Transcript
Speaker: Hello, hello and welcome to Imagine an Apple podcast with me as your host Vin and Francis.
Speaker: Hello there.
Speaker: Today on our show we have Jane, also known as Janus Flowers on her Twitter handle, here to talk to us about imagining apples, horses and various other visual based stimuli.
Speaker: Hi Jane.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: So tell us more about yourself because I saw you wrote a little thread under our mutual friends tour account talking about your ability to imagine things with your mind's eye.
Speaker: But it seems like unlike normal people, you seem to have more of a refined ability with this practice, especially with Casina.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit more about how you got into this and what is different about your ability?
Speaker: Yeah, so I guess, I mean, I've always had, I'm a visual designer by trade.
Speaker: I'm a fashion designer, I used to be user experience designer.
Speaker: So I've always been a visual kind of person.
Speaker: But I've never had the ability to like, you know, close my eyes and literally see what's there.
Speaker: You know, I do like what everyone else kind of does, so I can do the mind's eye kind of thing.
Speaker: But recently I did kind of over the summer, I had a lot of experiences with meditation.
Speaker: that kind of slowly started to, you know, I'd have my eyes closed and everything like usual and stuff would kind of start to coalesce.
Speaker: It would kind of, you'd start to see, it's kind of like looking at, I was kind of looking at an optical illusion and then like all of a sudden you see something just kind of pop into place.
Speaker: Like if you're looking at, if you've ever seen that kind of, there's this kind of mask illusion.
Speaker: that's this animated mask that I think Slate Star Codex did a post on at one point.
Speaker: And you can kind of see it and it rotates.
Speaker: And the thing is, like half of people see it when it's popped out.
Speaker: Like it's kind of this like 3D statue thing.
Speaker: And half of them see it as if it's like concave.
Speaker: So it's convex or concave, depending on how you're looking at it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
Speaker: Do you know what it's called?
Speaker: Because I don't really have a word that I can face.
Speaker: I just heard the mass collision.
Speaker: I have no idea exactly what it's called.
Speaker: It may have a particular name.
Speaker: I have no idea exactly what the thing is.
Speaker: We'll call it the mass collision for now.
Speaker: I can send out the link to the post.
Speaker: I have it somewhere.
Speaker: So meditation you mentioned.
Speaker: I just wanted to ask you what sort of meditation practice this was because I know that there's all these different kinds going about.
Speaker: Was it a particular meditative practice that you did?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not really, no.
Speaker: I have a weird experience with meditation in terms of I seem to have a lot of access to a lot of in terms of at least going by kind of like the standard, I guess, kind of Buddhist practice of the jhanas and everything like that.
Speaker: I never had to really practice for the jhanas.
Speaker: They kind of came to me.
Speaker: I was doing a breathwork course one time and I had never done that sort of thing before.
Speaker: So I just kind of sat down and followed the instructor and everything.
Speaker: It was a class.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden after like 10 minutes or something,
Speaker: I entered this weird altered state and only because I'm on Twitter and see tweets by people who do meditation, seriously, I'm like, I know what state I'm in, this is Echata.
Speaker: And so I ended up going through Jonah 1 and then very quickly after that, Jonah 5, which is when your whole body dissolves and it kind of feels like you just kind of leap over the Grand Canyon and keep falling and falling and falling.
Speaker: And so that just kind of came out of nowhere.
Speaker: So I kind of had been playing around with that all summer.
Speaker: And so playing around with that experience after having this kind of like being thrown into the deep end is when I started to play around and started to notice these kind of visualizations.
Speaker: And I kind of started to be kind of gravitated towards them.
Speaker: just because they were very interesting.
Speaker: And I've also had a lot of visual snow, which is if you have your eyes open, you generally see kind of a lot of almost kind of a static sort of thing.
Speaker: It's usually a little more colorful than like a black and white TV static.
Speaker: And it's very slight.
Speaker: I know some people who seem to have it much stronger than I do.
Speaker: But I've always been fascinated by that kind of visual phenomenon as well.
Speaker: And I've always tried to kind of like shape it, if that makes sense.
Speaker: And I was never really able to kind of do it.
Speaker: But with my eyes closed for whatever reason, when I was getting into this kind of Jonna territory, there seemed to be some kind of way that it
Speaker: there's some kind of order kind of collapsed and it never it didn't happen all at once um it was probably probably about a month or so of kind of doing it every couple days for a couple hours each um i started to kind of slowly slowly slowly be able to kind of see um first it was kind of going from 2d to 3d um and it was basically just kind of blobs at that point it wasn't anything fancy or it wasn't like any images or symbols or anything like that um but so what's going from 2d to 3d
Speaker: Basically, kind of like what I was saying with the kind of optical illusion of the mask.
Speaker: It's like you can kind of, it kind of just pops into place all of a sudden.
Speaker: It's kind of like you're kind of like walking by something and then the perspective kind of pops out into place.
