Inner Cosmos with David EaglemanHow do brains picture things internally, and how might you and I imagine differently? How have recent discoveries completely changed the debate and the way we understand internal experience? What does this have to do with Disney's Fantasia, or Pixar's aphantasia? Strap in for some very wild surprises today about our internal experiences, with guest Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar Studios.
If you had to guess about the internal life, the conscious experience of the guy who co founded Pixar, the computer animation studio, what would you guess about what's happening inside his head? And how do any of us picture things internally? How do we visualize? These sound like simple questions, but strap in for some very wild surprises today about our internal experiences. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe to uncover the most surprising secrets about our lives. Today's episode is about visual imagery. Now, I'm not talking about vision when something is in front of us and photons are bouncing off it and hitting our eyes and our brains are doing the analysis. Instead, I'm talking about when you're sitting there, let's say, listening to a podcast and the speaker says, hey, imagine watching a bluebird landing on a tree branch in the spring. Imagine the bird looks around, moving its head curiously, and then it flaps its wings for a moment, then it hops to a different spot, then it flies away. Now, there's no blue bird. Instead, your brain is taking everything it's ever learned about bluebirds in the past and generating internal visual imagery, all in the pitch blackness of your skull. How does that work? And how did recent discoveries here completely change the debate in psychology and neuroscience and the way we understand internal experience. So let's start in nineteen thirty eight, when an animator named Walt Disney was trying to reboot the popularity of his little rodent character named Mickey Mouse. So after years of work, he ended up making a feature length animated film set to classical music, and he called this Fantasia. Now, a project of this size combining visuals and music, this had never been attempted before, and it ended up becoming one of the most successful films in history. Now. Of the millions of young children who gaped it Fantasia over the next decades, one was especially taken by the magic of animation and the possibilities for how this could evolve. This was a boy named ed Catmol and he grew up into a world in which transistors were shrinking in the power of computer was growing, and all this was lighting up new pathways in his imagination. This young man would go on to create new methods to represent three dimensional objects mathematically, and after his PhD, he would co found a studio for making animated films with computers. This studio was called Pixar after twenty seven feature films. Ed had contributed more to our visual world than almost anyone in his generation, but there were certain things that he couldn't do. For example, his friend asked him to visualize a sphere in front of him, and Ed just couldn't do that. Now, was this some sort of rare brain disease or what was going on here? So to understand this, I'm going to zoom out to the question, the critical question for today, which is how do any of us picture a sphere in our heads? What does it mean to visualize something? So I'd like you to imagine an ant crawling on a red and white tablecloth towards a jar of purple jelly. Now, what exactly is happening in your brain? What is your experience? Are you seeing this like a movie or is it just a concept about ants and tablecloths and jelly? But it's not really like seeing Well, this is one of those questions that might seem simple, but it led to decades of debate and experiment among researchers, and this debate came to a head in the nineteen seventies in the psychology literature. People were asking what is visual imagery? How is visual information stored? Do we actually see the ant like the way you would experience vision, like watching a movie, or is something else going on? One side of the debate argued that information about visual objects was stored in a symbolic language like format, the way you would store data on a computer, and on the other side of the debate, the idea was that you're actually running your visual cortex and seeing the thing. Essentially, it's the same experience as seeing something real. This debate was really spearheaded by two luminarias in the field. One was Xenon Folician, who said, you're just manipulating symbols in your head, you're not actually seeing the thing, and the other was Stephen Coslin, who said, no, it's actually like a vision. You're running the same machinery. You're having a visual experience. And they both did experiments back and forth. Felician said, look, you're insane. It's not stored like a picture, and Costlin said, no, you're insane. It's not stored like a proposition, You're actually seeing it. And it was very difficult to come to a conclusion. Each argued for what he felt was true, and both were smart, so why couldn't they come to an agreement? So who was right? Well, you can answer this yourself. Think about how people actually visualize. I'm going to walk you through an exercise and then I'll tell you the answer of how humans actually visualize, and I guarantee that you will not get the right answer. So imagine this picture in your head, the rising sun. Think about the picture that comes before your mind's eye. Imagine the sun rising above the horizon into a hazy sky. And now picture