Dr. David Eagleman

Now, I happen to be aphantasic, so it's very hard.

I've studied this for years.

I've interviewed hundreds of people on this.

And so I get their description, but I can't picture that myself.

By the way, it's an interesting quick tangent.

For years, I've talked with Ed Catmull about this.

Ed Catmull is the guy who started Pixar, Pixar with all these terrific animated films and so on.

Ed has all these patents on like how to do ray tracing to get the you know, to get these animated characters looking as amazing as they do.

He was surprised when he discovered that he was aphantasia.

He doesn't picture anything in his head.

So he ended up giving this questionnaire to everybody at Pixar.

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

They don't see anything in their head.

And nobody, I think, would have predicted that because it seems so strange to this visual magisterium of Pixar.

But I have a hypothesis about why this is.

It's because the kid who grows up who's aphantasic

When they're asked, okay, draw a horse, you know, the kid sitting next to them who's hyper-fantasic says, oh, I know what a horse looks like and just draws it.

But the poor aphantasia kid has to really stare and figure out, like, okay, how does that work and so on.

And they get better at drawing as a result.

And that's why all his best animators and drawers are people who grew up aphantasic.