Speaker: I guess it's kind of like almost, yeah, it's like you're looking at a painting and it's like, for whatever reason, the leading point or whatever.
Speaker: And my...
Speaker: knowing what I do now about having read a lot about a lot of papers about visual reification and how the brain's processing works in that regard.
Speaker: It has to do with how the rain manufacture shadows.
Speaker: Because what is a shadow?
Speaker: It's basically information you don't have.
Speaker: And so for whatever reason, that part of the visual imagery, or at least this is my kind of like new harebrained theory, for whatever reason, if you keep paying attention long enough to the noise or the static or whatever you see when you have your eyes closed, you can start to run that kind of machinery, that kind of reification.
Speaker: The brain wants to see things in the noise.
Speaker: It wants to see, you know, signal in the static.
Speaker: So it will start to eventually once it can pinpoint enough, you know, things that can latch on to, it will say, ah, there is a shadow that is a 3D like space.
Speaker: And so it kind of looks like I get very early on.
Speaker: It's literally just like blogs and you have to be very and they're almost in my case, they were very monochromatic.
Speaker: So it was very difficult to see at first.
Speaker: So it took a lot of patience.
Speaker: But slowly, slowly, slowly, things you would start to get a handle and it's kind of felt like early 80s or 90s CGI kind of stuff.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, you know, there's kind of like gray landscapes and things like that.
Speaker: Just very basic, very blobby still.
Speaker: And knowing some stuff about computer vision from having done all of that, knowing some stuff about ray tracing and things was very fascinating to kind of be building this process from the ground up with my own brain.
Speaker: But one thing led to another and eventually like, you know, just doing that kind of practice.
Speaker: And then you start to see things that actually look like things.
Speaker: Like in my case, I ended up seeing a lot of, usually my kind of first sign that I was like actually in the kind of space where I could actually start to see images was plants for whatever reason.
Speaker: It'd be trees, like thickets.
Speaker: My interpretation of that is that that's a very good surface symmetry wise because there's a lot of leaves and things.
Speaker: So it's very symmetrical, but it's also very deep and detailed.
Speaker: So where do you imagine these trees and plants?
Speaker: Is it like with your eyes closed or do you open, keep your eyes open and then just project it into the world?
Speaker: They are, right now it's closed.
Speaker: Sometimes if it's in a dark room,
Speaker: And I've been doing this meditation for a little while.
Speaker: I can keep my eyes open and I can kind of see it.
Speaker: It's almost kind of like a split screen almost.
Speaker: I can't imagine it quite yet on my visual field, like in the room with me.
Speaker: I've heard that that's possible.
Speaker: Maybe I'll try that one day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you think it gets better?
Speaker: So from what it sounds like, pre-meditation, you weren't able to do this.
Speaker: And then after meditation, you suddenly were practicing this for a while before you got the ability to then have these visual techniques.
Speaker: visual, I don't know what to call them, hallucinations, I suppose, or like visual practice?
Speaker: Yeah, visual.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, I guess the technical term in meditation I learned after this.
Speaker: So I guess I invented this kind of meditation independently.
Speaker: It's called casino practice.
Speaker: Casino.
Speaker: Like I mentioned in my Twitter thread.
Speaker: But yeah, so that's the, I've just heard it referred to as the casino visualizations.
Speaker: There's not really a name for the particular visualizations, at least that I'm aware of.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it sounds like this is a very recent ability that you've picked up as well, because you mentioned you were playing with this last summer.
Speaker: How long ago did you gain this capacity?
Speaker: Probably like a month ago or so.
Speaker: A month ago?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It has not been all that long.
Speaker: And has it been aided beyond just like the meditative practice?
Speaker: Is there like more training that you had to do or some kind of like altered state of mind that you have to enter before you're able to start visualizing in the way that you're describing?
Speaker: Not really, no.
Speaker: It takes, it sometimes takes a while.
Speaker: And again, I kind of have to build it up from scratch each time.
Speaker: It's not like I can go into it immediately and immediately be able to control what I want to see and immediately see everything super rich.
Speaker: It usually takes a couple minutes at least.
Speaker: To get to the phase where I can even see my tiny little leaf on a plant or something like that.
Speaker: Which again, I have no idea why that's the starting gun for me.
Speaker: That's kind of in the Buddhist terminology, there's the term for how you know you're in a particular jhana as you look for their word for a sign is called a nimitta, I think.
Speaker: I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Speaker: But anyway, so I guess my nimitta is like a tree or something like that, which is weird.
Speaker: And I have no idea if that comes, if that's like, again, for whatever reason, it feels like maybe if it's going off of visual reification and shadows and symmetry, plants seem like a good enough kind of substrate for that.
Speaker: Otherwise, maybe it's just, I mean, my last name is flowers.
Speaker: Maybe it's a psychological thing that's personal to me.
Speaker: I have no idea.