that the sky clears and surrounds the sun with blueness. Now picture clouds, A storm comes, there are flashes of lightning, and now a rainbow appears. Now what I want you to consider is how vividly you pictured that. How vivid is your mental picture on a scale from one to five, where one is pictureless and five is akin to a photo or a video. So really think about this. The sun rising into the hazy sky, the sky clears to blue, clouds move in lightning flashes, finally a rainbow appears. How would you rate the vividness of your imagery from one no picture at all to five as clear as a movie. So whatever score you came up with there, it's not the right answer about how humans visualize the rising sun. The score you came up with is your answer, but it's not the right one for everyone. So returning to this question of why Fylition and Coslin, two brilliant researchers, couldn't come to agreement, the answer was this, they were each having a different experience on the inside. So with Felician's introspection, he didn't experience a picture and Coslin did. And here's the key. They both operated under the assumption that everyone else was having the same experience they were. It's a natural assumption. And you've heard me talk on other episodes about about how we each live on our own planet, the details of our inner cosmos determined by the three pounds of electrically screaming cells locked in our skull and constructing our reality. We each have our own slightly different version of reality, but we generally assume that everyone else is having the same thing, and so when Felician considered how do I imagine the ant on the tablecloth or the rising sun? He realized that he had no real picture in his head, and he assumed everyone else had the same experience, and he argued for that truth in the literature. And when Coslin saw a little movie in his head, he assumed everyone else did too, and he argued for what he believed was true for everyone. Like all of us, they were each operating under the assumption that everyone else's internal life was just like their own. And that's why the scientific literature was confused for years, because we all make these assumption that everyone experiences their internal life as we do. So, as it turns out, there are major differences between people when it comes to the vividness of their visual imagery. Now this has been known for a while, but my colleague Adam Zeeman put a name to this in twenty fifteen. He thought, look, let's call your internal imagery fantasia, which is the term that Aristotle used for the mind's I think of this word like Walt Disney's fantasia, but now with a pH instead of an F. And the important part is Zeeman said, if a person really visualizes nothing at all. We'll call that a fantasia. A is just a prefix that means not so. In other words, no fantasia, no mind's I thinking without images. And on the other end of the spectrum, if a person sees like an internal movie, he called that hyperfantasia. They're having imagery so so vivid that it rivals real seeing. So that's the spectrum from a fantasia to hyperfantasia. Now how do you measure that? Well, there's this standardized test created by the British psychologist David Marx. It's called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, and I've linked to this on the show notes. This questionnaire walks you through visualizing a bunch of scenarios. For example, think of some relative or friend who you frequently see but who is not with you at present, and consider carefully the picture that comes before your mind's eye. Imagine the exact contours of the face, the head, the shoulders, the body. Then think about how they walk, the precise carriage, the length of the step, think about the different colors of some of their familiar clothes. For each scenario, you try to form a mental picture, and then you rate how vivid it is using that at five point scale, if you don't have any visual image, you rate vividness as one, which means no image at all. I only know that I'm thinking of the object. You would score a two to mean dim and vague image. You'd use three to indicate moderately realistic and vivid. Four means realistic and reasonably vivid, and you use a five to mean perfectly realistic, as vivid as real seeing. So think about this. What is it like for you on the spectrum from no image to as vivid as real seeing? So try with some of these questions. Think of the front of a shop that you often go to. Consider the picture that comes before your mind's eye, the appearance of the shop from the opposite side of the road, a window display including colors and shapes and details of individual items for sale. Now imagine you enter the shop and go to the counter or the counter assistant serves you money changes hands. How vivid is your imagery? Or try this one. Think of a country scene which involves trees, mountains, a lake. Consider the picture that comes before your mind's eye the contours of the landscape, the color and shape of the lake, the color and shape of the trees. So think about what your level of clarity is. Now, my lab showed that we can actually measure this in people objectively, not just asking them subjective questions about their experience, but measuring them in the brain scanner. So we had people take the vividness of visual Imagery questionnaire, and then we put them in brain imaging fMRI and we had them do some visual imagery tasks, and then we looked at the activity in their visual cortex relative to the activity and the rest of their brains. And the key is that instead of averaging all the participants together