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It's Unexplainable. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. And this is the fifth episode of our series on the senses. So far, we've talked about auditory illusions, how touch could potentially work as a treatment for pain. But scientists don't really know how smell works and the fuzzy, often confusing borders of our sense of taste. This week, our producer Manding Nguyen has a story about our sense of vision, about what's possible to see in the mind's eye.
When I close my eyes and let my mind wander, I start to see images. The green canopy of redwood trees, or the mushroom risotto I ate last night for dinner, or my sister's face. Like, I can picture all this in my head, and that's something that I've always taken for granted. Until I spoke to Alice Coles. There's just a lot of words going in my brain all the time.
Words, but not pictures. You know, there's a song going, there's like TikTok audio down there. There's like the running to-do list of stuff that I haven't done. There's the guilt over something I said in sixth grade, you know, and then there's like all the other stuff just on top. When she was in college, Alice started to realize that some people could imagine more than just words, which was a little shocking to her. I think a big part of it was when I started doing yoga.
In yoga, there's a lot of like visualize yourself in your happy place and stuff like that. I've always heard that kind of stuff before. And like I've tried it. And I'm always just like, I don't know what this means.
But the people in Alice's class kept telling her about these visions that they could almost literally see. One of the girls was talking about this beautiful visualization that they had had that these like ravens were bursting out of their stomach and flying away. And they felt like this amazing release because they finally felt like they were embracing their body. And it was so beautiful. I was so happy for them. But I also was like, you saw that? Is that normal? I was like, I...
Is that what's supposed to happen? Because that seems worrying. I was like, what? What are you talking about?
As she started thinking about it, Alice realized that this happened to her all the time. You know, I'd always read about things like picturing your loved one's face. And I was like, why can't I picture anyone's face? Why can't I picture my old house in England, even though I can remember, even though I can remember my room was yellow and it had a mural on the wall. And when you came in, you went to the left and out the window was a park. And I can remember all that. And I can remember the layout and everything, but I can't
See it. For a long time, this was just a mystery to Alice. But one day, she came across a video on YouTube.
Whenever I'd read self-help books that required you to visualize your ideal self, or even guided meditations that asked to imagine sitting on a private beach at sunset, I could understand the concept, but I couldn't believe that anybody could actually see a beach in their head. It's just fantasy talk, right? Someone else couldn't visualize images either. To put it simply, if the brain is like a computer that can store and access data, mine seemingly runs perfectly fine,
except for the fact that the screen is switched off. And I was like, that's me. That is me, 100%. I am a zero. It is all blacklit. I can't see anything. And I called my mom and I was like, mom, can you visualize? And she was like, yeah, I can overlay stuff into the real world if I want to. And I was like,
Excuse me? Alice called up the rest of her family. She called up her friends. She grilled everybody she knew about whether they could see images in their mind. And she was a little shook that so many of them could. When you kind of put a name to it, there is a sense of loss or missing out of, oh, well, I'm supposed to be able to do this and I can't. And then for me, there was
almost an immediate sense of jealousy that, "Oh my God, this is why it's so hard. Why can't I be like them?" This week on Unexplainable, why can't some people see things with their mind's eye? And what's going on in the brain when the rest of us can? All knowledge must come through the senses. All that we perceive and all of the awareness of our daily existence.
light double rainbow oh my god sound listen to me listen to me touch squeezy odors ew and tastes what are your thoughts concerning the human senses as meat and wine are nourishment to the body the senses provide nutriment to the soul all that we perceive see all the awareness hearing all knowledge must come through the senses i have an incredible sense of touch
All that we perceive, tasting, all of the awareness, smelling, all knowledge must come through the senses. Doesn't make sense. So now we've lost. Please, so now we've lost. The inability to picture an image in your mind only got its name a few years ago. We felt there was a phenomenon to describe and that it deserved a name.
This is Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Exeter Medical School in the UK. We borrowed Aristotle's term for the imagination or the mind's eye, which is fantasia, and tagged an A on the end to denote the absence of that capacity. And so that was how the term aphantasia was coined. Adam first came across aphantasia in 2005 with a curious medical case. The patient was referred to me who...