Speaker: But yeah, it's only been about a month or so.
Speaker: And the only thing I've tried it with other than meditation is ketamine because it seems to be very tied to muscle relaxation.
Speaker: Whenever I'm in the kind of state where I can control them, I notice a whole lot whether I'm sober or I have tried ketamine with it.
Speaker: there is a very intense kind of muscle relaxation.
Speaker: And so ketamine is a muscle relaxant.
Speaker: It's one of its main properties.
Speaker: So playing around with that has helped.
Speaker: It speeds it up at least.
Speaker: So if I'm ever really tired and I really don't want to do the discipline that takes, you know, it usually takes at least 30 minutes to get to full power by myself, sometimes longer, depending on the day, depending on if I've... Can you tell me that process of you getting charged up?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it really kind of depends.
Speaker: But like I said, I kind of just, I usually, when I meditate, I usually lay down.
Speaker: That's another thing that I found really helps is that, again, it seems to be very, despite this being a visualization, despite this seeming like it would be a very kind of heady,
Speaker: like visual kind of process, it is very tied to the body somehow.
Speaker: I'll go into later because it seems to be very tied to both John O4 and a little bit of John O5, just in terms of the body experience.
Speaker: But all that to say, I usually lay down, you know, just totally flat because it helps to feel, you can feel when you're releasing tension, you can feel when the body needs to release tension somewhere.
Speaker: And that generally helps speed up the process a whole lot.
Speaker: So it's not just kind of this disembodied mental thinking phenomenon, which is interesting as well.
Speaker: So I'll lay down, I'll put on a mask usually.
Speaker: It depends.
Speaker: The funny thing is, the more I treat it like a ritual, the faster it comes.
Speaker: So sometimes I'll light some incense or something like that.
Speaker: Sometimes I'll plan my whole day around it in the sense that I'll fast the entire day.
Speaker: But sometimes I won't.
Speaker: It really kind of depends, although fasting does seem to help make it much more intense.
Speaker: And then I'll just kind of lay there.
Speaker: And it usually takes... Usually I do it in silence.
Speaker: Sometimes music is fun.
Speaker: But usually I've found that in the beginning it's a little too distracting to have music and focus on kind of building up the visuals.
Speaker: But once you get going, and the times I have kind of pushed through that, having music is fantastic to go with these things.
Speaker: They don't really mesh together in terms of like, it's not like I'm like seeing a music video for the music.
Speaker: But they, for whatever reason, the kind of sensations complement each other.
Speaker: Even if it's not in a literal symbolic sense, it's just kind of nice to have kind of like a guided kind of music path to kind of go on instead of just kind of doing in total silence.
Speaker: But again, that also makes it very difficult in the early stages to focus on just the visualization.
Speaker: So it's kind of a balance.
Speaker: But again, yeah, usually I just kind of stare into the noise on the back of my eyelids.
Speaker: until usually it doesn't take long at all to at least kind of see some 3D blobs or visualizations or something.
Speaker: And then past a certain point, there's a kind of weird phase after like a minute or two when you're in it a bit more.
Speaker: When it seems like your visual field, when your eyes are closed, it seems like it widens by 30 or 40%.
Speaker: And so, you know, whatever your peripheral vision is, like, increases by a lot.
Speaker: And so it kind of feels like you get much more deeper in it all of a sudden.
Speaker: It's kind of like, I guess that would be similar to axis concentration is kind of what I'd call it.
Speaker: But once you're in there, that's when you feel like you're kind of in that world, for lack of a better term, versus just kind of watching it from a looking glass.
Speaker: So for whatever reason, that step is crucial.
Speaker: I don't know how to describe it other than that.
Speaker: It also usually gets slightly darker.
Speaker: Even if I'm in a room that's pretty light, my vision will get very dark.
Speaker: And usually, especially at this phase, usually the only colors I'm seeing are shades from complete black all the way up to a dark royal blue.
Speaker: And then from there, I just watch it and just try, sometimes I'll concentrate and try to actually build up something symbolic like
Speaker: either a plant or like a statue or something like that.
Speaker: Otherwise, I'll just... What's the most complex thing that you can imagine?
Speaker: I'm sorry, go ahead.
Speaker: What's the most complex or complicated thing that you can imagine visually?
Speaker: I mean, it kind of, it's interesting because it's like, what you think is complex is not quite as complex as, you know, because you would think that
Speaker: Oh, it's really difficult to imagine a, for example, one thing I do a lot is detailed rooms or palaces or decor or things like that.
Speaker: For whatever reason, I have this weird kind of British royal country vibe.
Speaker: And you were able to do this before?
Speaker: No, I mean, in my mind's eye, yes.
Speaker: But not in visual, as in feeling like I'm walking through a simulation of all of them like I do.
Speaker: No, I was not able to do that.