like you usually do in fMRI experiments, we analyzed each person individually and we found that some people when they're imaging, have less activity in the visual cortex, and some people have more and everywhere in between. And when we correlate each participant with their vividness of visual imagery score, we found that the more clear your imagery, the more activity in your visual cortex. In other words, your vividness of visual imagery is measurable objectively. If you're someone who has rich visual imagery, you have more activity running in your visual cortex. And we were Jazz defined that we could objectively verify subjective report. So let's return to the young man that I mentioned at the beginning who watched and loved Walt Disney's Fantasia. This was Ed Catmoll. He loved animated films as a child and wanted at some point more than anything to go into the world of animated filmmaking, but there was no clear path for that. So he ended up getting his doctorate in computer science and in nineteen seventy eight he developed new three D computer graphics techniques involving how to describe any arbitrary surface as little patches. This is called the Catmull Clark surface subdivision, and later he would win an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for this, and Ed was involved in all the stuff that followed from that, including particle effects and ray tracing and everything about how light bounces off objects and where you get reflections and shadows. And he and his colleagues made the computer program render Man, which allowed them making a very complex scenes, and collectively this is what made computer graphics realistic. So in the nineteen seventies he got together with his friends and colleagues and they collectively had the ambition to make the world's first computer animated film, and things took a while, but then George Lucas got interested and took on the team, and then in nineteen eighty six, Pixar spun off as an independent company with Ed as the president. They got their investment money from Steve Jobs, who joined the board of directors as chairman, and they made this stunning two minute short film called Luxo Junior, which starred two desk lamps, one large and one small. You may have seen the short film, and if you haven't, you should. The large lamp looks on while the smaller, younger lamp has a great time playing with a ball until it accidentally deflates it. And by the way, this film is from Whence Pixar got its mascot. So Pixar went on to great acclaim and success, starting with Toy Story in nineteen ninety five, which was the first fully computer animated feature film, and Ed eventually became president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. So here's a guy who led the world in the realm of gorgeous computer animated film. So imagine his surprise when he learned about a fantasia, because he immediately understood that his mind's eye was blind ed. Is a fantasic. He doesn't visualize anything, and this makes no sense, right, How could the guy who runs Pixar and produced the visuals for our generation? How could he be a fantasic? So Ed and I have been in touch for a while on this topic. So I called him up to talk with him today about a fantasia and Art ed, when did you first realize that your brain was different from other people's.
Well, not that I ever thought it was like anybody else's, but there was a curious thing that took place when I was having dinner with a friend of mine who was involved in visual meditation, and since I meditate, I wanted to have him teach me how to do that. So he said, well, it's simple. Just sit down and then close your eyes and visualize a ball in front of you. Really simple.
So went home. I tried it.
I couldn't visualize a ball in front of me. So well, I was weird for a week. I kept trying. Now, when I went back to him, he said, oh, that's okay, some people can't do it, But now my curiosity is peaked. So I went to the person who was the production designer Ralph Eggleston for Toy Story and several of the Pixar movies. And I said, if you close your eyes, can you see things? He said, of course I can. And there's some people here who can do it so well. They can open their eyes and trace what they see. Okay, now it's interesting to me. Now, what's interesting about it was that the surfaces that are used in the movies today. We're from Jurassic Park, Toy Story movies, but almost everything you see in the movies was based on a patch, a way of making a surface that I conceived back when I was at the University of Utah.
It's like forty five years ago.
And I remember very well the process in which I did it, and that was I knew what the problem was. I would write things on the whiteboard that's trying to solve a problem about how to make a new kind of surface, and then I would feel the problem go down into my brain or subconscious It felt like it was going down, and I stood in front of the whiteboard and I rocked back and forth for twenty to thirty minutes, this several times, and I knew something was going on.
I had no conscious access to it.
And then something would bubble to the surface and I would draw on the whiteboard and interact with it. And when I would run into a problem, which I usually did, back down, I would go this was a very real feeling, but for all I knew, that's what other people did too. So now I'm surprised because I came up with this new way of making surfaces, but I didn't do it with math, and I didn't do it with visualization. So then I started to ask people that pixar, because I would have weekly lunches with random people, can.
