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Introduction to "Imagine an apple"
282 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to "Imagine an apple"! A podcast about our different inner mental worlds.
In this introductory episode, Vynn Suren and Francis Irving discuss differences in how they do (or don't) imagine, and how they got interested in this topic.
What are the differences between what it is like inside our minds? From imagining an apple, to imagining in a dream - even imagined smell and proprioception.
How do these vary between individuals, and how do they vary between human cultures?
Timestamps:
00:20 Why Vynn and Francis are interested in inner experience
02:42 The "Imagine an apple" test
08:33 Dream imagery
12:17 Imagery of the past and the future
14:26 Smell and other senses
16:00 Proprioception
22:27 Variety between individuals
27:35 Bornean shamans and prophantasia
37:57 Socialisation of inner realities
42:10 Summary
Show Links:
- "Think of an Apple in Your Head" Meme
- Lucid Dreaming “Hands” Reality Check
- Bobohizan
- How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others - T. M. Luhrmann
Contact Details:
Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences!
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Email: imagine@flourish.org
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Imagine an Apple'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple, a podcast about our inner mental worlds.
00:00:05
Speaker
My name's Francis.
00:00:06
Speaker
And I'm Vin.
00:00:07
Speaker
Great to be here.
Vin's Cultural Background and Mental Experiences
00:00:19
Speaker
Yeah, tell me a bit about how you're interested in mental experience.
00:00:22
Speaker
Like, where are you coming from, Vin?
00:00:24
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.
00:00:30
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.
00:00:53
Speaker
And that's something that seems to have a lot more cultural variance than most people give it credit for.
00:01:00
Speaker
Apart from that, I'm also a colonial scientist as well as an avid historian of emotions.
00:01:06
Speaker
I'm very interested in those kinds of perspectives on how our thoughts or mental lives are manifested.
00:01:17
Speaker
And this is kind of why I'm talking about mental experiences today.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's super fascinating.
Western vs. Non-Western Mindsets in Mental Imagery
00:01:22
Speaker
It's a completely different angle because my background is very much like Western scientific mindset background.
00:01:27
Speaker
And...
00:01:29
Speaker
I've much more just become aware that we never talk about our inner experience.
00:01:33
Speaker
People just assume everyone else has the same experience of them by default.
00:01:37
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.
00:01:46
Speaker
There is hugely between people.
00:01:50
Speaker
And I think...
00:01:52
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.
00:02:04
Speaker
And one of the, that we're very disconnected from our body is talked about a lot.
00:02:08
Speaker
I think we're also disconnected from really what's happening in our minds actually as well, quite a lot.
00:02:13
Speaker
Because the mind and the body are connected.
00:02:15
Speaker
Well, they're connected, exactly.
00:02:17
Speaker
And yeah, those experiences are linked to us as whole beings as
Impact of Social Media on Awareness of Mental Imagery
00:02:22
Speaker
well.
00:02:22
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.
00:02:34
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.
00:02:41
Speaker
And one of the things that I certainly took for granted was the fact that I am phantasic.
00:02:46
Speaker
The fact that I even have a word for that has come about from Twitter discourse.
00:02:51
Speaker
And what really blew up was this discourse over the Apple.
00:02:57
Speaker
I'm not sure if you've seen that.
Exploring Visualization: 'Imagine an Apple' Exercise
00:02:59
Speaker
Some people being able to imagine a five or a one on the
00:03:03
Speaker
Imagine an apple scale.
00:03:05
Speaker
And I was thinking to myself, well, surely everyone can do a five.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's so easy.
00:03:09
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.
00:03:20
Speaker
The apple's a super calming starting point.
00:03:22
Speaker
So yeah, it's good to mention it.
00:03:24
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...
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, imagine an apple.
00:03:32
Speaker
So do this yourself.
00:03:33
Speaker
Imagine an apple in your head.
00:03:36
Speaker
And then I guess, yeah, there's good ways of asking this question.
00:03:41
Speaker
It's a whole skill, but like ask what's the apple look like?
00:03:44
Speaker
And ask, you know, what do you know?
00:03:46
Speaker
What color it is?
00:03:47
Speaker
Do you?