His GP said, his general practitioner said, had lost the ability to imagine. This man, who the case study just called MX, used to love getting lost in his imagination. He used to get himself to sleep by imagining places he'd visited and faces of friends and family. But after getting cardiac surgery, something changed.
He said, when I read a novel, the descriptions in the novel no longer conjure a visual scene, which I used to enter. If I lose my keys, I used to be able to visualize where I'd put them down, and I can no longer do that. Adam and his colleagues gave Emmex a range of tests and found that his vision was fine, his working memory was also fine. So Adam gave him another test to figure out whether he could visualize something in his mind. So, for example, if I ask you to tell me which is darker, the green of grass or the green of a pine tree,
You will probably call the two shades to your mind's eye and answer on the basis of visualization. MX could answer questions like that without any difficulty. And when you asked him how, he said, well, I just know. I can't see anything. I just know. Here was a patient presenting a symptom that he'd never come across before, but who seemed to be fine on most measures of psychological testing. Adam was stumped. I realized that I knew very little about visualization, and so it sent me both to
to the neurological literature about people who've lost the ability to visualize, and also to the neuroscientific literature about what happens in our brains when we visualize. A general definition of a visualization or a visual image is forming an image in your visual cortex that is detached, so it's not coming from the outside world. This is Joel Pearson. He's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and he specializes in visual imagery.
It's not coming from your eyes, from your retina. You're not seeing something perceptually. You're voluntarily creating that. But visualizing is still related to how you see. When you look around the room now and you're seeing, you know, or you're driving a car or whatever you're doing, you're seeing things. A lot of information is hitting your eyes, your retina. It's shooting back to your visual cortex. And so that's going upwards, if you like, from your eyes up into your brain.
When we visualize, similar parts of the brain are activated, but at a lower intensity. So it's almost like we're having the experience of seeing something in real time, even if we're just imagining it. I think a good way to think about this is that imagery is like a virtual reality engine that we simulate things. But visual imagery has historically been really hard to study. It's something that's inherently private. It's inside someone's own mind. No one else knows what they're doing with their mental imagery.
In order to measure aphantasia, scientists can use something called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. And it runs people through a bunch of questions. And it's simple things like, think of the last time you saw a sunset. Now, try and imagine that sunset as best you can. Rate that sunset in terms of vividness. But self-reports aren't really rigorous enough to base a whole science off of.
And Joel realized that there weren't a ton of good tests to measure visual imagery. So he started working on some. So we've been on a mission to develop objective, reliable techniques. Like there's one where you can observe people's eyes and tell them to imagine looking at something really bright, like the sun. So the pupil right in your eye, when you look at a bright light, it contracts. It shrinks down to very tiny, so it's letting less light through. Turns out when you imagine bright things, something very similar happens. Your pupil changes.
You imagine dark things, it relaxes and opens up again. And you can also put sensors on people's skin to see how they react when you tell them a story with visual details. So I could ask you to imagine something very scary and see what your emotional response to that is. The stronger your imagery is, the stronger that response.
Scientists can also use brain imaging technology, like fMRI, to see which parts of the brain light up when someone visualizes. And that's exactly what Adam did to study his patient, MX. In a brain imaging study, whereas you or I, assuming that you have imagery, activate visual areas of our brain, when we visualize, he was unable to do so. So when he looked at a famous face, his brain activated quite normally. But when he tried to visualize it, he failed to activate those visual regions of the brain.
Adam thinks that MX lost his ability to visualize because of a stroke that happened during his surgery, which damaged parts of his brain. And other kinds of injuries can lead to aphantasia too.
But something like 2-3% of people have aphantasia, and injury isn't the only cause. There are a number of ways in which you can arrive at aphantasia, which makes sense given that we know quite a complex network of regions in the brain is involved in visualization. Other people have also developed aphantasia because of psychological reasons. It can occur in the context of depression, of depersonalization disorder, and of psychosis. But the largest group of people with aphantasia are people who have had it for their entire lives.