You just flesh out what the problem was.
At the time when I was starting, there were two ways of making surfaces, one of them which was with polygons, and the other one was with patches.
These were called beast blind patches.
They had a lot of flexibility and you could bend them in certain ways and then you would stitch a surface together with these four sided patches and they would come together with four.
Corners from the different patches.
Now, because I had made an image of my hand it was one of the first things I did with polygons, I knew there was an inherent problem, and that is stitching together four sided things where they come together at the corner with each one has problems if you do a hand or something simple like if you take a cube. Just think about a cube. It's got six sides, and it's got these four sided squares, but they come together with three edges at a point, not four. Even if for something as simple as a cube, four sided things coming together with four at a corner doesn't work.
Since we were now in the early.
Stages, I wanted a patch where you didn't need to have three come together at a corner. You had more flexibility, very important. So I came up with a way of doing that, and I proved that it worked once I figured out how to do it. Mentally, I proved that it worked using high school geometry. So I then went to a professor with this idea, and I.
Showed it to him.
Was eighteen page lung proof, and I looked at it briefly and he said, ed, what is this and he tossed it back of me. Wasn't critical to my thesis, so I set it to the side. And then after I graduated, then Jim Clark we came up with paper which then described it.
Let me just get it straight from the audience. So it is how do you represent surfaces on a computer and then you can do things like bounce light off that and take care of color and stuff like that. Yes.
Yes, this is basically the underlying patches that you piece together. And when you've got those pieces together, then there's a separate question of how you put texture on them and lighting and so forth. This is really the definition of the surface. It's a geometric problem.
And this is what all animated films came to use in the future. Yeah.
Yes, and so I and a couple of others received an Academy award because of this way of making services.
Now tie this back to your inability to picture the sphere while meditating.
So, knowing that this took place, I went to these lunches and I just talked about it with people and I would say, Okay, if you close your eyes, can you visualize something? How good are you at it? And what I was finding was that their ability to visualize among this random group of eight people at the table was all over the place. In fact, in one of them, the only person who couldn't or would report of they couldn't visualize was an artist and everybody else who is not an artist could visualize. So at this point it's like this is getting stranger and stranger, and I was wondering if there was if there wasn't even a strong correlation or any correlation between what they did and their ability to visualize.
Now, at this point, I.
Don't know about authentation, never heard of it. It's purely this curious phenomenon about the way people think.
The way they visualize, the visualize.
Yes, the next big step in terms of making it a very strange phenomenon was that I had a dinner with Glenn Keene. Glenn Keen is one of the best hand drawn animators of all time.
He did The Little Mermaid and what else.
Yeah, so basically he was the primary animator on those course of films. So his Little Mermaid, Beauting, the Beast, Aladdin, so the main characters they and they were done by Klan. I mean, they were rather great animators too, but like, this was the guy that was the best, and if you watch him draw, it's pretty stunning. So I had dinner with him and I explained the topic to him and he just said, oh, I can't visualize either.
I've never been able to visualize.
In fact, I got into an argument with my mentor at Disney, and his mentor was one of these the famous nine Old Men of Disney who did the fields from a long time ago.
Glenn really could draw, and the mentor knew this.
The mentor at one point said visualize it, and Glenn said, well, I can't, and the mentor said, well, of course you can.
You're an anime.
So they had this argument about whether or not he could visualize it is no, he really couldn't, so and at this point is this.
Is really weird.
And then the next step was that, as my daughter pointed out, this article in the New York Times about Adam Zieman's work at Exeter in London.
The article.
Actually had a mistake in what it said, because it wasn't what Adam had said. But what it reported in the New York Times article was that there was somebody who had a brain tumor and then they removed it. But after this process he was no longer able to visualize, and therefore they have found the center of visualization in the brain. It turns out this isn't what happened at all, but because that was what was reported, then I wrote to Adam and said I can't visualize, Glenn Keith can't visualize, and neither one of us have ever had a brain tumor. So he then wrote back and he explained that the article was wrong. But that's when I learned about the test, the VIVIQUE.
