Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple, a podcast about our inner mental worlds.
Speaker: My name's Francis.
Speaker: And I'm Vin.
Speaker: Great to be here.
Speaker: Yeah, tell me a bit about how you're interested in mental experience.
Speaker: Like, where are you coming from, Vin?
Speaker: So I think the most relevant bit of experience is the fact that I come from a different culture with a different whole culture.
Speaker: background set of assumptions about worldviews and religion and how that influences phenomenal experience of everyday objects from anything as mundane as what beliefs are, but to how the gods and their persistence in the world affects people's emotional or affective responses to the world.
Speaker: And that's something that seems to have a lot more cultural variance than most people give it credit for.
Speaker: Apart from that, I'm also a colonial scientist as well as an avid historian of emotions.
Speaker: I'm very interested in those kinds of perspectives on how our thoughts or mental lives are manifested.
Speaker: And this is kind of why I'm talking about mental experiences today.
Speaker: Yeah, that's super fascinating.
Speaker: It's a completely different angle because my background is very much like Western scientific mindset background.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: I've much more just become aware that we never talk about our inner experience.
Speaker: People just assume everyone else has the same experience of them by default.
Speaker: And things like whether you have an inner voice, what style it is, how much you imagine things, how you use your imagination, how rich it is in different ways.
Speaker: There is hugely between people.
Speaker: And I think...
Speaker: It's a bit of a, it's one of the things that disconnects us from like who we actually are, like living in a sort of abstract, urban, scientific, capitalist kind of place.
Speaker: And one of the, that we're very disconnected from our body is talked about a lot.
Speaker: I think we're also disconnected from really what's happening in our minds actually as well, quite a lot.
Speaker: Because the mind and the body are connected.
Speaker: Well, they're connected, exactly.
Speaker: And yeah, those experiences are linked to us as whole beings as well.
Speaker: Another thing that really strikes me as making me realise why I have a different mental experience from other people is the exposure I have to Twitter.
Speaker: And I think Twitter also has this tendency to make you overshare lots of things that were previously thought to be just taken for granted.
Speaker: And one of the things that I certainly took for granted was the fact that I am phantasic.
Speaker: The fact that I even have a word for that has come about from Twitter discourse.
Speaker: And what really blew up was this discourse over the Apple.
Speaker: I'm not sure if you've seen that.
Speaker: Some people being able to imagine a five or a one on the
Speaker: Imagine an apple scale.
Speaker: And I was thinking to myself, well, surely everyone can do a five.
Speaker: It's so easy.
Speaker: And just for granted that anyone can conjure mental images of apples in their minds, shape and red and shiny, and that this was something anyone can do.
Speaker: The apple's a super calming starting point.
Speaker: So yeah, it's good to mention it.
Speaker: So to explain for people who haven't thought about this at all, a good question to ask someone to get into this stuff is...
Speaker: Yeah, imagine an apple.
Speaker: So do this yourself.
Speaker: Imagine an apple in your head.
Speaker: And then I guess, yeah, there's good ways of asking this question.
Speaker: It's a whole skill, but like ask what's the apple look like?
Speaker: And ask, you know, what do you know?
Speaker: What color it is?
Speaker: Do you?
Speaker: What's the lighting like on it?
Speaker: What is there behind it?
Speaker: Is it on a table?
Speaker: Is it in a room?
Speaker: Does it move?
Speaker: Is it 2D or 3D?
Speaker: Do you even see anything at all?
Speaker: So if I ask you the colour, do you already know the colour or do you make up the colour when I ask you?
Speaker: That kind of thing.
Speaker: Can you rotate it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just that one simple thing I've had, yeah, it's less of a range in some things, but there's a reasonable range of responses you get.
Speaker: And some are quite odd as well.
Speaker: I've had from people I've asked that.
Speaker: So, yeah, so, yeah, what do you, just describe your apple.
Speaker: Think of your simplest apple that comes to your mind.
Speaker: Oh, wow, the simplest apple.
Speaker: Straightforward apple.
Speaker: There it has a sharp line.
Speaker: It's red.
Speaker: It has a glimmer to it.
Speaker: I can make it shine if I want.
Speaker: I can take off the shine.
Speaker: There's a little bit of a green leaf that's sticking to the end of it, although that's not how apples typically come in.
Speaker: Where is it?
Speaker: It's on the end of... I can imagine this apple however way I want, really, and the leaf is on the stem of the apple.
Speaker: That's just like an artistic choice.
Speaker: I don't think any realistic apple has that.
Speaker: And I can imagine it in my hand and holding it and rotate it.
Speaker: So your default is you're holding it.
Speaker: No, the default is like it exists by itself, sort of like not attached to anything in a perhaps like dark room, but I can also fill in the background if I want.
Speaker: I can imagine it sitting on a table, for example, or in my hand.
