Wendy Zuckerman (Science Vs host) / Radiolab clips narrator (also uses Radiolab voices)
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
And the person you just heard, his name is Derek.
And he is the opposite of me.
Like when I asked him to describe his apple, his description was wild.
And earlier we learned that there's a scientist who like maybe could give me that ability to be a little more like Derek.
And the reason I'm telling you about Derek is because he's actually the one that helped me understand why.
So Derek, he's about my age.
He was born in New England.
Moved to Texas when he was eight.
And he says as a kid, he loved having this supercharged imagination.
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus.
Which was nice for him because real reality was pretty hard.
But whenever Derek got sad or scared or like even just bored, he would close his eyes and just go into his imagination.
Or sometimes he'd even do this thing where he would take something from his mind and plop it out into like physical space, like out into the physical world.
Yeah, and you can always tell that it's a projection and not reality.
But at a certain point, he said that started to slip.
But the first job he got was at the Dollar Tree.
And a few months in, it wasn't going great.
But every now and then you'll hear a story, or maybe if you're a nerd like me, you'll read a scientific paper that makes you realize that we're different in these ways that you didn't expect, that you never thought about.
One day, he's sitting in his room, and he has this idea.
He picks up two dimes he has lying around, and he decides he's going to play a little game with himself, flipping both coins, trying to get them to land the same way.
He flips them in the air, looks down at the coins, and they're both the same.
They're both heads or tails.
He doesn't remember which.
And then he flips them again.
And he starts to believe that he can control them.
So he'd flip the coins and think to himself.
And he'd see they were both
And they'd both be... Heads down.
I don't know what it would mean to see a color with your mind.
Derek says what happened next gets kind of foggy.
So you stopped being able to tell the difference between an imagination and reality.
Derek's roommates kicked him out.
Derek wandered around all night and actually ended up living on the street for several years.
He does eventually get a diagnosis, schizophrenia, and he gets on medication for that.
And he says that things are better, but he still sometimes experiences psychotic episodes.
Is the hyperphantasia a common symptom of schizophrenia?
So according to neuroscientist Joel Pearson.
They do seem to be correlated.
And it's not just schizophrenia.
It broadens beyond that.
This is clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Holmes.
People who are highly disposed to thinking images may be slightly more anxious.
She brought up certain anxiety disorders, things like phobias.
For example, if you were afraid of spiders, you might experience bits of imagery of spiders with terribly big teeth and fangs.
And also... Perhaps the hallmark disorder is post-traumatic stress disorder in which people relive vivid mental imageries of events that have been traumatic in the past.
But you saw a leaf, right?
Now, of course, having strong imagery doesn't mean you're going to have any of these disorders or not having it doesn't protect you from them.
But it does seem that being able to make really vivid pictures in your mind makes them more likely.
I just, I felt like I had to say something about an apple.
The people at Hyperphantasia that I spoke to, they also told me about these other ways that mental imagery actually makes their life harder.
You were cheating on the test?
So whether it's looking back in sort of like PTSD or looking forward in anxiety, like a potential worry, it's just so visual that it kind of like drums up the body's emotional... Yeah, exactly.
Like, this has come up a lot in my life, okay?
Like imagery can really turn up emotions.
I mean, it's like it's the whole blessing and a curse or like a gift, but not without a cost.
Like you get an escape hatch like Derek can just fly off into space.
And that can be a gift.
But then it sounds like you get this sometimes these hauntings that then you can't escape.
People are like, visualize something.
And actually, like part of what Emily does is teach people how to gain some of this control.
So if we take the spider example, you could shrink or turn it green and push it away like it's more distant, like literally, visually.
And it's a way of showing I'm controlling you, you're not controlling me and you're not real.
I just always thought it was a metaphor.
Like, I just did my version of that.
I mean, after all my reporting, honestly, no.
I mean, I have no practice with it.
I feel like it could be kind of a bad trip that I like can't get out of.
Although, you know, the more I've been thinking about it, the more I'm like, I just have such a clean, empty space inside of me.
Like a word cloud kind of thing?
I'm not going to see poetry the way you see poetry or, you know, experience my memories in some sort of like rich sensory way.
But like I do have a meditation practice and I was like, whoa, like there's so much more to quiet if you're dealing not just with words and like ideas, but actually like images.
No, it's not a word cloud.
More stuff to sweep out of there.
You're good with where you are.
You reported your way out of lust.
You were like, actually, I don't want it.
But also just beyond myself, I really do think it's a good thing for the world that there's a spectrum and, you know, there's all these different brains thinking in all these different ways, you know?
It's like an abstract knowing.
And that probably leads to like so much miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Like I know I love someone.
You know, it's like being like, why are you so obsessive about this thing that happened?
It's like, why can't you see this?
But I think for that problem, it's like we all just need to understand better, I think, just how differently our brains work.
Like I just know that an apple has a leaf.
Wait, can I play you guys one last thing?
So, you know, I was just talking about meditating, something I love to do.
Well, when I was talking to Derek, the guy with that super intense imagery, I asked him what he likes to do, like what he does for fun.
And I just need to share it with you.
There's a part of me that knows that that is true, but it's not seeing it.
What is harsh metal vocals?
That was an episode from Radiolab.
