Imagination, Aphantasia & The Mind’s Eye: Why Your Brain Spends Half Your Life Somewhere Else

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:01:51)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

When we think of imagination, we tend to think it's reserved for the creatives among us: painters and poets, artists and musicians. But the truth is, we use our imagination almost all the time. Anytime we reminisce, anticipate, or plan. In fact, research suggests we spend between a quarter and a half of our waking hours with our minds wandering elsewhere. Away from the present moment.

Dr. Adam Zeman's 2025 book, The Shape of Things Unseen, explores just how central imagination is to human experience. In it, the UK-based neurologist blends neuroscience with the humanities and the arts, drawing on evolutionary biology, child development, literature, and music to paint a picture of the imaginative mind. He examines William Blake's visionary poetry, Mozart's ability to hear concertos in his head, and the creative insights behind scientific breakthroughs like the discovery of benzene. But Dr. Zeman also reveals imagination's darker side. A wandering mind can be an unhappy mind.

Excessive rumination contributes to depression, and our ability to simulate future scenarios can sometimes trap us in anxiety. From psychosomatic illness to the placebo effect, from living with vivid mental imagery to living without it, Dr. Zeman shows how Imagination operates at every level of human consciousness. Today on the podcast, we explore the science of imagination, how perception might be a kind of controlled hallucination, what artists can teach us about the creative process, and why the line between the creative and the curious may be thinner than we think. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about imagination in the shape of things unseen.

Dustin Grinnell (00:01:57 --> 00:01:59)
Dr. Adam Zeman, welcome to the show.

Adam Zeman (00:01:59 --> 00:02:00)
Thank you for having me.

Dustin Grinnell (00:02:00 --> 00:04:01)
I found it to be a really fascinating, comprehensive look at, you know, human imagination. You, you kind of made it hard for a podcast interviewer to kind of break this book down because there's just so much in it about how we think and how we perceive the world and how imagination is a double-edged sword. It leads to great things, but also negative outcomes. You wove in like research studies and literary references and patient stories. So I wanted to set the stage for us and the listener to kind of orient all of us about how I kind of might want to approach this conversation.

So I wanted to talk about imagination first, the kind of definition of it, the pros and cons of it, and then talk about sensory experience, how we can use our imagination to create mental images, talk about mind's ear, mind's touch, the various ways we can conjure up senses in our, in our mind. And then talk about creativity, how writers, artists, visual artists use their imagination, because that's a big part of your book as well. And then the latter part of the book is kind of how mental disorders. You talk about mental disorders in the context of imagination, various neurological illnesses like hysteria and neurological functional disorder, and the placebo effect. It's all very, very interesting.

And then to end, I kind of wanted to talk about your experience as a, you know, as a clinician, as a research scientist, and what it was like to write about science, to write popular science. So that's kind of setting the table for us. I wanted to just ask, like, what brought you to this topic? The book is A New Science of Imagination. What brought you to exploring the science of imagination?

Adam Zeman (00:04:01 --> 00:04:39)
So I, I guess I've had a very long-standing interest since I was a student, as many people do, in, in what makes us special, you know, whether there's anything about the human mind that's really distinctive that sets us apart from the rest of creation. And I think that quite a strong candidate is imagination in the very broad sense of the capacity that allows us to detach ourselves from the here and now recollect the past, anticipate the future, lose ourselves in the virtual worlds that are created by artists and, I believe, by scientists. So I wanted to explore this capacity, which seemed to me was a distinctively human possession.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:39 --> 00:04:46)
Just in terms of basic definitions, how would you define imagination? What is it in basic terms?

Adam Zeman (00:04:46 --> 00:07:11)
It's not a term of science, of course. It's a tricky term. And I think one could distinguish at least three levels or 3 planes on which the term is used. So there's— perhaps it's simplest to start with the, what I think is the most colloquial of the 3 senses. So if I ask you to imagine an apple, you will, if you have imagery, and most of us do, form an image of an apple in its absence.