Speaker: But it involves a little bit more effort than simply just like keeping my eyes open because I think the stimulus that comes from like my visual input gets in the way.
Speaker: And I think some people that I've spoken to
Speaker: certainly can imagine apples as opaque as any real object in their visual field.
Speaker: And that's something that... How do you mean they're not opaque?
Speaker: So for me, at least, if I imagine an apple with my eyes open, it's there, I can sort of imagine it overlapping or...
Speaker: What's the word?
Speaker: Overlapping the visual stimuli that I'm receiving with my eyes.
Speaker: Oh, you're seeing it as if you were seeing it with your eyes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Right, okay, so that's already quite unusual.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: The one you were talking about, you were seeing like that?
Speaker: The one in my hands, I'm kind of like imagining it, but it's not there.
Speaker: It's not opaque.
Speaker: Right, but you can make it opaque if you choose to.
Speaker: No, I couldn't make it opaque.
Speaker: At most, it will be transparent and...
Speaker: and I can see through it.
Speaker: Yeah, so people sometimes describe that as like a second screen, like there's a second monitor in their brain, in their imagination, and that still has positions in it and things can appear anywhere on that monitor, but they're not in the main actual vision, they're like a secondary sub-vision.
Speaker: So I thought I was aphantasic when I discovered all this a few years ago, and I'm sure we'll talk about that another time.
Speaker: Aphantasic meaning you don't have any mental imagery, and I think that's quite common, no one knows how common, but I reckon it's probably 5% of people or something rather than 1% or less than 1%.
Speaker: And I'm technically hypophantasic, which is like weakly phantasic.
Speaker: So, I don't really, I would have said I didn't see an apple at all.
Speaker: I just think about an apple and the concept of an apple and the word apple and what apples are like and whether I like apples and where you can get apples and things like that.
Speaker: What I think now I sort of get slightly later in the processing of the notion of experiencing an apple.
Speaker: It's quite hard to describe this.
Speaker: I think this is probably what's happening to everyone, but it's just like more removed in me.
Speaker: So I certainly don't get the lighting or the shading.
Speaker: It's definitely just in a not even black, like same colour as when your eyes are closed, like a no coloured kind of field.
Speaker: And it's just there, fairly large in the middle of it.
Speaker: Very weakly there.
Speaker: And even the fact of seeing anything at all is very weak.
Speaker: And it's more like...
Speaker: I can't remember the precise shape, but I can remember what it feels like to see the shape of an apple.
Speaker: And if that makes any sense to you.
Speaker: No, that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because I sometimes have to rely on that when I'm not actively conjuring the image of it because that takes extra steps, but I can still do that.
Speaker: So it's just more energy to get a detailed apple.
Speaker: But it's probably still low effort for me to do.
Speaker: And presumably also there are objects you don't know well and you can't see the detail.
Speaker: You can still vaguely remember what it was like seeing them or something.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: I think that definitely helps if you're familiar with it.
Speaker: And this is obviously very different.
Speaker: So you must be seeing objects all the time, right?
Speaker: Less so these days than before.
Speaker: I think these days I've developed a capacity for imagining text, but still in this visual format where I sometimes dream in...
Speaker: walls of text as opposed to like the normal dreams that I get of like it's all purely visual spatial temporal stimuli in my head so I guess this kind of segues a little bit into like how experienced dreams where aphantasics are said to like not experience dreams in this like
Speaker: visually rich mode, whereas most of my dreams are that.
Speaker: There's a visual component and often an audio component.
Speaker: But as of late, instead of having dreams about narratives and stories like a movie, I am experiencing my dreams as if it were Twitter.
Speaker: and I'm like seeing words and you visually see the text I visually just become aware of the words not just the words but I also see like the the tweak button profile photo the colors of the text the profile photos yes yes indeed and all the little settings down there so it's so I'm imagining walls of text but visually and there'll be a narrative that happens
Speaker: It'll be... it'll depend.
Speaker: Sometimes it doesn't have to be a narrative.
Speaker: Sometimes it's more like, oh, I need to write this essay.
Speaker: And in a dream, it just comes in the form of a wall of words that I typically type out in a Twitter text box or something.
Speaker: So, yeah, so dreams was how I realised I made Phantasic.
Speaker: I was thinking about dreaming because I was reading Jung, and I remembered this piece of advice for lucid dreaming, which is the one, there's one which is look at your hands a lot, and when you're in a dream, you have like one less finger.
Speaker: Well, there's something like that.
Speaker: It's quite common, apparently.
Speaker: And that's a way of helping you realise you're dreaming, and therefore leads to lucid dreaming.
Speaker: And I was like, hang on, that makes no sense to me, because I don't,
Speaker: I can't count my fingers in a dream.
Speaker: That's not how dreams work.
Speaker: Like, what are they talking about?
