Dr. David Eagleman

But the more subtle things, I'll just give you an example.

Like if I ask you to imagine...

to visualize, let's say, an ant on a purple and white tablecloth crawling towards a jar of red jelly.

Do you see that in your head like a movie or do you have like no particular picture at all or somewhere in between?

What do you experience?

Okay, so what you have, I'm just guessing where you are, but you are on the end of the spectrum that we call hyperphantasia, which means you have very rich visualization.

You're like seeing it like a picture or a movie.

Is that accurate?

Yes.

Okay.

I happen to be at the other end of that spectrum called aphantasia, where I don't have any visual images at all.

I don't see things visually in any way.

And it turns out the whole population is spread evenly along the spectrum.

I'll just give a quick side note, which is that for many years I've been –

Talking with Ed Catmull about this, he's the guy who started Pixar Films.

So he's got all the patents on how to do ray tracing and how to make these beautiful animated characters, right?

Ed Catmull is aphantasic like I am.

And when he learned about this, he got really interested and he gave the questionnaire to everybody at Pixar.

And it turns out many of his best animators and directors are aphantasic.

They don't picture anything inside their heads.