So the capacity to represent things in their absence is at least one of the core senses of imagination. There is a slightly technical sense in which the word's used by neuroscientists and psychologists, in which one could say that in perception one forms an image of the world. So the world casts an image on the retina, and that image then gives rise to a perceptual apprehension of the world, which is sometimes described as a perceptual image. So sometimes image is used to refer to your awareness of the here and now, the world around you. That's less colloquial than the second sense, which I mentioned first, the ability to represent things in their absence, your ability to imagine an apple or your front door or your best friend in his or her absence.

And then there is a third sense, a very broad sense in which imagination refers to our capacity to reconceive and reconfigure the world as we do when we are creative. And it's curious in a way that we use the same term for the ability that underpins creativity as we do for the ability that allows us to represent things in our absence, because they're rather separate, but they're interestingly related. I think there are good reasons why we use the same word, but those senses are somewhat distinct. As a kind of footnote, it's interesting to reflect on the etymology of imagination. So the root is apparently a Sanskritic word, which is something like E-Y-M, aim, which means to twin or to pair.

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:11 --> 00:08:08)
One thing I loved about your book was that it was just, it was good. It was good old-fashioned science writing, popularizing science for lay readers. There was so much more like richness to the book because you added in so many like personal reflections, personal experiences, literary references, historical references. And I liked all the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. One of the quotes I wanted to read was from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, because I wondered if this is maybe where the title of the book might have come from. And so in the play, the quote is, "And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation." and a name. And did that have something to do with your title, The Shape of Things Unseen?

Adam Zeman (00:08:09 --> 00:08:46)
I'm sure you're right that that was the origin, though it was filtered through my unconscious. So the title came to me, and it was only later that it occurred to me that, of course, I was borrowing from Shakespeare. Unconscious plagiarism. At least I'd modified it a little. Titles can be quite potent, can't they? And actually, I found The Shape of Things Unseen was quite an appropriate title, particularly given the interest which sort of coincidentally I developed in the course of writing the book in people's people who are unable to visualize or to experience sensory imagery, of course, have some sense of the shape of things unseen because they're not able to see them in their mind's eye.

Dustin Grinnell (00:08:46 --> 00:09:30)
It reminded me of when you talk about the ability to conjure up mental images. We'll get into the varying degrees of being able to, of having a mind's eye, the aphantasia, lacking completely versus hyperphantasia. There's an interesting test that I think you introduced me to a long time ago, which is if someone with aphantasia like myself, if you ask me the question, what's a darker green, like, um, like grass on a lawn or like a pine tree or something like that, I could, I could tell you the answer to that. I can't see it in my mind's eye, but I do know, right? And so that's very much unseen, and yet it has shaped—

Adam Zeman (00:09:30 --> 00:09:34)
Interestingly, ChatGPT also knows the answer to that question, though it's never seen anything.

Dustin Grinnell (00:09:37 --> 00:10:43)
There are several, like, big ideas in your book that you circle around, and one of them, I think, is that imagination, like you said at the beginning, it allows us to kind of spend time away from the present, you know, whether it's imagining the future or reminiscing on the past. And I wanted to just read a one short paragraph that I think encapsulates this idea, and then we can we can talk about it. But you, you say actually on page 2, we, we may not all be constantly engaged in creative work. We are all incessant visitors to imaginative worlds as we contemplate future possibilities, recollect vanished experiences, enjoy vicarious lives, travel into the imagined territories of science. Uh, deeply absorbed by these pursuits, we spend so much of our time in our heads that we often need to be reminded to return to the here and now. And yeah, talk about imagination's ability to dislocate us from the present reality, because I think that was a central theme in the book.

Adam Zeman (00:10:43 --> 00:11:54)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm always reminded in this context of watching my research assistant once crossing the rather busy road opposite my office, listening to music through his headphones and reading the book that was open in his hands. We do risk falling into potholes, don't we, when we become too absorbed in, in imaginary, imaginative worlds. But this has been studied now quite intensively. And it turns out that if you sample people's experience from moment to moment, we are very often lost in our thoughts, lost in daydreams, sort of 30 to 40% of the time people will report being absent from the here and now. And in fact, the single most common mental content is visual imagery, more common than awareness of the here and now. More common than any other mental content. So we really do, I think, in a now empirically proven sense, live in our thoughts. Of course, not constantly. It's very important that the world corrects those thoughts from time to time. And when you're playing football, I guess you're pretty much in the here and now, but much of the time we're occupied by imaginative processes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:11:55 --> 00:12:04)
You're saying we're spending more time playing, messing with visual images in our mind than we are perceiving the present.