Speaker: So I searched for this, and because there's more content about aphantasia on the internet since 2016, when it wasn't given a word, I found stuff which I'd never previously in my life.
Speaker: So I was in my 40s, and I had no idea that I didn't imagine.
Speaker: I thought everyone had a similar mental experience to me.
Speaker: And I was suddenly like, oh shit, other people can see things in their head?
Speaker: Literally, and not just like...
Speaker: No, metaphorically, they could see the details, the lighting, the shading, the texture, they can remember all sorts of things.
Speaker: So, yeah, so I came to it via dreams.
Speaker: I think dreams are definitely a separate, they're orthogonal category, because I've met people who have visual dreams but are otherwise aphantasic.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: And I think also the other way around, like I had a really, the most fantastic experience I've had since thinking about this in the last couple of years was actually a dream.
Speaker: I had a, like a dream of a video game trailer for a video game my brain had made up.
Speaker: And it was completely visual because it kind of had to be really, it didn't really make sense.
Speaker: And yeah, it had a character that...
Speaker: you were and the way you moved and stuff.
Speaker: And it was suddenly pretty decent, not like, actually really not amazing high quality, it was like a cartoon game, but it was fairly low quality, but I was like, oh, I'm getting a bit more sense of what it's like to experience a version.
Speaker: But that's,
Speaker: I can't make that happen in the day.
Speaker: So it's definitely... Yeah, I think there's a link between the dream processing and other uses of mental imagery, but it's not rigid.
Speaker: Similarly...
Speaker: So dreams is one.
Speaker: Do you have much difference, like, yeah, how you use imagination right now, but there's also, well, there's different uses of imagination, basically.
Speaker: People can use it to imagine completely inventive things.
Speaker: They can use it to remember the past.
Speaker: Sorry, these aren't really uses of imagination, they're uses of mental imagery.
Speaker: So the one I would call imagination is fictional things, almost like creative things that don't exist.
Speaker: You can remember the past as another one.
Speaker: And I almost think kind of planning the future is a different one.
Speaker: Again, it's slightly different from imagining fictional things.
Speaker: And my sense of talking to people is different people do, of all of these, do different ones to different amounts.
Speaker: But I don't know.
Speaker: So do you find, like, what are your, what's your imagery of the present, the past and the future?
Speaker: Like, does it vary?
Speaker: And how's that compared to your dream imagery?
Speaker: Here is less visual, for sure.
Speaker: It's more in the conceptual space.
Speaker: I think with past... So which is less visual?
Speaker: The imagine planning the future.
Speaker: Thinking about the past and the future.
Speaker: So you don't imagine scenes like I've got a job interview, I will imagine I'm in the interview, I'll imagine what the person looks like, I'll imagine what they say to me, I'll practice imagining what I say back to them.
Speaker: I certainly...
Speaker: do that in a more conscious way about the future.
Speaker: Meaning it takes more effort to imagine future scenarios.
Speaker: Whereas like with memories and imaginations of the past, I'll remember like a specifically blue mug that was associated with a time in my life when I was doing A-levels or something like that.
Speaker: And it'll just pop into your head.
Speaker: Pop into my head and I was like, oh wow.
Speaker: I just never realized how perfectly shaped this mug was or something like that.
Speaker: And it certainly is evoked more strongly by other sensory modes such as a particular smell or a piece of music that I was listening to during the first time the album came out.
Speaker: And that is very strong way for me to be taken back into the past.
Speaker: And it doesn't just like replay the music or the sounds, it also replays like
Speaker: the visual stimuli.
Speaker: Another thing that I want to mention while we're at this is that I can't imagine smells.
Speaker: So I can recognize smells when they come to me, but I can't conjure them
Speaker: with the same ease, if at all, the sounds and the visual stimuli that I have in my mind's eye or like my mind's ear.
Speaker: But I know for a fact that some people, perhaps fewer, are capable of producing and conjuring the sense of smell just like on the spot.
Speaker: And that's certainly something I am deficient in.
Speaker: yeah the yeah each sense has the same it's like a whole bigger topic I mean we should do whole episodes on audio and smell and stuff I'm aware that there is a touch touch is one you can mention as well and remember it's a bit harder I think this is where I'm like maybe one on a scale of one to five
Speaker: I know for a fact that there is a musical or like a sound equivalent to Fantasia and A Fantasia terminology, which is Amusica and Musica.
Speaker: Don't quote me on this, of course, I think I could be wrong.
Speaker: But there isn't one for olfactory senses, gustatory senses, and maybe what's the word for it?
Speaker: Hapticity senses.
Speaker: My guess is they're almost dominant because our culture is much more visual.
Speaker: Like in terms of priority of senses in society that you need to be good at and people care about.
Speaker: Visual is quite higher up and audio is quite higher up.
Speaker: For most people.
Speaker: And smell and touch are lower down.
Speaker: So I think my primary sense is not visual.