Like if I close my eyes and think about it, like it's really just black.
Full credits are in the show notes.
And the team at Radiolab actually have a new family-friendly show, which is called Terrestrials.
There's episodes about stumps and sharks and arctic squirrels and loads more.
Science Versus will be back next week.
But of course, the thing that was surprising for me was not what's going on in my head.
Like, I've lived in that my whole life.
The thing that blew my mind open
What's been going on in everybody else's head?
After that interview, I started obsessively asking everybody I came across to describe their apple.
And do you actually see the color?
And every time... What do you mean?
The image is in my head.
I don't know, your eyes are closed.
People would say they could actually see it.
Like I am seeing it right now.
In the way that you see things in real life?
Like it's on a white plate on a kind of cafeteria style table.
Like, I went middle school.
I know the grade I went because it was when I had Miss Pacholi, so it was sixth grade.
I threw it into that particular cafeteria.
Turns out it's not just who loves Tay-Tay and who thinks she's just fine.
Yeah, when she said picture an apple.
Like, what does seeing in the mind even mean?
Yeah, I guess it is just words.
Maybe I see the same blur as you, but I get all excited and poetic about it.
And you're just like, meh, there's not much there.
You know, how can we be sure?
I mean, well, for a long time, we couldn't be sure.
But then I found this guy, Joel Pearson.
Who sort of like stumbles into this way of showing that there really is a difference here.
One day he's in his lab.
And today's episode is all about this.
He was playing around with this thing called binocular rivalry.
Basically, you put on these sort of like VR goggles that give each eye a different image.
So let's say your left eye gets a green square and your right eye gets a red circle.
Wait, okay, so each eye only gets one of those?
Each eye can't see what's going on in the other eye.
And, you know, typically when you're just looking around at things, like your eyes are getting slightly different images.
The idea that we're different in these unexpected ways.
Your brain just sort of like randomly switches between the two.
It's like green square, red circle.
Green square, red circle.
Before he turns on like the images in the goggles, he's like, okay, let me just imagine a green square.
I was like, huh, I saw the thing that I imagined.
Joel only sees the green square.
It comes to us from Radiolab and it's a story that we heard and we just really loved it and wanted to share it with you.
It's like just imagining the red circle made his brain actually choose to show him that one.
Like what he thought actually changed what he saw.
If someone like me does it.
My mind doesn't linger on the imagined object.
It just kind of switches between the two.
And Jules continued to find these like objective ways to see a difference.
Like he did this one experiment looking at people's eyes.
People who have imagery, if you ask them to imagine, say, looking at the sun.
As if they were actually looking at the sun.
But if someone with no images in their head does this.
So we're going to jump in just after the break.
And there's even a name for this, for not being able to see in your head.
What does that word mean?
Just so we really... Fantasia.
Fantasia means imagination.
And aphantasia means no imagination.
So there's like about 1% of us who don't see anything.
Most people see something, like maybe vague lines or cartoons like you, Latif, or even more vividly like you, Lulu.
But then there are these other people.
Who say their imagery is as vivid as real seeing.
Create this entire world where I'm like flying on a Pegasus back, you know, and it's as real to me.
It's called hyperphantasia.
About two to three percent of people have it.
And when you ask these people to imagine staring at the sun, their pupils open.
One guy described being able to, like, walk through his childhood world.
So, like, I never actually feel lonely, usually.
This woman described reading books being like... As if I was watching a film.
except that I'm standing in the film.
And when this other person reads, the visuals are so strong that he'll sometimes just leave the page.
So we all know that everyone's different, right?
This woman described having these like images that just constantly play in the background of her mind.
Like in the middle of the interview, I asked her, I was like, are you seeing something right now?
So you are experiencing that in your head while you're answering my questions.
Oh my God, are you kidding?
Just to know that there's this like,
whole part of being a human that i will just never get to experience yeah like i was listening to this old radio lab episode never heard of it uh what show is that anyway it's like some old episode called who am i with uh-huh yeah robert and he goes on this little uh actually you know what do you guys want to hear it yeah yeah for sure i
And today's story comes to us from producer Sindhu Nyanasambandhan.
And you're sitting there like, ah!
No, like monkeys can visualize.
Okay, so this story, it sort of found me.
Like most of them just can't change the image.
Robert says I'm worse than a monkey.
And like, I know it's funny, but like it's just, it also makes me sad.
I want to disappear into books.
When a book is like really descriptive, I'll just read the same paragraph again like five times and nothing will enter my brain.
And also, yeah, just thinking about, oh, I don't get to, I just don't get to hold memories the way that all of you get to.
Like my memories aren't places I go.
Like I don't get to see or feel or touch them.
I almost want to make you guys like picture someone you love right now.
And just like share what you see and how it feels.
Last year, I was working on this episode about memory.
And I was talking to this neuroscientist, Mark Whitman.
And at one point in that conversation with that scientist, Joel.
He said he thinks he can give it some... Whoa!
Wait, how would he even do that?
Yeah, so Joel found that when he ran this very low electrical current through people's visual cortex, their imagery actually got stronger.
He asked me this question.
Now, he does think it would be more complicated for people who are starting out with no imagery.
We're all special snowflakes.
I'll tell you why after the break.