00:03:48
Speaker
What's the lighting like on it?
00:03:50
Speaker
What is there behind it?
00:03:51
Speaker
Is it on a table?
00:03:52
Speaker
Is it in a room?
00:03:53
Speaker
Does it move?
00:03:54
Speaker
Is it 2D or 3D?
00:03:57
Speaker
Do you even see anything at all?
00:03:59
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?
00:04:02
Speaker
That kind of thing.
00:04:03
Speaker
Can you rotate it?
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:05
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.
00:04:13
Speaker
And some are quite odd as well.
00:04:14
Speaker
I've had from people I've asked that.
00:04:16
Speaker
So, yeah, so, yeah, what do you, just
Variations in Mental Imagery Capabilities
00:04:19
Speaker
describe your apple.
00:04:19
Speaker
Think of your simplest apple that comes to your mind.
00:04:22
Speaker
Oh, wow, the simplest apple.
00:04:22
Speaker
Straightforward apple.
00:04:23
Speaker
There it has a sharp line.
00:04:26
Speaker
It's red.
00:04:26
Speaker
It has a glimmer to it.
00:04:28
Speaker
I can make it shine if I want.
00:04:29
Speaker
I can take off the shine.
00:04:30
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.
00:04:37
Speaker
Where is it?
00:04:38
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.
00:04:47
Speaker
That's just like an artistic choice.
00:04:49
Speaker
I don't think any realistic apple has that.
00:04:52
Speaker
And I can imagine it in my hand and holding it and rotate it.
00:04:57
Speaker
So your default is you're holding it.
00:04:59
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.
00:05:09
Speaker
I can imagine it sitting on a table, for example, or in my hand.
00:05:16
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.
00:05:26
Speaker
And I think some people that I've spoken to
00:05:28
Speaker
certainly can imagine apples as opaque as any real object in their visual field.
00:05:35
Speaker
And that's something that... How do you mean they're not opaque?
00:05:39
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...
00:05:50
Speaker
What's the word?
00:05:51
Speaker
Overlapping the visual stimuli that I'm receiving with my eyes.
00:05:55
Speaker
Oh, you're seeing it as if you were seeing it with your eyes.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:59
Speaker
Right, okay, so that's already quite unusual.
00:06:02
Speaker
Really?
00:06:02
Speaker
The one you were talking about, you were seeing like that?
00:06:06
Speaker
The one in my hands, I'm kind of like imagining it, but it's not there.
00:06:12
Speaker
It's not opaque.
00:06:13
Speaker
Right, but you can make it opaque if you choose to.
00:06:15
Speaker
No, I couldn't make it opaque.
00:06:17
Speaker
At most, it will be transparent and...
00:06:20
Speaker
and I can see through it.
00:06:21
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.
Understanding Aphantasia and Hypophantasia
00:06:42
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.
00:06:48
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%.
00:06:59
Speaker
And I'm technically hypophantasic, which is like weakly phantasic.
00:07:06
Speaker
So, I don't really, I would have said I didn't see an apple at all.
00:07:10
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.
00:07:20
Speaker
What I think now I sort of get slightly later in the processing of the notion of experiencing an apple.
00:07:27
Speaker
It's quite hard to describe this.
00:07:28
Speaker
I think this is probably what's happening to everyone, but it's just like more removed in me.
00:07:32
Speaker
So I certainly don't get the lighting or the shading.
00:07:35
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.
00:07:43
Speaker
And it's just there, fairly large in the middle of it.
00:07:48
Speaker
Very weakly there.
00:07:49
Speaker
And even the fact of seeing anything at all is very weak.
00:07:52
Speaker
And it's more like...
00:07:55
Speaker
I can't remember the precise shape, but I can remember what it feels like to see the shape of an apple.
00:08:01
Speaker
And if that makes any sense to you.
00:08:02
Speaker
No, that makes sense.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:04
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.
00:08:12
Speaker
So it's just more energy to get a detailed apple.
00:08:15
Speaker
But it's probably still low effort for me to do.
00:08:19
Speaker
And presumably also there are objects you don't know well and you can't see the detail.