Speaker: Although I do have at least some background in interior design as well, so maybe that contributes to it in some regard, but that was not interior designing with my internal casino visualizations back then.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But, yeah, so probably the most complex thing is one of my favorite things to do is kind of go into these like very kind of ornate houses, rooms or whatever.
Speaker: And then kind of walk around in all the details or kind of, I don't say walk because I don't really have a sense of a body when I'm doing this.
Speaker: That has been something I've been working on.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So do you think there's a difference between, I guess, walking through what you simulate versus walking in your mind's eye?
Speaker: I mean, I really, mind's eye is different.
Speaker: And I've been really thinking about mind's eye recently, just because in contrast to this, because, you know, you never think about, you hear about some people who can visualize things for real like this.
Speaker: But you always assume whenever people say mind's eye, they mean not your actual eye, but your kind of mind's eye.
Speaker: Mind's eye is interesting because it's very tied to abstract reasoning, or at least in my case it is.
Speaker: I don't want to speak for other people's experiences.
Speaker: And I can totally see the apple.
Speaker: I know the test you're talking about, the apple.
Speaker: I can totally see that in my mind's eye totally fine.
Speaker: But comparing it to trying to do the same in Cassina visualizations, it's interesting because then you actually do see the apple.
Speaker: So a lot of it kind of leads me to wonder, what is mind's eye visualization?
Speaker: Is it actually visualization or is it kind of recruiting the kind of thought patterns that you would have in your brain for whatever reason is good enough at making that kind of inference?
Speaker: that it recruits all the thought patterns you would have as if you were to have seen this image, but you're not actually seeing it.
Speaker: So it's kind of interesting to think about, so what is Mind's Eye visualization in regards to Casina visualization and why did we evolve that versus like just actually Casina or something like that?
Speaker: Right, yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: That's really fascinating.
Speaker: One thing I've been wanting to ask you is like, so is your advanced imagination ability limited just to visual stimuli?
Speaker: Or can you also do this for sounds and I don't know, smells and touch?
Speaker: No sounds, no smells.
Speaker: Touch is weird.
Speaker: I've been playing around with that some recently, more than the visualizations actually.
Speaker: Every now and then, I can get, if I'm playing around with the visualizations, and for whatever reason, sometimes one will come directly into my eye.
Speaker: Let's say it's a long vine or something like that, or it's some pointy object or something.
Speaker: For whatever reason, it goes exactly where I'm imagining where my eyes would be.
Speaker: For whatever reason, it does have some sort of tactile stimulation.
Speaker: I'm not exactly sure how to describe it.
Speaker: It's very kind of diffuse.
Speaker: It's not like a sharp point at all.
Speaker: There's some sort of... So I'm not sure if it's...
Speaker: kind of like a mind's eye sort of thing where it is just kind of the brain's reacting as if you expecting it as if you would kind of like flinch away from something in the real world or if it is actually the like the tactile stimulation being repurposed in the same way that my visual reification or visual processing abilities are being so I need to play around with that a little more.
Speaker: From the little bit of research on it from traditional practitioners, there's not a whole lot about tactile stimulation in particular.
Speaker: I've heard some people say
Speaker: that they felt things, but not in any great detail.
Speaker: The one, it's kind of, and then you also have to kind of draw a line between, between tactile stimulation in the sense that, you know, all the things you're seeing tie directly into your tactile experience versus things like, you know, having Janna-ish feelings.
Speaker: Like for example, I feel like whenever I'm in kind of the strongest parts of these visualizations,
Speaker: I'm certainly in John 4, and it seems to be kind of touching on John 5 in the sense that I'm not dissolving my entire body yet.
Speaker: But there is this sense, especially when I'm looking at very abstract landscapes, very kind of spacey places,
Speaker: you kind of get this body feeling sense of being space almost.
Speaker: You get the sense that you're kind of constructing your perception of having body, being bounded by a body.
Speaker: But you also get the sense that this could be let go of, this is not a given.
Speaker: So there's interesting kind of like byproducts in the tactile sense that aren't directly linked to what you're simulating, experiencing.
Speaker: And then of course, with John of War, there's also just the great feelings of peace and equanimity and all those kind of things.
Speaker: So there's that.
Speaker: There's a lot of interesting things going on there.
Speaker: And if you've ever read anything about neural annealing, from my felt, kind of folk sense of what neural annealing feels like in me, from having done various psychedelics and having done meditation,
Speaker: That is definitely going on with the casino as well.
Speaker: There's some sort of internal moving the furniture around kind of thing is probably the best way I would describe it.
Speaker: So something's going on with that too, tactile.
Speaker: But again, it doesn't seem to be exactly tied to the images.
Speaker: But who knows, maybe it's one of those things where I've heard sometimes that, at least in terms of genre meditation, or sometimes in trips that you see,
Speaker: Versicular ayahuasca.
Speaker: Sometimes people hypothesize that, oh, your brain's showing you whatever your repressed traumatic, whatever memory is, but in a different form than what the actual memory is about, what the subjective content is about.