And this is where things get a little mysterious. We don't know very much yet about the mechanism of lifelong aphantasia. We know it's associated with certain conditions. It's sometimes associated with difficulties with face recognition, sometimes with difficulties with autobiographical memory, sometimes with autistic spectrum disorder, and sometimes with none of the above. Adam also thinks that there might be a genetic component. If you have aphantasia, there's a roughly tenfold increase in the likelihood that a first-degree relative of yours will have it.
But scientists don't really know what causes someone to be born with it. And there doesn't seem to be any singular part of the brain that we can point to and say, "Yes, I see this person as aphantasia." I'm sure aphantasia is more than one thing. I think it's a variation in experience, a feature of experience, and it can occur in a number of contexts. People with aphantasia can have really varied internal lives. Not everyone is bothered by it. And like we heard at the top,
A lot of them don't even realize they have it until well into their lives. So it raises the question of why we have imagery if we don't need it. What are these mental images really even used for? That's after the break. Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight. People with kids tell me time moves a lot faster. Before you know it, your kid is all grown up. They've got their own credit card.
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Unexplainable, we're back. I'm Manning Nguyen. Before the break, we were talking about people who don't have the ability to picture images in their minds. And a lot of them live perfectly healthy lives. Which raises a bigger question. What is imagery even for? One really important thing that imagery does is allows you to imagine things that aren't there, either in space or in time. Emily Holmes is a psychology professor at the Uppsala Institute in Sweden, and she studies imagery.
Emily's found that the world inside our heads is really closely tied with our emotions. The more you use imagery, the more it kind of cranks up the volume on your emotional amplification. Emily and her team have done studies where they tell one group of people to think of a concept in words, and then they tell the other group to imagine the same concept, but using an image instead. People who imagined the scenarios had a far stronger understanding
emotional effect than people who merely thought about them in words. So if those scenarios were negative events, like slipping on the stairs, they'd become, for example, more anxious. And also the converse. If those scenarios were positive events, like a picture of chocolate cake and the word eat, then people also had more positive emotions.
It's similar to Joel's experiment where people with sensors on their skin heard scary stories. That study shows the same thing. Simply by manipulating instructions to think in imagery rather than words, those people who think in imagery have a far more powerful impact on their emotions, both to make them more negative but also to make them more positive when exposed to the same information. The question is, why? Why would our brains be wired to use images to intensify emotions? There are...
But Emily's found that intensifying emotions can also have a downside.
There are studies going back, for example, to the 1990s that show that people who use imagery a lot tend to score higher on measures like anxiety or tendency to feel fears and phobias. If imagery causes a powerful impact on emotion, it actually can be really disruptive and cause like micro fluctuations all the time in daily life. Emily's also a clinician, so she works a lot with patients struggling with PTSD. And there, a key defining symptom is intrusive imagery.
the kind that just pops up where you don't want it to. And in that case, people can have images of difficult events, stressful events, and traumatic events that have happened in the past.
When those images pop to mind, they might just be milliseconds long, but they can cause a huge emotional reaction. In this case, aphantasia could be particularly helpful. If someone had a difficulty forming mental images, then it would stand to reason it would be very difficult to have intrusive images, which could be protective, actually. The idea that having little or no visual imagery could actually be protective against PTSD or help dull traumatic memories, it's just a hypothesis.
But it's an interesting question.
One of the things to say about mental imagery is that we need to do so, so, so much more research. We really are at the base camp of our understanding. And studying mental imagery can help scientists learn how our brains make sense of the world. By opening up the doors to the science of mental imagery, it starts unlocking keys to, OK, could we think about this problem in a different way? Could we create a technique that isn't just talking to somebody, but actually working with this problematic imagery to
I think that's really exciting. I think it means that there are all sorts of innovations, particularly for mental health treatments, that are on the horizon and out there yet to be explored and implemented.