00:08:24
Speaker
You can still vaguely remember what it was like seeing them or something.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:08:28
Speaker
I think that definitely helps if you're familiar with it.
00:08:31
Speaker
And this is obviously very different.
00:08:34
Speaker
So you must be seeing objects all the time, right?
00:08:39
Speaker
Less so these days than before.
00:08:41
Speaker
I think these days I've developed a capacity for imagining text, but still in this visual format where I sometimes dream in...
00:08:52
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
00:09:11
Speaker
visually rich mode, whereas most of my dreams are that.
Dreams and Mental Imagery
00:09:18
Speaker
There's a visual component and often an audio component.
00:09:22
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.
00:09:31
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
00:09:54
Speaker
It'll be... it'll depend.
00:09:56
Speaker
Sometimes it doesn't have to be a narrative.
00:09:57
Speaker
Sometimes it's more like, oh, I need to write this essay.
00:10:00
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.
00:10:09
Speaker
So, yeah, so dreams was how I realised I made Phantasic.
00:10:13
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.
00:10:26
Speaker
Well, there's something like that.
00:10:28
Speaker
It's quite common, apparently.
00:10:30
Speaker
And that's a way of helping you realise you're dreaming, and therefore leads to lucid dreaming.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I was like, hang on, that makes no sense to me, because I don't,
00:10:37
Speaker
I can't count my fingers in a dream.
00:10:38
Speaker
That's not how dreams work.
00:10:40
Speaker
Like, what are they talking about?
00:10:41
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.
00:10:52
Speaker
So I was in my 40s, and I had no idea that I didn't imagine.
00:10:56
Speaker
I thought everyone had a similar mental experience to me.
00:10:59
Speaker
And I was suddenly like, oh shit, other people can see things in their head?
00:11:04
Speaker
Literally, and not just like...
00:11:06
Speaker
No, metaphorically, they could see the details, the lighting, the shading, the texture, they can remember all sorts of things.
00:11:13
Speaker
So, yeah, so I came to it via dreams.
00:11:15
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.
00:11:23
Speaker
That's interesting.
00:11:24
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.
00:11:33
Speaker
I had a, like a dream of a video game trailer for a video game my brain had made up.
00:11:38
Speaker
And it was completely visual because it kind of had to be really, it didn't really make sense.
00:11:43
Speaker
And yeah, it had a character that...
00:11:46
Speaker
you were and the way you moved and stuff.
00:11:48
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.
00:12:01
Speaker
But that's,
00:12:02
Speaker
I can't make that happen in the day.
Uses and Variations of Mental Imagery
00:12:06
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.
00:12:17
Speaker
Similarly...
00:12:19
Speaker
So dreams is one.
00:12:21
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.
00:12:29
Speaker
People can use it to imagine completely inventive things.
00:12:32
Speaker
They can use it to remember the past.
00:12:35
Speaker
Sorry, these aren't really uses of imagination, they're uses of mental imagery.
00:12:38
Speaker
So the one I would call imagination is fictional things, almost like creative things that don't exist.
00:12:45
Speaker
You can remember the past as another one.
00:12:47
Speaker
And I almost think kind of planning the future is a different one.
00:12:51
Speaker
Again, it's slightly different from imagining fictional things.
00:12:54
Speaker
And my sense of talking to people is different people do, of all of these, do different ones to different amounts.
00:13:00
Speaker
But I don't know.
00:13:01
Speaker
So do you find, like, what are your, what's your imagery of the present, the past and the future?
00:13:05
Speaker
Like, does it vary?
00:13:06
Speaker
And how's that compared to your dream imagery?
00:13:10
Speaker
Here is less visual, for sure.
00:13:11
Speaker
It's more in the conceptual space.
00:13:13
Speaker
I think with past... So which is less visual?
00:13:15
Speaker
The imagine planning the future.
00:13:17
Speaker
Thinking about the past and the future.
00:13:19
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.
00:13:31
Speaker
I certainly...
00:13:33
Speaker
do that in a more conscious way about the future.
00:13:38
Speaker
Meaning it takes more effort to imagine future scenarios.
00:13:42
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.
00:13:52
Speaker
And it'll just pop into your head.