Speaker: I think my primary sense is proprioceptive.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: And this is very interesting.
Speaker: Oh, just explain what that is.
Speaker: So, proprioception is just, it's sort of a sixth sense.
Speaker: I think the all Aristotelian idea of like having us five senses is a very outdated model.
Speaker: We've now since discovered this, probably more than the five traditional senses.
Speaker: Anyway, one of those extra additional senses is the sense of proprioception.
Speaker: And proprioception is knowing where your body is in space.
Speaker: And it's very distinct from touch and visual stimuli simply because... Skeletal position.
Speaker: Skeletal position, exactly.
Speaker: Knowledge, awareness.
Speaker: Because someone could be dancing and be...
Speaker: Exposed to the exact same visual and touch stimuli as another person.
Speaker: But if they lack the proprioceptive keenness, they're not able to mimic in a similar way the dance maneuvers that someone who is more...
Speaker: Yeah, I came across it in throwing pots pots in pottery and you have to put your fingers an exact distance apart to get the correct shape of pot.
Speaker: And there's nothing, the pot moves it, you can't use the force on it or you have to just know the distance apart of your fingers.
Speaker: So that's proprioception.
Speaker: And I think for me proprioception has been far more...
Speaker: important in many situations, mainly because when I'm cycling or something and I need to make quick swerves to avoid life and death scenarios, sometimes literally life and death scenarios, I owe so much more to my proprioceptive sense than to visual sense.
Speaker: So the obvious question here is can you imagine
Speaker: proprioception.
Speaker: I don't know what that means.
Speaker: Or remember, recall memories of proprioception.
Speaker: I don't know what that means, certainly.
Speaker: Because, like, what does that mean to imagine proprioception in your head?
Speaker: Because it's always very...
Speaker: inextricable from your body, right?
Speaker: Maybe I'm possibly good at imagining possible states of my body, what it's supposed to look like in a yoga move.
Speaker: So I've noticed huge variance in skill ability to copy other people's movements or actually report it.
Speaker: So if someone's doing something like, you know, throwing a javelin or doing drop spindle spinning and there's a particular hand motion needed to do that thing,
Speaker: I've watched other people just see it once and then just like boom, able to do it and I've been I can't, it just takes me ages I have to keep getting shown it, I don't remember the movement and I want to intellectually conceptually know the movement, like why is the movement like that what's the angle at, why is it that angle rather than just copying the salient parts of the movement, which is much more efficient letting the whole of my neural network process it rather than shoving it through conscious, like rational awareness which is what I tend to naturally do
Speaker: So can you, are you good at doing that?
Speaker: I would say I'm more on the hyper proprioceptive end of things, to coin a new word, simply because I do ice skating and I've noticed that I only started ice skating very recently, less than a year ago, and I've already passed
Speaker: UK level skate 8 and that's like the highest you can get and I'm now in like gold early stages.
Speaker: So you must be rapidly copying other people's movements as to how good skating is by demonstration.
Speaker: Because some of the other students in the class have been doing this for decades and they're in their 40s now, 50s, they've been doing this for literally decades and I've just caught up to them and surpassed them so easily in less than a year
Speaker: uh maybe that's because i'm younger and i'm more willing to take force but i think there's also just uh just hyper proprioceptive so possibly proprioception imagination could be because i was assuming since i found out as a fantastic that one of the reasons i'm bad at copying people's body movements like can you see if you see someone skating and then you're trying to skate
Speaker: can you in your mind's eye exactly remember how they moved so you can as you're doing it copy their movement okay so is that a thing so i don't use my visual imagination or my ability to manipulate in my mind's eye the image of someone skating i certainly use that very little for ice skating okay i think it is more just like an intuitive gut feeling like okay i know what to do with my
Speaker: hips, my shoulders, my legs whenever I hit the ice and that suggests to me further evidence that hyper proprioception is distinct from like hyperphantasia.
Speaker: Right so you're but is it to do with how your mind it might just be you're good at it in the now so
Speaker: I'm much better at processing things I can see than for some of my imagination.
Speaker: I'm perfectly able to do things that I can see right now.
Speaker: So similarly, it might be you're just good at using proprioception right now to properly respond to your body and understand the right motion.
Speaker: But that's slightly different from do you use your mental modelling of proprioception to remember what someone else is doing, copy them somehow?
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's hard to distinguish because unlike the other four senses, which are certainly richer in the information and ability to describe, I think we severely lack a vocabulary to describe proprioceptive phenomena.
Speaker: In the same way that we don't have as much olfactory terms to describe smells, whereas we have that for emotions, visual stimuli, and sounds.
Speaker: Yeah, interesting.
Speaker: I mean, I guess some of the vocabulary, something like yoga, has relevant vocabulary.
Speaker: I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I think that's probably where you see an efflorescence of the skill as well as the lexicon that is related to that skill.