Imagination is a powerful tool, but it's not just limited to visual imagery. It's like smelling with the mind's nose or hearing with the mind's ears. We can imagine the sound of the tune "Happy Birthday," for example, even though someone's not actually singing that. Our brains can also use abstract symbols, concepts, and verbal thoughts.
all sorts of strategies to imagine the world. It's a bit like using a navigation app on your phone. You could either choose to have the map of the world and navigate it, or you could choose to take the written list of instructions. But a lot of times we can solve the same task in different ways, and there's no right or wrong. You know, the human brain is exquisitely wired up to solve problems.
This is why I wanted to talk to Alice, the woman I spoke to in the beginning of the episode. She doesn't just have aphantasia, she's actually a professional artist. Like, I was drawing before I could talk, before I could walk. Like, you know, I was, I had a, I've had a pencil in my hand for as long as I can remember. When she first found out about her aphantasia, she started doubting herself as an artist.
This is why I can't get anatomy yet. This is why I can't picture what this pose would look like in my head. This is why I feel like I'm so reliant on references. If I could visualize, I would be a better artist.
You know, and I sat with that for a while. And then I realized that's simply just not true. Because first of all, all the masters throughout all of history have used references. Alice relies on references too. She's also built up knowledge over time about anatomy and human proportions and what colors go well together that she doesn't need to visualize.
It's more about muscle memory and knowing the different relationships between proportions and things like that than it is about drawing a picture that you see in your head. So it's kind of like the analogy of using Google Maps versus reading the directions. When Alice is figuring out what to illustrate, she's using the written directions. Someone else might see their image, but my brain will say,
"Okay, I'm going to do an 8.5 by 11 piece. I'm going to use my friend Momo as a reference. I want her to be facing to the left. I'm going to incorporate amethyst crystals coming up from the bottom left and spiking upwards towards her. And the whole piece is going to be pale lavender pastels and some like light gold, light silver tones." Over time, Alice started seeing that aphantasia wasn't something that she had to overcome. It could be a strength.
I think one of the beautiful things about that is I'm not generally tied to an image that's popped up in my head. So there's a lot of
exploration, and I always like to think of it as the characters, they come out of the page. I'm not putting them there. I'm just kind of releasing them from the page. - Affentasia is also something that helps her quiet her mind. - When I'm stressed and struggling, especially with art, I can just take a deep breath, close my eyes, and it's just black. It's like this void that I can just sink into and allow thoughts to come to me.
And as she's leaned into her own unique creative process, Alice doesn't really stress on what she's missing anymore. I'm pretty glad I don't visualize, honestly. I think I have an overactive imagination and like, I would rather not visualize. I'm okay with it. Every single one of the researchers that I've spoken to has emphasized that aphantasia isn't a dysfunction, it's not a lack. Some researchers didn't even want to call it a condition. It's just a variation of human experience.
People live fine, full, creative lives without visual imagery because there's more than one way to think. If we start opening the conversation of I don't visualize, where else can we start recognizing each other's differences? Being someone that's like neurodivergent, like having ADHD or autism or somebody that struggles with mental illness, I have bipolar or people that deal with anxiety, depression. Our brains are different, but everyone's brain is different.
This was the fifth episode of our Making Sense series. Next week for our final episode, we'll be talking about a sixth sense. When you close your eyes, it's not like the world disappears. There's an impression of it. That's proprioception. It's the sense of where our bodies are in space.
This episode was reported and produced by me, Manning Nguyen. We had editing from Brian Resnick, Noam Hassenfeld, Catherine Wells, and Meredith Hodnot, who scored the episode along with Noam. Richard Sima did our fact-checking, and Christian Ayala did our mixing and our sound design. The rest of the Unexplainable team includes Bird Pinkerton and Tori Dominguez. To read more about some of the topics we cover on the show, or to find episode transcripts, check out our site at vox.com slash unexplainable.
And if you have any thoughts about the show, you can always email us at unexplainable at vox.com. Or you could leave us a review or rating, which we would love to. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Check this space next Wednesday for the conclusion of our Sense series.