00:13:53
Speaker
Pop into my head and I was like, oh wow.
00:13:55
Speaker
I just never realized how perfectly shaped this mug was or something like that.
00:14:00
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.
00:14:13
Speaker
And that is very strong way for me to be taken back into the past.
00:14:18
Speaker
And it doesn't just like replay the music or the sounds, it also replays like
00:14:24
Speaker
the visual stimuli.
00:14:25
Speaker
Another thing that I want to mention while we're at this is that I can't imagine smells.
00:14:30
Speaker
So I can recognize smells when they come to me, but I can't conjure them
00:14:35
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.
00:14:44
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.
00:14:55
Speaker
And that's certainly something I am deficient in.
00:15:01
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
00:15:21
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.
Sensory Imagination Beyond Visual and Auditory
00:15:32
Speaker
Don't quote me on this, of course, I think I could be wrong.
00:15:35
Speaker
But there isn't one for olfactory senses, gustatory senses, and maybe what's the word for it?
00:15:41
Speaker
Hapticity senses.
00:15:43
Speaker
My guess is they're almost dominant because our culture is much more visual.
00:15:46
Speaker
Like in terms of priority of senses in society that you need to be good at and people care about.
00:15:53
Speaker
Visual is quite higher up and audio is quite higher up.
00:15:56
Speaker
For most people.
00:15:56
Speaker
And smell and touch are lower down.
00:15:59
Speaker
So I think my primary sense is not visual.
00:16:02
Speaker
I think my primary sense is proprioceptive.
Proprioception as a Primary Sensory Experience
00:16:05
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:16:05
Speaker
And this is very interesting.
00:16:07
Speaker
Oh, just explain what that is.
00:16:09
Speaker
So, proprioception is just, it's sort of a sixth sense.
00:16:12
Speaker
I think the all Aristotelian idea of like having us five senses is a very outdated model.
00:16:18
Speaker
We've now since discovered this, probably more than the five traditional senses.
00:16:22
Speaker
Anyway, one of those extra additional senses is the sense of proprioception.
00:16:28
Speaker
And proprioception is knowing where your body is in space.
00:16:33
Speaker
And it's very distinct from touch and visual stimuli simply because... Skeletal position.
00:16:40
Speaker
Skeletal position, exactly.
00:16:41
Speaker
Knowledge, awareness.
00:16:42
Speaker
Because someone could be dancing and be...
00:16:48
Speaker
Exposed to the exact same visual and touch stimuli as another person.
00:16:53
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...
00:17:03
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.
00:17:12
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.
00:17:20
Speaker
So that's proprioception.
00:17:23
Speaker
And I think for me proprioception has been far more...
00:17:29
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.
00:17:47
Speaker
So the obvious question here is can you imagine
00:17:51
Speaker
proprioception.
00:17:52
Speaker
I don't know what that means.
00:17:53
Speaker
Or remember, recall memories of proprioception.
00:17:55
Speaker
I don't know what that means, certainly.
00:17:56
Speaker
Because, like, what does that mean to imagine proprioception in your head?
00:18:01
Speaker
Because it's always very...
00:18:04
Speaker
inextricable from your body, right?
00:18:07
Speaker
Maybe I'm possibly good at imagining possible states of my body, what it's supposed to look like in a yoga move.
00:18:15
Speaker
So I've noticed huge variance in skill ability to copy other people's movements or actually report it.
00:18:22
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,
00:18:35
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
00:19:04
Speaker
So can you, are you good at doing that?
00:19:06
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
00:19:23
Speaker
UK level skate 8 and that's like the highest you can get and I'm now in like gold early stages.
00:19:31
Speaker
So you must be rapidly copying other people's movements as to how good skating is by demonstration.
00:19:37
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
00:19:51
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
00:20:12
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
00:20:38
Speaker
hips, my shoulders,
Proprioceptive vs. Visual Imagination
00:20:39
Speaker
my legs whenever I hit the ice and that suggests to me further evidence that hyper proprioception is distinct from like hyperphantasia.
00:20:54
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
00:21:03
Speaker
I'm much better at processing things I can see than for some of my imagination.