Which stands for the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.
Yes, I had that test, and I thought, oh, well, this is cool because I have two studios, because I was over both Pixar and Disney Animation, and we kept the two studios fairly separate so they would have different ways of thinking about things. And I thought, well, what I will do is is I will give the test to the people at the studios, but I also asked them to answer some other questions, and in particular is what was their job?
But what did they do?
And then with my daughter, who also can visualize, we gathered the data from I think six hundred people filled it out to look for a correlation between the ability to visualize on what their job was, what they actually.
Did, and what was it you learned.
The people who had, I would say statistically better ability to visualize were the storyboard artists who are conceiving of the story and making drawings all the time of what the story might be. But they weren't a lot higher. They were just like statistically higher. But in that group where people who had the hyper fantasia, and one of them, for instance, would conceive of a film while driving home because he had a forty five minutes an hour commute every day, and he would play appropriate music for the thing he was working on, and while he was driving, he would basically build this scene in his head, and when he was done with it, he could play it backwards and forwards in his head and stop on a frame and drop. It's hard to know about the quality of the images because storyboard artists only need to make the images good enough to convey the story part point and then they move on to the next one.
So he was at the hyperfantasia.
But every one of them said that when they did this process, whether it's driving or walking, but they typically did move around, and they always did it with their eyes open while they're building up this visualization of what they're doing. There were also these storyboard artists who were extremely good who had a fantasia, and they actually worked a little bit slower, but their drawings looked better, probably because they were trying to convey something through the quality of drawings. It wasn't until I brought this up to them that they then talked about it with each other. So there were people that are working together for fifteen years and had no idea about this difference. The people with a Fantasia were a little more likely to think, oh, I'm not as fast as they are, I'm not as good, but they never said anything. But the drawings actually looked better and the quality of the stories was just as good.
But they knew there was a difference.
Okay, so let's zoom in on the artisan animators with a Fantasia. So you mentioned earlier that the way Glenn Keene draws is extraordinary. We've both seen him draw. How would you describe that?
What we could see, and he would describe it this way, is that he had something in him but he could only get it out by sketching. His hand would just move, and what you see are these rough drawings. Sometimes the rough drawings were so rough at the early stages that you didn't know where it was going until he worked it out. But then after a few sketches, his drawings would turn into rather remarkable pieces of artwork.
So he's having a dialogue with the page. But what else when you watch him draw, If you're watching him while he's drawing, let's say, on a computer screen, what do you observe?
Well, the thing which actually he didn't know at the time because people didn't normally point a camera at him. He was advising the other animators, but he never really was interested or tried to use a computer animation. But they all knew that he was had this incredible skill. So he would dravo on the screen. His preference was paper with a certain kind of pencil. It was actually remarkable. He was completely obsessive about the kind of pencil and the paper that he had. But he could draw on the screen, and he did with his way of doing it. And at this point somebody had an iPhone and they just pointed at him while he was doing it, and his body was acting out the emotions that he was doing, so he was, you know, making those kind of faces, and he wasn't aware of. What he was aware of is that after a day of drawing, he was exhausted.
So for the audio audience, let me explain so, so, right, if he is drawing a character that's surprised, his whole body takes on an air of surprise, and his facial expression is one of great surprise as he's drawing.
Or if he's drawing a character that's angry or laughing or something, his whole body and face take that on that character as he's drawing. And this is what we call embodied cognition. Somehow he's understanding the character by adopting that character's emotions in the moment, as opposed to simply visualizing in his head and then jotting down what he is visualizing.
Yes, whatever is in his head is coming out in his body and in his drawings. It's amazing to watch, and it was amazing people to watch how I would do this. And the reason I related to this was that when I was doing the surface work that I was very aware that it was somewhere else in my body that this was taking place, and I could only get it out by drawing it on the whiteboard. And then I was interacting at a level with it on the whiteboard, seeing if it worked, and if it didn't, I'd make modifications, and if if the modifications didn't work, then it would go back into this place where I no longer had conscious access to it, but I knew I was working on so I would not disturb it. That's why I rocked back and forth, because if I went and did something else, then I would actually disturb a process that I was aware of, but I couldn't control other than protecting it. When we were at Lucasfilm, we were trying to solve a whole number of problems based on the fact that we knew that technology was increasing at an exponential rate. So the fact that we had such an incredible group of talent at Lucasfilm and then a Pixar is what enabled us to convince other people like Disney that we had the ability to make really high quality images. Incidentally, I should note that for the three people that started with the underpinnings of Rennerman, Lauren Carpenter and Rob Cook being the other two, they both had a fantasia also right.