Adam Zeman (00:12:04 --> 00:12:16)
If you give people buzzers and the buzzers sound at random intervals and you ask people to report what is occupying their awareness, the most common content is visual imagery, not here and now, but imagining something.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:16 --> 00:12:58)
In your book, you referenced a Harvard study. I think it was something about a wandering mind. And it said a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. So So what you explore in this context is the double-edged sword of, yeah, sure, like being able to plan and think and imagine and suggest and propose and create. It's all well and good and has wonderful outcomes, but it has the flip side of the coin is that too much of it can make us unhappy. In the most extreme case, you have rumination, which can lead to clinical depression. And I wonder what other ways imagination can kind of get us into trouble in this context.

Adam Zeman (00:12:59 --> 00:15:07)
We have to take account of what might happen in the future. And we, to understand ourselves, we need to take account of what's happened in the past. So I think there's a constant sort of tug in human lives between the wish to live fully in the present and the wish to understand ourselves longitudinally, so to speak, and to take account of the imagined past and the imagined future. So as you say, if you, people who dwell too much on the past, are often less happy than, than others. That was the, that was the finding of the Harvard study.

And, and as you say, when we become depressed, we tend to ruminate in a rather repetitive way on past experiences. It's problematic for us if we lose contact with reality, as people do in psychosis when they hallucinate. They generate images which seem to them, which they take for reality, but which deceive them. This reminds me to say, and perhaps this is something you want to come on to, that there's an idea currently that our awareness of the world around us is best regarded as a kind of controlled hallucination. So there is a sense in which everything we experience comes, comes from the brain, comes from our heads.

Dustin Grinnell (00:15:07 --> 00:17:00)
Uh, but it, it made me think too of, I wonder where our species would be like without the ability to imagine, the ability to imagine images for one. Like I have a, I had a colleague, this was, uh, 7, 8 years ago when I wrote this fictional story about someone with aphantasia and they curated it with a digital technology to create hyperphantasia. The idea of having hyperphantasia has always seemed like a superpower to me because I lack the ability to conjure up mental images. So to be able to kind of go to your favorite movie and play it back and stop it at your favorite scene, or even just picture a loved one who's passed, you know, it's all just seems like wonderful. What inspired the story was I had a colleague who she was at the top end of hyperphantasia.

So she told me over lunch once that when she was bored at work at her desk, she would just, uh, go into her mind and lift off and fly around, fly around the Boston area. And, uh, what an incredible power to be able to escape from one's present circumstances. That's a very benign example. But then you think of— you talked about this in your book— Viktor Frankl in the concentration camp, he literally used it as a survival tactic. He was able to dislocate from an incredibly grim, catastrophic situation to specifically like go into his apartment and walk down the street.

Adam Zeman (00:17:00 --> 00:17:32)
Absolutely. But to illustrate the, the tension that we were talking about a moment ago, um, There is a risk to indulging one's daydreams, and there's recently been described a syndrome of maladaptive daydreaming. Someone dissatisfied with their current situation and who, for whom daydreaming becomes somewhat addictive. They lose themselves in rich, absorbing daydreams about possible futures to the extent that they neglect the present, they neglect their current duties.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:33 --> 00:18:02)
Yeah, no, that, that's what happens in my story. The person becomes actually disabled because if you can imagine a world where everything is perfect, where you're perfect, where there's no pain, where you can do anything, why would you stay in reality? Reality is so messy and problematic. So I wonder how you pull those people out. I mean, it's interesting that you talked about a specific case of psychosis. In that regard. How do you lure them back to reality?