00:21:07
Speaker
I'm perfectly able to do things that I can see right now.
00:21:10
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.
00:21:21
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?
00:21:30
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.
00:21:47
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.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, interesting.
00:22:03
Speaker
I mean, I guess some of the vocabulary, something like yoga, has relevant vocabulary.
00:22:08
Speaker
I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:22:10
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.
00:22:18
Speaker
I'm not sure in which direction.
00:22:20
Speaker
It's probably a feedback loop, one improving on the other.
00:22:24
Speaker
So, yeah.
Mental Imagination's Impact on Daily Life
00:22:28
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.
00:22:40
Speaker
And this is all the time.
00:22:42
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...
00:22:54
Speaker
you're like, oh, when they're doing that thing they're good at it.
00:22:58
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.
00:23:10
Speaker
And it's just really weird that it doesn't really get mentioned.
00:23:13
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.
00:23:20
Speaker
And yet,
00:23:22
Speaker
So I feel like our whole society has kind of just ignored this.
00:23:29
Speaker
And there's this language is kind of quite interesting here.
00:23:35
Speaker
When I first found out that everyone else could imagine, I was a bit in shock.
00:23:38
Speaker
I was in shock for weeks.
00:23:39
Speaker
I wrote this wild blog post, like just stream of consciousness about how shocked I was.
00:23:44
Speaker
And all of these words suddenly changed their meaning.
00:23:47
Speaker
Picture an animal.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, picture this means literally picture it.
00:23:52
Speaker
A flashback is actually, you actually get a flash off the scene.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, when people count sheep, they actually see the sheep, which is why it never worked for me.
00:24:06
Speaker
There's just a million things where the vocabulary is much more literal, and I thought it was metaphoric.
00:24:13
Speaker
And all sorts of stuff in film I thought was just made up by clever filmmakers.
00:24:18
Speaker
But actually, it's just representing what they're really experiencing.
00:24:21
Speaker
Probably hyper-phantastics.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, lots of techniques of showing previous scenes and showing scenes in people's memories and showing scenes in people's dreams.
00:24:30
Speaker
I thought it was just creative, and it's not.
00:24:31
Speaker
And obviously, what's strange is that our language is so weak that that can happen.
00:24:37
Speaker
Like, 10% of the population can be in that situation, and no one ever notices.
00:24:42
Speaker
It's not a thing.
00:24:43
Speaker
It's only as of... I mean, it speaks to how recently this...
00:24:48
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
00:25:14
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
Mental Imagery and Sleep
00:25:24
Speaker
me.
00:25:24
Speaker
Just as you mentioned, imagining sheep while counting sleep, that was actually one of my
00:25:30
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.
00:25:40
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
00:25:53
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
00:26:17
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?
00:26:26
Speaker
I think I almost do things like sleep easily partly because I don't have all of those things.
00:26:31
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:26:32
Speaker
Weirdly.
00:26:33
Speaker
This is a, well, so daydreaming was another of these words, which I didn't understand.
00:26:39
Speaker
And obviously it's much more just,
00:26:41
Speaker
distracting to daydream if you have photorealistic imagery than if you're just thinking about stuff.
00:26:46
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.
00:26:53
Speaker
Oh yeah, yeah.
00:26:54
Speaker
So I get kind of weirdly less... I get rooted in the now.
00:26:57
Speaker
Lots of things that people try to get from meditation.
00:27:00
Speaker
I think kind of apheantasic people somewhat have because we don't have this ability to go into a fantastical world.
00:27:06
Speaker
Right.
00:27:08
Speaker
which is kind of weird.
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:12
Speaker
Commonly known as day-driven, right?
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, like meditation.
00:27:14
Speaker
I have to get rid of the inner voice noise, but yeah, the kind of concentrate on a candle.
00:27:21
Speaker
It's not like I've got loads of other random imagery flitting in if I don't imagine a candle.
00:27:25
Speaker
So I don't really need to imagine a candle.
00:27:27
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.
Cultural Perceptions of Spiritual Experiences
00:27:35
Speaker
Now, having said that,
00:27:36
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
00:28:03
Speaker
in Borneo who have extraordinary powers.