Speaker: I'm not sure in which direction.
Speaker: It's probably a feedback loop, one improving on the other.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So just in this one domain, there are other domains of mental experience than sensing, but in that one domain, we're all kind of going around with slightly different takes.
Speaker: And this is all the time.
Speaker: That's what sort of strikes... I was kind of... So if you see, you know, some people are good at whatever, cycling, or some people are good at programming or something, like typically they're...
Speaker: you're like, oh, when they're doing that thing they're good at it.
Speaker: But something like whether or not you have a mental imagination, like every day, every minute of every day, that's having an impact on how you act within the world and what your experience of the world is.
Speaker: And it's just really weird that it doesn't really get mentioned.
Speaker: There are some arts communities where it gets mentioned sometimes and there's the odd reference in the literature but very, very few and far between.
Speaker: And yet,
Speaker: So I feel like our whole society has kind of just ignored this.
Speaker: And there's this language is kind of quite interesting here.
Speaker: When I first found out that everyone else could imagine, I was a bit in shock.
Speaker: I was in shock for weeks.
Speaker: I wrote this wild blog post, like just stream of consciousness about how shocked I was.
Speaker: And all of these words suddenly changed their meaning.
Speaker: Picture an animal.
Speaker: Yeah, picture this means literally picture it.
Speaker: A flashback is actually, you actually get a flash off the scene.
Speaker: Yeah, when people count sheep, they actually see the sheep, which is why it never worked for me.
Speaker: There's just a million things where the vocabulary is much more literal, and I thought it was metaphoric.
Speaker: And all sorts of stuff in film I thought was just made up by clever filmmakers.
Speaker: But actually, it's just representing what they're really experiencing.
Speaker: Probably hyper-phantastics.
Speaker: Yeah, lots of techniques of showing previous scenes and showing scenes in people's memories and showing scenes in people's dreams.
Speaker: I thought it was just creative, and it's not.
Speaker: And obviously, what's strange is that our language is so weak that that can happen.
Speaker: Like, 10% of the population can be in that situation, and no one ever notices.
Speaker: It's not a thing.
Speaker: It's only as of... I mean, it speaks to how recently this...
Speaker: awareness of the different kinds of ways of experiencing the world has only just caught on and primarily because Twitter is a platform that encourages oversharing and if we didn't start oversharing like these minutiae of experience I certainly would have gone completely oblivious for the rest of my life expecting people to like oh what do you mean you can't do this thing obviously it's so obvious
Speaker: And yeah, it makes me question like all the sorts of things that I took for granted growing up as a child and having certain capacities or techniques that were useful to me.
Speaker: Just as you mentioned, imagining sheep while counting sleep, that was actually one of my
Speaker: techniques for getting to bed because I thought, oh, sometimes I'm too tired and like my body is ready to go to sleep, but my mind isn't.
Speaker: So I thought I'll exhaust it by instead of imagining counting sheep, I instead explode my visual imagination with all sorts of like
Speaker: visual stimuli and so I'd imagine a unicorn and a rainbow and birds and trees and animals and people's faces and I just let it explode and to like exhaust my capacity to like imagine then then once it started cooling down I would say okay now my mind is sufficiently exhausted can like go into sleep mode now
Speaker: So the fact that most people didn't do that kind of like speaks to me like, well, what if I, what if this is the reason why I never suffer from insomnia and other people do?
Speaker: I think I almost do things like sleep easily partly because I don't have all of those things.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Weirdly.
Speaker: This is a, well, so daydreaming was another of these words, which I didn't understand.
Speaker: And obviously it's much more just,
Speaker: distracting to daydream if you have photorealistic imagery than if you're just thinking about stuff.
Speaker: And it's not like I can't daydream, but it's much less compelling than just looking at the physical world that I'm in.
Speaker: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So I get kind of weirdly less... I get rooted in the now.
Speaker: Lots of things that people try to get from meditation.
Speaker: I think kind of apheantasic people somewhat have because we don't have this ability to go into a fantastical world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: which is kind of weird.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Commonly known as day-driven, right?
Speaker: Yeah, like meditation.
Speaker: I have to get rid of the inner voice noise, but yeah, the kind of concentrate on a candle.
Speaker: It's not like I've got loads of other random imagery flitting in if I don't imagine a candle.
Speaker: So I don't really need to imagine a candle.
Speaker: It's like a kind of weird... Yeah, I think it is a little bit more distracting for me to have so much stuff going in my visual imagination.
Speaker: Now, having said that,
Speaker: daydreaming it just occurred to me um to bring up some of my experiences um as an ethnographer and working with bone and shamans um in my time there 12 months um yeah 11 months ago i came across uh a bubble his own and a bubble his own is um it's hard to translate that term but they're effectively shamans or seers or priestesses or spiritual people ritual specialists
Speaker: in Borneo who have extraordinary powers.