Adam Zeman (00:18:03 --> 00:19:42)
So, you know, psychosis is generally treated using medication in the hope that the brain in time will recover its equilibrium and regain its— it's recover its moorings, regain its links with reality. The, the approach in psychosis is typically pharmacological, whereas in PTSD, say post-traumatic stress disorder, where people's minds are invaded by intrusive images, behavioral approaches can be particularly effective. If I may, just going back a step, you were asking where we'd be without imagination, and I think the answer to that question does depend on which kind of imagination you have in mind. If the question is where would we be without creativity, I think the answer is we'd be a very long way back, wouldn't we? I mean, our whole, our lives are completely soaked through with culture, and culture is the product of individual acts of imagination in the sense of creativity.

Our culture is the result of innumerable small acts of creation. Creativity in this sense meaning the ability to make things that are both new and useful. So we'd be nowhere really if we lacked imagination in that sense. The question of what sensory imagery does for us is a really, really interesting one, which perhaps we'll come to. I think it's much less obvious what sensory imagery does for us than it is what human creativity does for us.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:42 --> 00:20:33)
Let's go to sensory experience. And you talk about there's a lot of variation in our ability to imagine various senses, whether it's sound or vision, or I met someone at the conference we were at who has a very strong mind's touch. Her dog had passed away, and she was able to kind of imagine her dog laying on her chest. She could feel the weight of her dog. That's a mind's touch. Really fascinating. You wrote about Mozart and his mind's ear, which seemed to be off the charts. He actually heard concertos in his head and he would rush to the notepad and have to write them down. So talk about our ability to imagine scents and the variation among us.

Adam Zeman (00:20:33 --> 00:22:36)
Yeah. So this is an invisible variation. I think each of us tends to take his or her own experience as the norm. So it comes It comes, for example, as a huge surprise for many people with aphantasia, many people who lack imagery, to discover that other people actually enjoy sensory experience, imaginative sensory experience. So typically people with aphantasia say, up till a certain point, I'd always assumed that talk of the mind's eye was just a metaphor, it was just a figure of speech.

And then at a certain moment I realized actually people really are seeing something in their mind's eye. We're very visual animals, so visualization is, particularly dominant, prominent example of sensory imagery. But you've mentioned the mind's ear. Many, many people enjoy something like the experience of hearing in their mind's ear. Many of us can imagine the feel of velvet as against the feel of satin or sandpaper.

There are people who appear to have imagery of smells and tastes. I think most of us can imagine running for a bus, say. So we have— most of us have motor imagery or kinesthetic kinesthetic imagery. You can imagine walking gently down a country lane as opposed to racing to catch a train. We can enjoy multimodal— well, most of us can enjoy multimodal sensory motor experience.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:36 --> 00:23:00)
So it's like in like sports psychology, like Olympians right now, skiers are preparing for their events, right? So they talk about, you know, visualize the power of visualization and running through the event in your mind's eye before doing it. And are you, are you saying it's almost like a neurological match between doing it?

Adam Zeman (00:23:01 --> 00:23:05)
There is, there is a neurological match. So Let me give you a couple of examples.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:06 --> 00:23:06)
If you—

Adam Zeman (00:23:06 --> 00:24:30)
there was a nice experiment showing that simply imagining exercising a finger increased strength over the course of a few weeks. It didn't increase muscle, it increased strength. So the effect was probably in— the effect was in the brain. Another experiment showed that getting novice pianists to practice a particular pattern of finger movements mentally enlarged the area of cortex in which those movements were represented just as much as actually practicing for real. Mental practice makes a difference.

I, when I was researching this, I particularly enjoyed, perhaps because of my medical background, I particularly enjoyed an article about surgeons who, it turns out, I've never thought about this, but it turns out that surgeons very often plan for and reflect on their operations, and they do so using imagery. They kind of replay the video, if you like, and they imagine themselves performing the operation and they think through what they're going to have to do, and afterwards they analyze difficulties they ran into or mistakes they made, again using sensory-motor imagery. So it's a widely used form of thought. Yes, there is a big overlap between what happens in the brain when you're seeing, for example, or hearing or moving, and what happens in the brain when you're imagining seeing or hearing or moving.