00:28:07
Speaker
And some of these extraordinary powers do include the regular gamut of healing and being able to pass down ancestral knowledge.
00:28:18
Speaker
But some of it does get into this domain of hyperphantasia, where they are capable of imagining or seeing, shall we say,
00:28:31
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.
00:28:44
Speaker
And I experienced this when I was doing an interview with one of these Babu Hizans.
00:28:51
Speaker
And she, once I earned her trust enough, asked me whether I could see
00:28:59
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
00:29:27
Speaker
which she can see visually with her eyes, and she's not dreaming it.
00:29:32
Speaker
And she takes this as real.
00:29:34
Speaker
And she knows it's a spirit.
00:29:36
Speaker
She knows it's coming from another world, but it exists among us.
00:29:40
Speaker
And she has all these rules about how to interact with it.
00:29:44
Speaker
But this idea of...
00:29:47
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.
00:30:04
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.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, just to sort of add some context, that's super interesting.
00:30:24
Speaker
And I would have interpreted that very differently, like five or ten years ago than I do now.
00:30:28
Speaker
Because I'm immediately, like, first of all, I'm immediately less sceptical.
00:30:32
Speaker
Like, if you take the Western science thing, it's just like, oh, they're seeing ghosts, this is nonsense.
00:30:38
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.
00:30:44
Speaker
He started...
00:30:46
Speaker
using his imagination a lot, and got to the point where he could make things appear in his actual vision.
00:30:51
Speaker
And the word for this happens, not many people do this.
00:30:54
Speaker
Again, I think it's the opposite.
00:30:55
Speaker
I think quite a lot of people do.
00:30:57
Speaker
My guess is it's 5 or 10% of people.
00:30:59
Speaker
So similar to the number who are aphantasic.
00:31:01
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.
00:31:08
Speaker
Pro Fantasia.
00:31:10
Speaker
Which is like projecting your Fantasic imagery into the real world.
00:31:13
Speaker
So the pro is for projection.
00:31:15
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.
00:31:26
Speaker
And he would make a dragon come out of the pavement for fun.
00:31:31
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
00:31:59
Speaker
They just effectively block them in real life.
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah, so they can basically, yeah, like literally block in real life.
00:32:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:05
Speaker
And this is a thing, apparently.
00:32:07
Speaker
It's like a Black Mirror episode.
00:32:09
Speaker
Oh, OK.
00:32:10
Speaker
So this is clearly a technique.
00:32:12
Speaker
Clearly people can learn it.
00:32:13
Speaker
A bit like you said, even the shaman was learning the technique.
00:32:17
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.
00:32:24
Speaker
But if it's done deliberately, if you know you're doing it... And you're controlling it.
00:32:29
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.
00:32:37
Speaker
But the shaman knows that this isn't an actual...
00:32:40
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
00:32:59
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
00:33:18
Speaker
And do people share what they see?
00:33:20
Speaker
How does that work?
00:33:21
Speaker
I'm certain that they share what they see, but only the gifted seers actually see anything.
00:33:28
Speaker
I certainly don't engage in Pro Fantasia as far as I'm aware.
00:33:32
Speaker
I don't remember any cases where I actively conjure images of things in the world.
00:33:38
Speaker
Although...
00:33:41
Speaker
I probably have.
00:33:42
Speaker
I probably have.
00:33:42
Speaker
When I was a child, much more.
00:33:44
Speaker
But we'll get into that in a little bit.
Cultural Ontology and Mental Models
00:33:47
Speaker
Before that, I want to mention Tanya Lerman's work.
00:33:50
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.
00:34:05
Speaker
And in it, she does anthropological work in three regions of the world.
00:34:12
Speaker
One in Accra, somewhere in Africa.
00:34:15
Speaker
Another one in India.
00:34:18
Speaker
I can't remember which city now.
00:34:19
Speaker
I think it was Mumbai.
00:34:20
Speaker
And another region was in America.
00:34:26
Speaker
Again, I can't remember exactly where it was.
00:34:28
Speaker
But these three different societies have different relationships or expectations of pro-phantasic entities.