Speaker: And some of these extraordinary powers do include the regular gamut of healing and being able to pass down ancestral knowledge.
Speaker: But some of it does get into this domain of hyperphantasia, where they are capable of imagining or seeing, shall we say,
Speaker: seeing ghosts and spirits and Rogon, which are these malevolent spirits, in their visual field, almost as if they're daydreaming them into existence.
Speaker: And I experienced this when I was doing an interview with one of these Babu Hizans.
Speaker: And she, once I earned her trust enough, asked me whether I could see
Speaker: the the creature behind me and i didn't want to break the spell so i said yes i see it tell me but tell me more about what you see and so then she accepting that i was now like part of the people who won't take her as a crazy person starts expanding more on what she can literally see behind me and it's this like dark figure of a rogue on
Speaker: which she can see visually with her eyes, and she's not dreaming it.
Speaker: And she takes this as real.
Speaker: And she knows it's a spirit.
Speaker: She knows it's coming from another world, but it exists among us.
Speaker: And she has all these rules about how to interact with it.
Speaker: But this idea of...
Speaker: being able to see these creatures, she describes as a skill, such that when she was younger, she merely saw flashes of it and shaded images of shadows, perhaps, disappear when she looks at it directly.
Speaker: But now, because she's developed the ability, it stays within her vision, even when she focuses on it and isn't just like a flashing image in the peripheral of her eyesight.
Speaker: Yeah, just to sort of add some context, that's super interesting.
Speaker: And I would have interpreted that very differently, like five or ten years ago than I do now.
Speaker: Because I'm immediately, like, first of all, I'm immediately less sceptical.
Speaker: Like, if you take the Western science thing, it's just like, oh, they're seeing ghosts, this is nonsense.
Speaker: Whereas now I know I've got a friend, maybe we can interview him at some point, who as a kid was sufficiently bored.
Speaker: He started...
Speaker: using his imagination a lot, and got to the point where he could make things appear in his actual vision.
Speaker: And the word for this happens, not many people do this.
Speaker: Again, I think it's the opposite.
Speaker: I think quite a lot of people do.
Speaker: My guess is it's 5 or 10% of people.
Speaker: So similar to the number who are aphantasic.
Speaker: And the word someone called aphantasia meow on the internet, the word he's given to it, which I quite like as a word, is a profantasia.
Speaker: Pro Fantasia.
Speaker: Which is like projecting your Fantasic imagery into the real world.
Speaker: So the pro is for projection.
Speaker: And it's certainly possible to consciously control and project real objects into your actual vision rather than on the second screen that we talked about earlier.
Speaker: And he would make a dragon come out of the pavement for fun.
Speaker: and it'd be realistic and it'd be like oh this whole thing like a film apparently people make people invisible it happens like at high school and stuff and they'll be there another kid you hate and you fuzz them out and it's a bit literally like the invisible man in a film they know they're there they can see them obviously their eyes are getting photons of them but then they've made their early in their visual cortex relatively early they substitute them and it just becomes a blur of a constructed background of what's behind the person
Speaker: They just effectively block them in real life.
Speaker: Yeah, so they can basically, yeah, like literally block in real life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this is a thing, apparently.
Speaker: It's like a Black Mirror episode.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: So this is clearly a technique.
Speaker: Clearly people can learn it.
Speaker: A bit like you said, even the shaman was learning the technique.
Speaker: And we're very dismissive of this and use words like hallucination, and it's things like schizophrenic scare, like the idea of people seeing things they shouldn't see.
Speaker: But if it's done deliberately, if you know you're doing it... And you're controlling it.
Speaker: And you're not just... It's not like a part of your brain you've got no control of that's madly giving you imagery in the real world, which is obviously very disconcerting.
Speaker: But the shaman knows that this isn't an actual...
Speaker: if it's a spirit not a physical she's not getting confused about reality she knows you can't see it but she knows she can see it yeah so it's an interesting like in between so now i would be like oh interesting she could just be subconsciously profantasically constructing this character as a metaphor to something so i at least believe
Speaker: that there's value in it now there could be more beyond that but that's like a so do you yeah how do you do you ever do this and how do you feel about it do you did you get to see anything like when you were doing it in this context it was much more like in an environment where it was assumed that you might see things did you
Speaker: And do people share what they see?
Speaker: How does that work?
Speaker: I'm certain that they share what they see, but only the gifted seers actually see anything.
Speaker: I certainly don't engage in Pro Fantasia as far as I'm aware.
Speaker: I don't remember any cases where I actively conjure images of things in the world.
Speaker: Although...
Speaker: I probably have.
Speaker: I probably have.
Speaker: When I was a child, much more.
Speaker: But we'll get into that in a little bit.
Speaker: Before that, I want to mention Tanya Lerman's work.
