David Eagleman

And different people, you know, like 3% of the population has synesthesia and others don't.

Or something that I've been studying a lot lately is what's called hyperphantasia.

or at the other end of the spectrum, aphantasia, which is how you visually image something.

So if I ask you to imagine an ant crawling on a tablecloth towards a jar of purple jelly,

For some people, that's like a movie in their head.

They can see the whole thing.

Other people, it's just conceptual.

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...

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.

And 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, right?