Speaker: It's not showing you that content.
Speaker: But it's showing you some other kind of isomorphic equivalent representation.
Speaker: So you can deal with it, so you can process it, so you can kind of feel its energy, but also not be triggered by whatever the kind of traumatic symbolic kind of baggage that is tied with the literal kind of one for one representation of what it is.
Speaker: So maybe that's
Speaker: going on to with the visualizations and the feelings.
Speaker: Does that mean you can visualize an emotion and it has an imagistic quality to it?
Speaker: No, it's not that particular synesthesia.
Speaker: That would be cool.
Speaker: Maybe I should play around with that.
Speaker: One thing I will say is that sometimes colors can lead to temperature, which this is something I actually read about first before I tried it myself and I ended up being to confirm it.
Speaker: But, for example, if I do, I'm not sure exactly if it's tied to an emotion that allows me to interpret.
Speaker: I'll have to pay attention closer next time.
Speaker: For whatever reason, sometimes.
Speaker: It seems to be more tied to intensity rather than, say, anger or something like that.
Speaker: But if I can generate a red light or generate a lot of red shading, because in my case, usually I'm seeing my kind of primary color that I end up kind of everything kind of emerging from is this kind of dark
Speaker: blue black um sort of thing so usually it kind of feels like it's um you know most things are kind of coming from that color even if they change in a different color slayer um but if i kind of bathe the whole scene every now and then with this kind of red um my body temperature will rise like dramatically um i usually i'm usually laying down under a blanket or two um but if i do this um sometimes i have to like throw off the blankets um during the middle of the meditation because i'm
Speaker: sweating so much.
Speaker: So it's interesting that you can kind of play around with that kind of visualization.
Speaker: So not emotion per se, but you can create temperature, you can mess around with body temperature, which again, this is something I read about first before I tried it myself.
Speaker: So at least that seems to be a little more confirmed in terms of, and you can probably all find a source of the Sindel or something on that.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Sounds like you have some pretty advanced Bene Gesserit powers being able to control your temperature with nothing but your mere imagination.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So do you use it for anything, for therapeutic ends or something like that, or is it just for fun?
Speaker: I mean, I guess you could say they're kind of one in the same to me.
Speaker: But it does seem to be, there is kind of something interesting going on in it.
Speaker: Like I said, it feels very tied to, even if it's not traditional genre, the genre maps, it seems to be tied to some of whatever kind of neural and neural aspects that the genres have, those kind of very freeing, those kind of very
Speaker: relaxing aspects.
Speaker: So doing it very intensely for a couple hours, it definitely feels great.
Speaker: And it has definitely helped me work through some stuff.
Speaker: And it's very interesting that usually the next day, I'll have a lot more sensory clarity just in general as well.
Speaker: More sensory clarity and then also less
Speaker: Just kind of less in general, I guess, for lack of a better term, symbolic thoughts.
Speaker: I'm still not, I'm not one of those people who's like inner voice totally goes away.
Speaker: But I can definitely notice that in addition to having a lot more sensory clarity, just the general kind of mental loops in general kind of neuroticism goes way down, at least kind of an afterglow for the next day or two.
Speaker: So, yeah, in the mental health regard, I think it would be a very interesting area to explore, especially if more people can get there with psychedelics, which, again, they seem to help.
Speaker: But I'm very hesitant to recommend, oh, go try psychedelics.
Speaker: And this is like a shortcut because it doesn't feel quite like that.
Speaker: It feels like there is a lot more skill involved.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that the psychedelics are like, at least a little bit of kinamine I've tried.
Speaker: It's not that, I mean, I've never taken recreational doses of ketamine before, so I have no idea if what I'm seeing is actually a K-hole or something like that.
Speaker: I have no idea.
Speaker: I have no reference for that kind of set of visualizations.
Speaker: All I'm doing is making it, because it seems to be very tight to visual, or sorry,
Speaker: muscle relaxation.
Speaker: I'm mostly using it for that because sometimes just knowing my body and having done it on yoga, I still have a lot of knots and a lot of tightness just kind of everywhere and a lot of tension.
Speaker: They can be very difficult even consciously after hours of body work for me to let go of.
Speaker: So having that kind of always helped.
Speaker: But it would be interesting to do more.
Speaker: Tie in, I've never seen any really
Speaker: and it may be out there, I haven't really looked, any kind of research that ties in casino meditation and those kind of visualizations to, for example, the visualizations you see on LSD.
Speaker: Because again, a lot of psychedelics seem to have different kinds or different phenomenon visually that they, whether it be in the subjective experience, in the content you're seeing, or just if you've ever seen an article from Qualia Computing,
Speaker: where they talk about, here's how to write a rigorous report of a psychedelic trip.