Speaker: So Tanya Lerman is an anthropologist, and she wrote a very interesting book with a very interesting title of How the Gods Became Real, or How God Becomes Real, Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, to be more exact.
Speaker: And in it, she does anthropological work in three regions of the world.
Speaker: One in Accra, somewhere in Africa.
Speaker: Another one in India.
Speaker: I can't remember which city now.
Speaker: I think it was Mumbai.
Speaker: And another region was in America.
Speaker: Again, I can't remember exactly where it was.
Speaker: But these three different societies have different relationships or expectations of pro-phantasic entities.
Speaker: such that when you speak about God or like divine beings or spiritual beings in these different cultures,
Speaker: there are different attitudes people take towards them, such as, you know, for example, in India and Accra, for example, it's obvious that these spirits or these beings exist and we can see them and we make them real and we collectively agree that I'm seeing something that is real, even though some of you might not be able to see it.
Speaker: We accept its reality, albeit its visibility differs from person to person.
Speaker: Whereas speaking about the Holy Spirit in a Euro-American context always has to be prefaced or caveated with
Speaker: I know this is going to sound crazy.
Speaker: I'm not schizophrenic, but I felt the Spirit of the Lord or something like that.
Speaker: And they... Yeah, I mean, in Western Protestantism, I think, yeah, some Catholic stuff is maybe different.
Speaker: And in Africa, it's very different Christianity.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's not the religion.
Speaker: It's more probably the Enlightenment or... The Enlightenment.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Attitude to the natural, supernatural.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What is real and what is not real.
Speaker: And this really goes into, like, how...
Speaker: Ontologies are fundamentally different in different cultures.
Speaker: So, for example, in Accra, it's just taken for granted that if you envy someone or you say a bad word, this bad word has the magical property of inflicting harm onto someone.
Speaker: So they take speaking curses a little bit more seriously.
Speaker: Whereas, of course, in our American context, you curse someone, it's like, whatever.
Speaker: It's not going to affect someone.
Speaker: It's a bit like expecting prayer healing, healing prayers to be efficacious.
Speaker: Whereas that's not the case.
Speaker: But prayer healing is believed to work in the same way that curses carry magical energy in them that can have causal effects in the world.
Speaker: non-Western societies right so that's getting on to the bigger topic of other cultural things that make our experience of the world different fundamentally yeah what's a good entry point into that topic yeah I don't really know yeah
Speaker: Because I suppose my question for that, like, obviously different people have different beliefs.
Speaker: I don't want to go into this in massive detail in this episode, but obviously people have different knowledge about the world and mental models of what's happening and beliefs about what's going on.
Speaker: And the example you gave is super tangible of people are profantasically, and maybe that's real in some meaningful way, seeing beings.
Speaker: But that's quite tangible.
Speaker: There's a difference that the shame she was actually seeing the being.
Speaker: She was.
Speaker: And there's some specific concrete meaning to that.
Speaker: But it must be more amorphous usually.
Speaker: It's just like a difference in attitude or a difference in...
Speaker: I mean, the fact that one can see things in the world speaks to different attitudes to what is real and what is not.
Speaker: And if your reality happens to disagree with the dominant interpretation of what should be real...
Speaker: then you've effectively bought into the wrong ontology and that kind of sets you up to be labelled as schizophrenic.
Speaker: So to socially succeed, which we all do as social primates, you would sort of ignore the bits of your reality that you really saw or experienced and adjust them to the sort of status quo of your society.
Speaker: So in my case, like, yeah, because this links to the language thing again, that...
Speaker: I made up since I was a child that all of these words were metaphors for vision and it didn't matter I mean socially I was largely fine there are certain things I'm unable to do that I could or were less good at but
Speaker: Because late 20th century Britain heavily rewards conceptual thinking, I didn't need to have a strong imagination.
Speaker: It wasn't necessary.
Speaker: So I was a linguistically, there's this thing where we have a shared, our shared layer is basically linguistic, really.
Speaker: It's not, but the obvious shared layer is linguistic.
Speaker: And as long as that's functioning, you can get along socially.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As long as you remember that imagination is the opposite of reality.
Speaker: Oh, how do you mean?
Speaker: Oh, so I think this is another thing where language forces us to adopt the reality of common consensus or the
Speaker: reality of like the status quo or status quo reality which is that if something is imagined then that can't be part of real reality whereas if you take as a different set of presubmestations to be true which is that yes you can have imagined reality as well as unimagined reality and they're both equally reality just reality at different like ontological levels and
Speaker: then you don't immediately take as a foregone conclusion that imagination can be discarded because it's just trivial or unreal.
Speaker: Oh, I see.
Speaker: So Western culture doesn't take that seriously enough because if it had, I would have noticed, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Like the fact that you couldn't be amfantazic in a society that cared more about imagination or took it more seriously.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's almost seen as like a little bonus extra visualization that you don't really necessarily need.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's almost how it's treated in the West.