I just ran into Rob Cook last week and I asked him about this, and he was so surprised and interested that anyone cared and was talking about this issue.
It was one of those things like there was no reason for us to ever talk to each other about it or ask, So we had no idea whatsoever route and there was only after my daughter and I we made the presentation and we talked about it that we realized, Oh, none of us can visualize, but what we have is the underlying technology which is used to make images.
What is your hypothesis about why many artists and animators and why you and Cook and Carpenter were able to come up with these stunning visual technologies without being able to visually image in your heads.
Our brains work in really interesting in different ways, and we have different methods of getting it out and which you know, this is like, it's appreciating that some people's brain can work in a very different way and still do something productive. And it's to value the fact that other people do things that we can't do in different ways.
And that's actually, that's very cool.
I can't be like anybody else, and if I can't be anybody like other people, and I can't be another gender, I can't be another ethnicity, I can't be raised in another culture. My brain doesn't work like other people's brains, so it would be folly for me to pretend or think that I should have those experiences instead of what I have is like a faith that other people bring something of great value, even if I can't experience experience it, and even.
If I don't know what it is. And for me, this is an important thing.
It's really to have faith that what other people bring is of value and I shouldn't be expected to fully understand why, just that. No, that's actually cool, and I want to have those kind of people around me.
I love that. Hey, I'm curious about your thoughts on my hypothesis about this. Here's the way I started thinking about this issue of artists. You know, between the two of us, we know lots of artist and animators who are a fantasic. And it's so counterintuitive at first, but what struck me is that if you are a young child and you have let's say, hyperfantasia, and the teacher says, okay, draw a horse, you're just drawing the horse that's in your head. But if you're the kid with a fantasia, you really have to stare at the model and really look at it and figure out where the lines are. You have a dialogue with the page and with what's in front of you. That way, and that's why I think children with a fantasia can under some circumstances, become better artists because they're having to put the work in instead of imagining that they already know exactly what's out there, which may or may not be such a great drawing, it might not be accurate. What do you think of that?
There are a couple of things.
One of them is that I do remember when I was in elementary school that we had another kid in the class is you're like maybe fifth grade or something like them, But when he drew, he was driving horses and so forth. I was blown away as a kid because they were at the professional level.
Right.
I knew that I never knew what happened to this guy. All I knew was that his abilities at that age were remarkable. For me personally, I liked art, and I drew a lot, you know, because I'd want to be an animat But the thing I appreciate was I did have to spend a lot of time observing and trying to think about proportions.
And ratios and how the backgrounds came together.
I am very upset and irritated that when the money gets tight in the schools, one of the first things to go or the art programs, Well, what is art? Art has a fundamental skill of observing. It's looking, it's trying to see and understand. Which fields do we have where it's not important to be observant. You like your doctor to be observant, you know, and if you're an engineer, you want to be observant. It's like in every one of these fields. It's an important skill because people have the misconception that art is about drawing, when really art is about seeing, and we have different ways of seeing. But developing those skills, however our brain works is actually very important.
Is there anything else that you want to mention?
Well, there was one thing I was surprised at when I went to the conference. Some of the people with hyperfantasia said they wish they didn't have it because there were things they would like to forget. So so, well, that's really interesting. Actually, I've always had a crappy memory, you know, I wish it were better, and trying to make it better. I would read these techniques about the memory palace, and it was only in retrospect that I realized the memory palace never worked for me because they couldn't see the damn rooms. But the fact that some people didn't like it because they were remembering things they didn't want.
It was just very interesting.