Speaker: And they give you all these kind of like, you know, very kind of scientific research, experimental kind of pathways to say, okay, no, if you're looking at like an alien in whatever you're, you know, I guess some people see aliens if they take like DMT or whatever.
Speaker: Just kind of like what I'm saying, the casino visualizations, it's like that's your brain's, for whatever reason, your brain's visual reification, visual processing algorithms are just going on over time.
Speaker: So whatever you're saying, you can consider it real, but you could also, alternatively, you could kind of do this kind of rational second on approach.
Speaker: where you say, okay, I'm going to look at how fast is this image pulsing?
Speaker: How am I seeing the shadows?
Speaker: How am I seeing trails is another one, because your visual field has a intrinsic frame rate that if things move too fast, that's when you see a blur versus being able to see something very clearly if it's moving slower.
Speaker: So how does that affect my visual refresh rate?
Speaker: So they have all these little...
Speaker: hints and suggestions for breaking it down at kind of the level under content.
Speaker: Like what is generating this content?
Speaker: What in my kind of body perceptual experience could be creating that?
Speaker: So I have no idea if anyone's done that comparing again, say LSD or DMT visualizations to casino visualizations in terms of are they doing the same thing?
Speaker: Are they doing something different?
Speaker: But that would be a very interesting pathway to research, I guess.
Speaker: Maybe I'll try it one day.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: So other than visualizations, how does this practice affect your sense of reality?
Speaker: You feel like, oh, this is something that causes you to question certain fundamental assumptions you've had?
Speaker: Or, yeah, how does that affect reality?
Speaker: I wouldn't say it doesn't make me question like, oh, we're living in a simulation.
Speaker: I would assume for some people it probably would, especially if you haven't had near as much.
Speaker: research as I've had into just how perception works, just partially as part of my work as an artist and visual designer, and then also partially just from sticking a lot of this kind of stuff.
Speaker: Probably the main thing is it reveals just how much your brain is constructing perception.
Speaker: Whenever you see the exact same shadows in Cassina that you're visualizing as you see in real life, you say, okay, you wonder how much, in one of my tweets, I think I mentioned something along the lines of your intuition for how much you're constructing versus how much you're perceiving.
Speaker: And our brains are very good.
Speaker: And studies have shown this long before anything on meditation or Cassina or anything.
Speaker: has a lot of just kind of basic research in the area of visual psychology and things like that, have shown that we take in a very paltry amount of sense data, but our brains are just very good at, I wouldn't say deceiving us is the right word, because it's a very helpful deception.
Speaker: It's very good to be able to have all this data.
Speaker: So you don't want to use it kind of rejordically in the sense that, oh, this is all an illusion.
Speaker: Like, no, it's not.
Speaker: It correlates to the real world enough that it's a very hopeful illusion.
Speaker: But it's constructed.
Speaker: Yes, it's constructed.
Speaker: You can see, you know, it's like, let's say, maybe most people's.
Speaker: intuition for direct realism is the term that's thrown around a lot in this regard.
Speaker: How much of your experience is totally real versus how much are you constructing it after the fact?
Speaker: And I think a lot of people would say, oh, it's at least 50% real, if not more.
Speaker: Forgetting there's a little weirdness on the edge of optical illusions and things like that.
Speaker: So it's an edge case, who cares?
Speaker: So that's, you know, most people would seem to buy direct realism.
Speaker: But when you do things like Asenia and you realize you can kind of recreate the entire world based on just a little bit of the kind of stimuli you're seeing on the back of your eyelids, it makes you wonder, is that about how much information I'm taking in in terms of, you know, like,
Speaker: photons from light and then I'm just reconstructing all this world so instead of your intuition being oh it's like 50 to 80% real world that I'm taking and I'm only processing like maybe 20 or 30% it's like no it feels kind of like there's like 1% stimuli and 99% construction though which again it's like you don't want to go down the line of like oh this isn't that means everything's a simulation or things like that or that means I'm hallucinating all the time it's like no that's
Speaker: It's kind of a confusion in terms if you frame it that way.
Speaker: It's just you become more fascinated by how the world works and that you would have thought, based on everything you know, you would have never thought to step outside your own minds in that regard or realize that you're fabricating that much.
Speaker: Then it makes you wonder what else can you fabricate for your own benefit.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: So it just sounds like you're more aware than most people about how much of your visual, of your vision is constructed as in like 99% is construction and only 1% is just photons of light stimuli.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, and that's my estimate.
Speaker: That is very, just very impressionistic off the cuff.
Speaker: I have no idea if there's an actual stat or if that could even be measured.
Speaker: But do you feel those numbers to be like roughly right for you?
Speaker: Like 1% to 99%?
Speaker: Yeah, I would say somewhere between 1% to 5%.
Speaker: Just because knowing, you know, whenever you close your eyes initially and whenever I start the meditation, there's nothing there.
Speaker: But then being able to reconstruct, you know, basically the whole world.