Speaker: Whereas if you don't have this strong...
Speaker: imagination versus reality dichotomy.
Speaker: You don't try to like box every bit of your mental experience into imagination, therefore trivial and mental phenomena that is like real and painful and therefore psychiatric as real and therefore taken taken seriously by mental health professionals.
Speaker: This kind of dichotomizing into real and imagination also has the effect of treating things in the real categories as serious and the things that fall into the imagination box as like not serious.
Speaker: And therefore we don't have to pay attention to the minor details and distinctions between them.
Speaker: Whereas if cultures kind of like don't dichotomize these things and just treat us all as like one reality and one world, there is a tendency to avoid trivializing the imagined stuff.
Speaker: And you tend to take more seriously all these spirits and emotions and envy and evil eyes and what have you.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, we should definitely come back to the body part of that as well, because you mentioned emotion and yeah, interesting.
Speaker: Where is emotion?
Speaker: Which definitely relates to that.
Speaker: But that's definitely for another episode.
Speaker: There are a lot of topics.
Speaker: This is so under-talked about.
Speaker: There's definitely hours of conversation and interviews needed.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So how should we wrap this up?
Speaker: How shall we wrap this up?
Speaker: Well, what have we talked about so far?
Speaker: Just to, like, summarise this.
Speaker: I thought that was a good way to... Different people imagine apples differently.
Speaker: That's for sure.
Speaker: And the only way we can find out about this is if we have Twitter and, like, some...
Speaker: A medium that allows us to talk about it and speak about it, or in this case, write about it, and then discover that, oh, people don't actually mean this metaphorically.
Speaker: They actually literally mean picture an apple.
Speaker: And... Yeah, and that applies to every other sense?
Speaker: Yeah, proprioception is...
Speaker: kind of like my go-to.
Speaker: Well, even proprioception.
Speaker: Yeah, even proprioception.
Speaker: Audio, smell, touch, proprioception.
Speaker: And how that translates.
Speaker: All of them can probably be imagined badly or worse in different ways.
Speaker: And this also translates into how we experience our dreams.
Speaker: Dreams sometimes...
Speaker: most people for some people don't dreams and the past and the present and the future and you can use imagination in different ways in all of those uh quite it's quite a rich vein of variety it's as varied as yeah yeah any other human activity or art form or something it's like hugely varied and then there's the pro fantasia where you project your mental imagery onto the real world sometimes in a second screen kind of way but sometimes in
Speaker: the actual visuals.
Speaker: Well, yeah, the profantesus word is you reserve it into the actual world.
Speaker: Oh, yes, okay.
Speaker: But yeah, there's a continuum, I think, to some extent.
Speaker: It could get more and more vivid and more and more spatially present related to them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And then, yeah, and that's definitely the highest end of skill.
Speaker: Yeah, there are people who don't imagine at all and there are people who commonly project things into the physical world.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll get into tooling as well at some point.
Speaker: Like you can use all of these impractical ways.
Speaker: And then we talked about other elements.
Speaker: So coming to other elements of the difference of being from a different human culture and what culture sets you in a certain way of your mental experience and makes you aware of it in a certain way.
Speaker: And because we're talking about visual imagination a lot,
Speaker: You gave a really cool example of a shaman in Borneo profantasically seeing a being.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And, yeah, if you don't believe in other beings, then you can believe that her mind constructed the being and it has a rich meaning that that's where it came from.
Speaker: But maybe there's more than that.
Speaker: And it's very hard to... Yeah, if you don't take seriously the experience, you're not really... You're just sort of...
Speaker: You're dismissing part of reality because the experience of her seeing the being is part of reality.
Speaker: And then you said more stuff about
Speaker: I think we concluded on imagination and reality and how different cultures draw that line separately or maybe don't even have a boundary between the imagined reality and the real reality medicalisation of schizophrenia or yeah sort of somewhat dismissing of people constructing things or having a reality separate from the sense of reality saying it's constructed like we're choosing to say that certain things are constructed um
Speaker: And that's definitely, yeah, it's definitely a mindset that's worked and done certain things, but it also misses a lot of other things.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: Thank you, Vin.
Speaker: That was fantastic.
Speaker: Thank you very much, Francis.
Speaker: This is fabulous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, do what I meant to say.
Speaker: Like, do like and subscribe and write in the comments.
Speaker: I mean, what I'm really interested in is people, like, just give things that this occurs to you that are interesting.
Speaker: Like, tell us, get in touch with us, write in comments how you experience the world and how this has made you think about how you experience the world.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: if we've made you realize maybe that's something you experienced differently from others that has an impact on your life.
Speaker: Like stories of that are just super interesting and help us all understand what's happening.
Speaker: So yeah, I'd love to hear about that.
Speaker: So would I. Great.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Have a lovely rest of your day.