The other interesting thing was one of the I don't know what through neurologists or psychologists there asked the question of the general audience that if they were given a pill that would reverse their abilities from hyperpantasia to aphantasia, but the pill was irreversible, how many would take the pill?
And about half the audience raised their hands.
Now, in my case, I wish that I could see images from the past. I think part of it is because you don't know what it's like to experience that. Then you could say, oh, I would like to have that ability. You wouldn't know whether or not it would have negative consequences that would.
Come with it, or for that matter.
It's one of the things I look at was that when I took my courses, because when I went to college, I majored in physics, I judged a teacher whether or not they gave me an intuitive understanding.
And there were some teachers who.
Basically were the philosophy you just follow the math, and I would just say to myself, Oh, they're a crappy teacher. I used to think they were crappy teachers, and there were some that would give you an intuitive feeling, and when I got the intuitive feeling, I would do very well. So then I wonder, Okay, was it the fact that I had a fantasia which made me push harder to get an intuitive feeling which was not a visual one, and that having a fantasia may have been a great advantage.
For I'm so interested in how these things cash out in terms of advantages, like for an artist or someone trying to understand physics and having to work the extra mile for it.
So I can't go back, I said, well, and I would like to have had all the things I had, plus I want this other stuff because you know, it may be the lack of certain things was actually in create advantage for him.
That was Ed Catmull, co founder of Pixar and one of the many a fantasics there. As Ed mentioned, he had posted a survey of his whole company and he found that many of his colleagues, like Carpenter and Cook were also a fantasiaic. And he found this was true of many of his best artists. For example, you heard us mention Glenn Keen Glenn is one of the godfathers of animation. So a while ago I talked with Glenn about this and here's what he told me. Quote, as I draw, I feel like my drawing is a conversation and it's talking to me and I'm responding to it. So it's actually not a one way thing at all. It's something that exists and I'm responding to it and pulling it out. End quote. And when you watch Glenn, he uses a lot of lines. He's feeling things out as he draws. He describes it as a quest. We were talking about a particular film and I asked him about what he might visualize if he needed to draw a scene where a girl has to jump off a cliff into the water so she can get on to another shore. And in his words, he said, quote, I don't have a visual on it, but I know exactly the whole experience of it, and I can feel it very clearly. And when Glenn sets to work on the page sketch and feeling with the lines, the animation comes to life. I'm going to put some videos of him working on these show notes at eagleman dot com slash podcast, so check those out. It's really amazing to watch him work now again. A fantasie is not just for artists. There's a million examples. I'll just take one. There's a famous software engineer named Blake Ross. He's the guy who founded Mozilla, and he posted on facebooks and years ago that he had just stumbled on a fantasia. On his Facebook post, he wrote that this was quote as close and honest to goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh. He went on to write, quote, I just learned something about you, and it is blowing my mind. Here it is, you can visualize things in your mind. I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I can't see my father's face, or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom, or the run I went ten minutes ago. I thought counting sheep was a metaphor. I'm thirty years old and I never knew a human could do any of this, and it is blowing my mind. End quote. When he had accidentally heard about a fantasia, he right away began asking his friends what their internal experience was like, and his friends told him they could see things like if he asked them to imagine standing on a beach, but the idea of a mental picture like that made no sense to him. Now what's interesting is that after his post, I saw one of his colleagues right on Twitter quote, I'm amazed and humbled that Blake Ross got so good at user interface design at Mozilla, given that he has a fantasia. But this is the same thing with Ed Catmull. No one would have expected that the computer scientists who pioneered new methods for making three dimensional surfaces that allow you to capture the proper light reflection and so on, no one would have guessed that he had a fantasia. But the thing I want to point out about Blake's post was his absolute amazement in discovering that other people were having a very different internal life than he was. It is hard to believe this when you first learn about it, And calling back to the beginning of this episode, this is why it took so long for the debate of how we visualize to get resolved in the psychology literature, because we all assume that everyone's experience is exactly like ours on the inside. Now, speaking of people's internal worlds being different, one of the classes I teach at Stanford is called literature and the brain. And one of the things that's been fascinating to me for years is understanding the fundamental differences between individual authors. So I want to give you two very concrete examples. First, I want you to think about the level of visual description here in this passage from Thomas Hardy from his novel Return of the Native Quote. The next morning, when Thomason withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the