00:34:40
Speaker
such that when you speak about God or like divine beings or spiritual beings in these different cultures,
00:34:48
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.
00:35:08
Speaker
We accept its reality, albeit its visibility differs from person to person.
00:35:15
Speaker
Whereas speaking about the Holy Spirit in a Euro-American context always has to be prefaced or caveated with
00:35:25
Speaker
I know this is going to sound crazy.
00:35:27
Speaker
I'm not schizophrenic, but I felt the Spirit of the Lord or something like that.
00:35:33
Speaker
And they... Yeah, I mean, in Western Protestantism, I think, yeah, some Catholic stuff is maybe different.
00:35:39
Speaker
And in Africa, it's very different Christianity.
00:35:42
Speaker
So, yeah, it's not the religion.
00:35:43
Speaker
It's more probably the Enlightenment or... The Enlightenment.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:47
Speaker
Attitude to the natural, supernatural.
00:35:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:50
Speaker
What is real and what is not real.
00:35:51
Speaker
And this really goes into, like, how...
00:35:53
Speaker
Ontologies are fundamentally different in different cultures.
00:36:00
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.
00:36:12
Speaker
So they take speaking curses a little bit more seriously.
00:36:16
Speaker
Whereas, of course, in our American context, you curse someone, it's like, whatever.
00:36:22
Speaker
It's not going to affect someone.
00:36:24
Speaker
It's a bit like expecting prayer healing, healing prayers to be efficacious.
00:36:33
Speaker
Whereas that's not the case.
00:36:36
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.
00:36:46
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
00:37:10
Speaker
Because I suppose my question for that, like, obviously different people have different beliefs.
00:37:13
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.
00:37:27
Speaker
And the example you gave is super tangible of people are profantasically, and maybe that's real in some meaningful way, seeing beings.
00:37:38
Speaker
But that's quite tangible.
00:37:40
Speaker
There's a difference that the shame she was actually seeing the being.
00:37:43
Speaker
She was.
00:37:45
Speaker
And there's some specific concrete meaning to that.
00:37:47
Speaker
But it must be more amorphous usually.
00:37:51
Speaker
It's just like a difference in attitude or a difference in...
00:37:55
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.
00:38:04
Speaker
And if your reality happens to disagree with the dominant interpretation of what should be real...
00:38:11
Speaker
then you've effectively bought into the wrong ontology and that kind of sets you up to be labelled as schizophrenic.
00:38:18
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.
00:38:32
Speaker
So in my case, like, yeah, because this links to the language thing again, that...
00:38:39
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
00:38:52
Speaker
Because late 20th century Britain heavily rewards conceptual thinking, I didn't need to have a strong imagination.
00:39:01
Speaker
It wasn't necessary.
00:39:03
Speaker
So I was a linguistically, there's this thing where we have a shared, our shared layer is basically linguistic, really.
00:39:09
Speaker
It's not, but the obvious shared layer is linguistic.
00:39:13
Speaker
And as long as that's functioning, you can get along socially.
00:39:17
Speaker
Yes.
00:39:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:19
Speaker
As long as you remember that imagination is the opposite of reality.
00:39:25
Speaker
Oh, how do you mean?
Western Culture's Impact on Imagination and Reality Perception
00:39:27
Speaker
Oh, so I think this is another thing where language forces us to adopt the reality of common consensus or the
00:39:38
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
00:40:05
Speaker
then you don't immediately take as a foregone conclusion that imagination can be discarded because it's just trivial or unreal.
00:40:13
Speaker
Oh, I see.
00:40:14
Speaker
So Western culture doesn't take that seriously enough because if it had, I would have noticed, right?
00:40:18
Speaker
Yes.
00:40:18
Speaker
Like the fact that you couldn't be amfantazic in a society that cared more about imagination or took it more seriously.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yes.
00:40:24
Speaker
It's almost seen as like a little bonus extra visualization that you don't really necessarily need.
00:40:29
Speaker
Yes.
00:40:29
Speaker
It's almost how it's treated in the West.
00:40:32
Speaker
Whereas if you don't have this strong...
00:40:34
Speaker
imagination versus reality dichotomy.
00:40:38
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.
00:40:55
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.