Dustin Grinnell (00:24:38 --> 00:25:48)
I want to run something by you. I instantly knew I wanted to ask you this question when I saw it. So basically, Alex Hannold, the famous free solo climber, he climbed a skyscraper. So this, this guy's really something. His latest stunt was to climb a huge skyscraper in Taiwan without ropes.

It was a live event. Everyone's wondering, is he going to fall and all that? But he said something really fascinating in one of the interviews. He said that he— the way he prepares for free solo, like big free solo events, is that he actually imagines the fear that he will experience while he's climbing without ropes in very gnarly situations., and that preempts him when he's actually in a fearful situation up there. So in his mind, he practices, yes, the physical movements, the maneuvers, but he also practices the emotional experiences he knows he will encounter.

And he's that much better able to handle fear in the moment when it's actually happening. So that's a different thing. That's not playing the piano. That's playing out emotions. What do you think about that?

Adam Zeman (00:25:48 --> 00:27:22)
No, that's fascinating. So it sounds as if he's sort of able to inoculate himself against the emotion to some degree. I mean, it makes sense. The principle that I've described applies very widely. So it applies, for example, to pain.

So the brain regions engaged by pain overlap considerably with the pain regions engaged when you are looking at somebody in pain, especially if they're close to you. So if you look at a loved one in pain, that will activate areas that are engaged in the brain when you are in pain. And imagining pain or remembering pain can also engage those areas. So there was a study showing that if you looked at brain activity when somebody was subjected to sort of moderately painful stimulus, you know, a little burn on the skin kind of thing that experimenters use, which is bearable but distinctly unpleasant, remembering that episode a few hours later, or it may be the next day, engaged almost exactly the same set of brain regions as experiencing the pain. So it's a, it's a general principle that experiencing, remembering the experience, imagining the experience, and watching somebody else undergoing the experience will engage certainly a substantially overlapping set of brain areas.

They're not, not identical. There are differences as you'd expect, but there's substantial overlap. I'll give you another example. And this is quite old work. There is a particular brain region which is strongly engaged by disgust, gets engaged if you are disgusted.

Dustin Grinnell (00:27:22 --> 00:27:39)
This is a little bit something I hadn't thought about, but does it work with affection and love? Like, if we imagine a loved one versus seeing one in person? Like, is there a neurological signature?

Adam Zeman (00:27:39 --> 00:28:13)
I believe that there is. I'm trying to— I'm trying to call to mind the evidence. I think that Semir Zeki has done work along these lines, but I would need to remind myself. He's looked at the neurological signature of the experience of beauty, and he also looked. I'm trying to remember what the details of the experiment in which he studied romantic partners was, but I think broadly the answer, I think, is yes. Was the question going in particular to a particular destination?

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:13 --> 00:28:29)
No, it just reminded me of the movie Contact. It was one of my favorite movies based off a Carl Sagan novel. And the movie kind of plays with this idea of, can you prove love? How do you prove experiences that aren't quantifiable, that aren't measurable.

Adam Zeman (00:28:29 --> 00:28:43)
Yeah. Well, so the, um, the pain work I was describing certainly speaks to that. So you, you have a much stronger neural response to seeing somebody you love in pain than you do to seeing a stranger.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:43 --> 00:28:50)
Uh, just out of curiosity, what is the brain region that is in question here?

Adam Zeman (00:28:50 --> 00:29:18)
It's a, it's a matrix of brain regions, as it's called, which includes, um, the amygdala areas in the cingulate cortex, areas in the orbitofrontal cortex. It actually maps quite closely onto— this is the set of brain regions which is involved in pleasure, essentially the regions in the, in the brainstem and in the limbic system and in areas of the frontal cortex.

Dustin Grinnell (00:29:18 --> 00:29:58)
I wanted to get back to something that you touched on earlier about perception and this phrase of controlled hallucination. You write about this, like, very fascinating idea that, like, maybe our perception of reality, of the world, isn't passive. We're not just, like, receiving data from the world, but we're in some ways helping to create it. I guess my question is, like, to what degree are we, like, truly objectively sensing what's outside of us versus creating a controlled hallucination? Like, how much How much of our perception is an actual creative act?