Speaker: You know, you wonder, it's like, you know, is this just me, you know, recreating it versus usually I'm seeing it?
Speaker: Or again, my argument would be I'm using the same source or I'm using the same processing that I would be using normally day to day.
Speaker: I'm just repurposing that and just changing the 1% that is external stimuli from light photons to whatever I'm seeing on the back of my eyes.
Speaker: So that's kind of my thought experiment.
Speaker: That's kind of how it feels intuitively right now.
Speaker: I have no basis for any of that other than my intuition.
Speaker: But that's my step.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I think I've run out of any questions now.
Speaker: Francis, do you want to take over?
Speaker: Yeah, I just want to slightly loop back to this distinction between mind's eye.
Speaker: And I think, Jane, you're calling these powers you've gained in the last month or two hyperreal.
Speaker: Is that the word you've been using?
Speaker: Yeah, once they get to the most kind of like the kind of strongest point.
Speaker: Yeah, that's that's how we kind of describe them.
Speaker: It's kind of like if you had a, you know, it's kind of like modern CGI.
Speaker: I mean, it's just like, you know, incredibly hyper realistic to the point where, you know, you really can't tell.
Speaker: And especially because it's happening in front of you in real time.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very the only, you know, the only thing that, you know,
Speaker: helps you stay grounded is the fact that it does have a still, even though it's very hyperreal, it does have a dreamlike quality.
Speaker: I'd be interested, I've never done a whole lot of lucid dreaming.
Speaker: I fall into them every now and then, but that's very rare.
Speaker: And I generally don't remember my dreams a lot.
Speaker: I know I have them, I know I wake up with them a lot, but I don't generally remember them much longer past waking up with them.
Speaker: So I would assume that it's similar, it's all the same kind of visual processing minutes.
Speaker: Dreams are slightly different because again, it's like in this regard, I know exactly what I'm doing.
Speaker: But in dreams, it's like you never really notice like, okay, where did that come from?
Speaker: Where did that come from?
Speaker: You're not paying attention to all the kind of like narrative sequential logic of the dream versus usually I can kind of pay attention to it.
Speaker: In terms of differences from like your normal day-to-day mind's eye, so it sounds like it's in your actual vision, like your eyes are closed usually when you're doing this, but you're seeing it where you would normally see things, like you start doing it by looking at the white noise that you see with closed eyes.
Speaker: Correct, yeah.
Speaker: And then when I do my eyes, I can kind of do the split-screen effect where it's like, it's not, I can't make things 3D, like, you know, on a background of real-life stuff, but I can kind of do this where I can kind of see the kind of, for lack of a better term, kind of like the Merc, the kind of visual field that I see when my eyes are closed, if I'm looking at like a blank wall in a dark room or something like that.
Speaker: So it's definitely, it is definitely the real visual perception and it's not the mind's eye after image.
Speaker: And in your mind's eye, you're a designer, so I'm assuming you get full quality, really realistic lighting and color and shading when you're imagining things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have a tweet somewhere where I talk about, oh yeah, I see the apple.
Speaker: And then I go on to write this whole story about how I can visualize, oh, it's in this one.
Speaker: It's like this American Gothic kind of setting.
Speaker: And the wife watches the Chip and Joanna games, like decor show.
Speaker: She watches that.
Speaker: And that's why your kitchen is decorated that the apple is in.
Speaker: That's why it's decorated.
Speaker: So it's like there's the whole red button.
Speaker: If you visualize that as hyperreal instead, would it be, in terms of the detail of what the colors and textures are, would it be about as complex as the Mind's Eye one, just in your actual vision?
Speaker: Or is there some other difference other than it being in your actual vision?
Speaker: That's a pretty interesting question.
Speaker: I haven't really thought a whole lot about what my Mind's Eye visualization is in regards to Casina, because it seems like in both cases, but it's particularly in Mind's Eye now that I think about it,
Speaker: you wonder how much you're actually seeing versus how much is your brain agreeing, okay, I am seeing this, if that makes sense.
Speaker: It's almost kind of like this subjective negotiation of, okay, I'm seeing enough of an apple to agree that I'm seeing enough of an apple, if that makes sense.
Speaker: And particularly it feels that way in mind's eye because in Messina, that's not always the case.
Speaker: Because, you know, it's very real.
Speaker: So there's this kind of sense that, and again, it's like, I don't want, you know, that somewhat sometimes sounds pejorative in the sense of like, oh, excuse me, oh, I'm tricking myself or oh, I'm like, you know, deceiving myself.
Speaker: It's like, no, that's, you know, as a designer, I can say firsthand, having a mind's eye visualization, you know, really helps.
Speaker: But at the same time, it's not,
Speaker: It's not quite the same thing as, oh, I'm actually perceiving all these kind of new volumetric shadows, or I'm perceiving all those kind of things.
Speaker: If I thought about them, I could go to them.