00:41:12
Speaker
And therefore we don't have to pay attention to the minor details and distinctions between them.
00:41:18
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.
00:41:35
Speaker
And you tend to take more seriously all these spirits and emotions and envy and evil eyes and what have you.
00:41:44
Speaker
Interesting.
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah, we should definitely come back to the body part of that as well, because you mentioned emotion and yeah, interesting.
00:41:51
Speaker
Where is emotion?
00:41:53
Speaker
Which definitely relates to that.
00:41:57
Speaker
But that's definitely for another episode.
00:41:58
Speaker
There are a lot of topics.
00:42:00
Speaker
This is so under-talked about.
00:42:02
Speaker
There's definitely hours of conversation and interviews needed.
00:42:07
Speaker
Great.
00:42:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:11
Speaker
So how should we wrap this up?
00:42:12
Speaker
How shall we wrap this up?
00:42:14
Speaker
Well, what have we talked about so far?
00:42:16
Speaker
Just to, like, summarise this.
00:42:18
Speaker
I thought that was a good way to... Different people imagine apples differently.
Conclusion and Call for Listener Engagement
00:42:23
Speaker
That's for sure.
00:42:25
Speaker
And the only way we can find out about this is if we have Twitter and, like, some...
00:42:31
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.
00:42:39
Speaker
They actually literally mean picture an apple.
00:42:44
Speaker
And... Yeah, and that applies to every other sense?
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, proprioception is...
00:42:49
Speaker
kind of like my go-to.
00:42:50
Speaker
Well, even proprioception.
00:42:51
Speaker
Yeah, even proprioception.
00:42:52
Speaker
Audio, smell, touch, proprioception.
00:42:56
Speaker
And how that translates.
00:42:57
Speaker
All of them can probably be imagined badly or worse in different ways.
00:43:03
Speaker
And this also translates into how we experience our dreams.
00:43:07
Speaker
Dreams sometimes...
00:43:10
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
00:43:40
Speaker
the actual visuals.
00:43:42
Speaker
Well, yeah, the profantesus word is you reserve it into the actual world.
00:43:46
Speaker
Oh, yes, okay.
00:43:48
Speaker
But yeah, there's a continuum, I think, to some extent.
00:43:51
Speaker
It could get more and more vivid and more and more spatially present related to them.
00:43:55
Speaker
Okay.
00:43:57
Speaker
And then, yeah, and that's definitely the highest end of skill.
00:44:00
Speaker
Yeah, there are people who don't imagine at all and there are people who commonly project things into the physical world.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yeah, we'll get into tooling as well at some point.
00:44:08
Speaker
Like you can use all of these impractical ways.
00:44:11
Speaker
And then we talked about other elements.
00:44:14
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.
00:44:26
Speaker
And because we're talking about visual imagination a lot,
00:44:28
Speaker
You gave a really cool example of a shaman in Borneo profantasically seeing a being.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:44:38
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.
00:44:46
Speaker
But maybe there's more than that.
00:44:48
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...
00:44:57
Speaker
You're dismissing part of reality because the experience of her seeing the being is part of reality.
00:45:03
Speaker
And then you said more stuff about
00:45:07
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
00:45:36
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.
00:45:42
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:45:44
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:45:46
Speaker
I think...
00:45:47
Speaker
Thank you, Vin.
00:45:48
Speaker
That was fantastic.
00:45:49
Speaker
Thank you very much, Francis.
00:45:50
Speaker
This is fabulous.
00:45:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:53
Speaker
And yeah, do what I meant to say.
00:45:57
Speaker
Like, do like and subscribe and write in the comments.
00:45:59
Speaker
I mean, what I'm really interested in is people, like, just give things that this occurs to you that are interesting.
00:46:06
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.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:16
Speaker
if we've made you realize maybe that's something you experienced differently from others that has an impact on your life.
00:46:23
Speaker
Like stories of that are just super interesting and help us all understand what's happening.
00:46:28
Speaker
So yeah, I'd love to hear about that.
00:46:30
Speaker
So would I. Great.
00:46:32
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:46:33
Speaker
Great.
00:46:33
Speaker
Have a lovely rest of your day.