shark Tattoo out of Port Orange, Florida. The
• 1:20:15
  guy that runs the shop, his name is Richard. It's just him and
• 1:20:18
  and his other tattoo artist, Maya, and they both do incredible work.
• 1:20:24
  And actually Richard's super interesting. He also machines his own tattoo machines, like
• 1:20:30
  he has invented a style of tattoo machine that works really well, to the
• 1:20:34
  point where my tattoo from last night has not bled since I got it.
• 1:20:38
  Wow. Really strange and really interesting and it's a weird experience, but it's
• 1:20:42
  really great and so big strong recommend to check out Electric Shark tattoo out of
• 1:20:46
  Port Orange. Cool? All right, next time, next time you're in
• 1:20:49
  Port Orange and looking for some ink, nowhere to go? Yeah yeah,
• 1:20:54
  come hanging out for bike week or race week or whatever it is you're here
• 1:20:56
  for. I am recommending a company there, either called Cloud Puncher Games or
• 1:21:01
  Project Iron Side. I'm not totally sure, but this is a company that
• 1:21:04
  manufactures accessories for gaming type things for a tabletop games, and so I recently
• 1:21:13
  purchased one of their gaming tables. What I like about them is that it's
• 1:21:16
  designed to be very modular. You can kind of set it up in several
• 1:21:19
  different orientations, so there's like a conversion to make it coffee table height or
• 1:21:24
  regular table height, or extra long or extra wide, or just a small
• 1:21:28
  extension, or have like put a top on it so that like, because
• 1:21:31
  the games are usually a little bit low, so you can sort of play
• 1:21:33
  the game in the table and then cover it with the top so then it
• 1:21:35
  looks like a normal table anyway. They also do game shelves and like some
• 1:21:40
  accessory pieces that are all sort of these unique twist inventions that they sort of
• 1:21:46
  came up with, And I was really impressed with the quality of the table
• 1:21:49
  that I got, So if you're interested in tabletop type accessories, I put
• 1:21:55
  on here the Iron Side game table. But I think that on that website
• 1:21:58
  has links to their other other projects that they've done as well. I love
• 1:22:01
  that. I'm looking at it right now. There's some cool stuff on here.
• 1:22:04
  Yeah, they've got some pretty neat products and they're very reasonably priced.
• 1:22:08
  The reason that I actually got into I decided to purchase this is because it
• 1:22:11
  was like a fraction of what I normally see these things cost. So it's
• 1:22:15
  a little company. They're pretty small, but hopefully if a lot of people
• 1:22:18
  like what they're doing and want to support them, then they'll be able to
• 1:22:20
  grow. And I like what they're doing. So yeah, and they even
• 1:22:23
  have gup holders. They do have couple holders. Yeah, I love that.
• 1:22:28
  Okay, So if you'd like to tell us about a fantasia, something
• 1:22:30
  that we got wrong, something that we got right, if you want to
• 1:22:32
  throw some support our way and be like, yes, I back up what
• 1:22:35
  you're saying, I've seen the light metaphorically speaking, you can email us directly
• 1:22:41
  info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com. You can also reach out to us on the
• 1:22:45
  social media platforms and You can also tell us about game tables or tattoo places
• 1:22:48
  that you like, and if we would like to share your email with others,
• 1:22:51
  then we'll read it as part of a listener mail on an episode,
• 1:22:55
  and that can be a thing that happens. So anyway, this has become
• 1:22:58
  very long. Anything that you would like to add or anything that we should
• 1:23:00
  do before we wrap up today. No, I think that covers it.
• 1:23:03
  Okay, that was a weird way for me to phrase that question, but
• 1:23:06
  I got nothing left. So this is Abraham and this is Shane. We're
• 1:23:10
  out, Sia. You've been listening to Why We Do what We do.
• 1:23:14
  You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot
• 1:23:19
  com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.