Speaker: But I'm not getting them for free in the sense that when I imagined Apple, they're like all there, and it's not 100% there.
Speaker: It's like I have to consciously focus on, okay, now let me pay attention to the shadow aspect.
Speaker: So when I imagined Apple, like, yes, I can see all the light and all the everything of that.
Speaker: But it still seems like it's 2% of the detail that would be there in real life just because the nature of that kind of processing, the kind of more abstract serial processing that the kind of abstract reasoning comes with is very computationally intensive in the brain.
Speaker: Just like doing math in your head is very computationally intensive to do that kind of discrete step-by-step logic.
Speaker: So it seems like your brain is very good at saying, we can take it wherever you want it.
Speaker: We can visualize whatever you want to visualize.
Speaker: But for the purpose of imagine an apple, we can reach a very quick agreement on what that is in terms of, okay, I can imagine the very tip the apple versus...
Speaker: With Casina, it seems to be more of a parallel computing phenomenon in the sense that you see it all there and it all happens for free.
Speaker: You see the shadows are just there.
Speaker: I don't have to imagine and say, it's kind of like when you think about, oh, I'm going to think about breathing, I consciously control my breathing.
Speaker: That's kind of the difference, I would say.
Speaker: Usually with Cassina, it's like your breathing's running on autopilot.
Speaker: The visualizations are running on autopilot, unless I kind of very slightly influence them.
Speaker: Versus with mine's eye, it's entirely that very, very manual sense of I am controlling my in-breath and out-breath.
Speaker: If that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah, that completely makes sense.
Speaker: Have you heard of the word profantasia?
Speaker: So this is in the, like, aphantasia, hyperphantasia, hyperphantasia spectrum.
Speaker: There's a guy called aphantasia meow who invented this word.
Speaker: It means in his definition projecting fantasia.
Speaker: So it's getting imagined imagery into your actual vision.
Speaker: And the kind of
Speaker: I've heard of examples.
Speaker: I've got a friend who does this a bit who talks about seeing dragons come out of the pavement.
Speaker: When he was a child, he was very bored and he would be imagining things a lot.
Speaker: And then eventually he got to the point where he could see them in the real world.
Speaker: And similarly, I've heard of people like at high school, people they hated disappear, like invisible, like they became invisible and things like that.
Speaker: So that feels like a kind of more similar to your hyper real things, like dragging out into your actual vision and being a bit more kind of altering the real world.
Speaker: Maybe, but maybe not, because you could do that in a less intense way, perhaps as well.
Speaker: Do you experience anything like that where you've taken these hyper real things and made them happen with your eyes open?
Speaker: Is that even useful or more useful that you do that?
Speaker: Like I said, I can manage the split-screen thing, where I can kind of, again, if I have my eyes open and I have a blank enough surface somewhere in my visual field, it kind of acts like as if my eyes were closed, in the sense that the same visual snow or whatever.
Speaker: can go on on that surface.
Speaker: It's not quite so busy.
Speaker: So it's essentially like having a big surface is equivalent in some ways to just having my eyes closed.
Speaker: It's anything for my kind of visual snow to kind of play on.
Speaker: I would imagine, given that I can do that, I would imagine that there's not really any limit and that past a certain point, you wouldn't need, your visual snow could get on, you could have it interact on whatever background you want or whatever real life thing you want.
Speaker: I can do some kind of, when you talk about making someone disappear that you don't like, I can't do that constantly as if, okay, erase them, they're gone, I never see them again.
Speaker: But sometimes I'll be staring up at my bed at night at the light fixture in my room and usually it works better when the lights are off.
Speaker: But I can kind of sort of progressively make it smaller or erase it.
Speaker: But it kind of feels like...
Speaker: It doesn't quite feel like the same thing casino-wise, but maybe it does.
Speaker: But it just kind of feels like you're stretching the noise you get already, which again, maybe that goes against what I said earlier, which is like most of the noise you're getting is actually stuff you're constructing anyways.
Speaker: So I can do little effects like that, but not in the same way that it's like, oh, let me create a dragon right in front of me in real life.
Speaker: But again, it's like I've heard of...
Speaker: just within the narrow bounds of casino practice, I've heard of that being possible.
Speaker: Or at least some of the original sources that kind of lay out the practice for this meditation, or at least formalized it in the canon, like say that that kind of stuff is possible.
Speaker: So maybe, again, clearly it's like, maybe a month from now we'll be riding dragons everywhere in my real life.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that's super interesting.
Speaker: It does feel like as a society, we've only just begun to
Speaker: explore how we learn to do these things better and the different kinds of them there are.
Speaker: It feels like very, there's a lot of work to do to unpick the different ways of learning it.
Speaker: Super interesting.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: I feel like you're pro-Fantasia, if we can even call it that, abilities, far outstrain mind, full brain of imagination.
Speaker: Thanks, Shane.
Speaker: That was fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks for having me.