may pole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack's beanstalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers. Beneath these came a milk white zone of may bloom, then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged robins, daffodils, and so on till the lowest stage was reached. That's how Thomas Hardy writes. Now I want you to contrast that with Ernest Hemingway, who's much less individual descriptions. Here's a passage from his novel A Farewell to Arms quote. If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them. So of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave, impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry. Okay, so here's my hypothesis. Ernest Hemingway is the felicition of literature, and Thomas Hardy is the costlin. In other words, I speculate that Hemingway was a fantasic and Hardy was hyperfantasic. Now I have no way to prove this, because their brains are gone, but it seems a possibility to me that we might be able to make some crude retrospective neural guesses by looking at how an author writes and what kind of details the author assumes his reader would want. Presumably Hardy thinks that all readers are like him, and that everyone's going to love this description of all those flowers, and presumably Hemingway assumes that his readers are like him, and that they really care zero about the visual detail. In fact, in another spot, in a Farewell to Arms, Hemingway is writing about the use of words in wartime, and he writes abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow or obscene, beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates. So I assert they were both writing in the manner that made sense to them, and both of them put their workout into the world, and readers ended up buying their books, And presumably both authors think, yeah, I know what readers want and I nailed it. They don't necessarily realize that they're attracting only a subset of readers to their work. They have set up bug lights at different ends of the fantasia spectrum. Okay, so we've covered a wide territory from Disney to Catmull to Hardy to Hemingway. So let's see where we are. One of the conclusions that has come out of the study of a fantasia and hyperfantasia is that there's no particular disadvantage to being at any part of the spectrum. There are many ways to experience reality, and although we traditionally concentrate on disorders and diseases, neuroscience is increasingly examining the variety of normal human experiences. And when we look at the great engineers and animators around us, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that some of them are a fantasic and some are hyperfantasic and everywhere in between. The last several years have seen a lot of discussion about diversity, but traditionally that conversation is only skin deep. Really, there are many many axes of diversity that we could attend to, and I'm going to do a future episode on this about the heterogeneity of internal experience across the population. Today we talked about the spectrum of visual imagery, but there's increasing study now in other forms of imagery. For example, there are large individual differences in smell imagery. When you imagine the scent of cinnamon, you're smelling with the mind's nose. Some people can recreate the sensation of a smell like take lemon pie, as though the pie is present for other people on the other end of the spectrum. This the mele of lemon pie is only conceptual. It's nothing like an experience. We find the same thing with hearing. When you imagine the Happy Birthday song or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you are hearing with the mind's ear. Some people are great at this. It's almost like they're listening to a radio, and other people don't hear anything on the inside. What is your capacity to imagine the feel of silk with your mind's fingers or imagine the taste of goat cheese with your mind's tongue. Whatever your answer is, your best friend's answer might be different. And these questions of imagery reach beyond the senses. I can ask you to imagine climbing up twenty flights of stairs. Now, some of you can feel the sensation and your muscle and the movement in the ache. This is called motor imagery, but for other people they're not feeling it very much at all. Or take something like the act of identifying your own emotions or describing the emotions of other people. Some people are really talented at this. Others have what's called alexithymia, which means they're really bad at identifying describing emotions in themselves. Or others, And it should be noted there are many aspects of the human experience which, to my knowledge, have not even yet been studied. As an example, consider the degree to which you hear your internal voice. I don't really hear much of anything. In contrast, some friends of mine have what they call an internal radio. They sometimes don't hear other people when those people talk, because, as they describe it, this speaker gets drowned out by the internal radio. We joke about this now, but it took us years to realize that there's this fundamental difference between our experience on the inside. So there's so much variety from head to head, and there's been so little study on this in any previous generation. Why it's because of our strong and natural intuition that everyone experiences the world exactly the way that we do. But we're finally at a point with science where we have the desire and capacity to understand the differences on the inside. So now we can finally undertake the endeavor to chart and explore the enormous variety of the eight billion planets of the inner Cosmos. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading and videos. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos, The Stunt and
