David Eagleman

There's no picture there at all.

So the first group is called hyperphantasic.

The second group is called aphantasic.

And it turns out that across the population, everybody is smeared way out here.

And so although we would assume that everyone has mental imagery that's like ours, in fact, everybody's totally different with this stuff.

So this is what I've been spending my time writing about lately is the differences between humans.

Extremely fascinating to me.

Well, okay, so almost all animals have a sense of smell that's so much better than ours.

I don't know if you saw my TED Talk, but I did this example of, you know, really imagine that you are a dog.

Imagine you've got this long snout with 200 million scent receptors in it, and everything for you is about smell, and you've got these wet nostrils that attract and trap, you know, scent molecules, and you've got floppy ears to kick up more scent.

Everything for you is about scent.

And what it would be like if one day you looked at your human master and you thought, what is it like to have the pitiful little nose of a human?

You might imagine erroneously that there's sort of this missing black hole of smell and we all realize we have this missing smell.

But of course, we're all trapped inside of our own umwelt.

And so we think, oh, yeah, I've got a great umwelt.

I'm detecting everything out there.

We don't realize typically that there's so much that we could be sensing.

Now, lots of animals have magnetoreception, which means they're picking up on the magnetic field of the earth.

And that's how they navigate.

That's how they know north and south.