Adam Zeman (00:29:58 --> 00:32:55)
Well, I would say it is creative act. It may seem at first sight a kind of outrageous thing to say, but I think there's very compelling evidence for it. And it's nicely summarized by my friend, colleague Anil Seth, who says that in some ways perception is more inside out than it is outside in. The evidence for this comes really from two main directions. One is kind of set of psychological data and reflections and the other more neurological.

In the psychological domain, I mean, we've all come across illusions in which things, when you measure them, turn out to be different to the way they seem. So for example, in the book, there's a nice image of my partner, in fact, running across a bridge. There are 3 images, each of them is the same size, but placed at different points on the bridge. And she looks much bigger when she's further away. And that's because your mind makes an unconscious correction for distance.

You can't overcome it. When you measure the image, you find it's the same size, but it looks different. Another example would be the Necker cube. So you— this is just a cube drawn on a piece of paper, which as you look at it, changes in depth. And clearly nothing's changing on the page, but your perception of it is changing.

The man in the moon is another example. There is no man in the moon, but I can't help finding him there. And then, um, as a kind of extreme example, I think I relate the, the story in the book of an experience I had as a teenager when I slept in a garden room. Um, one night I must have forgotten to close the curtains, and I woke up in the early hours, and there was a burglar standing at the foot of my bed wearing a striped shirt. And he was so compellingly real that I shouted at him, and within a couple of seconds he dissolved into a pattern of light and dark shining through the slats of the fence that I was looking at through the windows.

That was an utterly compelling hallucination. So a good example of the generative nature of perception. So there's that set of psychological observations which takes one to the conclusion that perception is generative. And then there's the neurological evidence, which is in a way made much simpler. Our brains are constantly at work.

They're constantly consuming oxygen and glucose. If they stop, perception stops, you know. So, so clearly the experience stops. Experience— our human experience is entirely dependent on the, on the metabolic activity of metabolic and neural activity occurring within our brains. Um, so clearly there's, there's some biological process at work which is responsible for experience and in particular perception.

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:55 --> 00:33:35)
When we met, it was 5 or 6 years ago during a conference that you helped put together. I believe it was on the heels of the research that you had started in 2015 about mental imagery when you coined the term aphantasia, lacking a mind's eye. I was wondering, could you bring us back to that moment in 2015 when you started to study those like 21 patients who didn't have a mind's eye and how that snowballed into incredible amounts of public interest? And yeah, just talk about mental imagery and the variation of it, and we can discuss aphantasia and hyperphantasia as you as you like.

Adam Zeman (00:33:35 --> 00:36:34)
It may be worth telling the story from, from the beginning, making a little detour. I first encountered somebody who couldn't visualize in 2003, I think, when I was referred a patient who had lost the ability to imagine, which wasn't a symptom that I'd ever come across before, and I was intrigued by it. He turned out to be a very delightful man, excellent research participant, and indeed it did seem that he had selectively lost the capacity to visualize following a cardiac procedure, and we did a brain imaging study in which we showed that when he looked at faces, his brain activated quite normally, but when he tried to imagine them, he failed to activate those visual regions that most people with imagery activate when they visualize. So I thought this was an interesting case. We wrote a case report.

I didn't really expect too much more to come of it. The story was then picked up by Carl Zimmer, an American science journalist who wrote an article in Discover Magazine about This patient, and then over the course of the next 2 or 3 years, I and my colleagues were contacted by 21 people who said, we're just like MX, the person described in this Discover article, except we've never been able to visualize. We've always realized that there's something a little bit different about us. When other people reminisce about the past, they seem to have a visual experience of what they're remembering. We don't.

And these 21 people told quite a consistent story. We sent them a vividness questionnaire which just measures how vivid your imagery is, asking people— asking you to visualize 16 scenes, and we asked them a set of common sense questions. And when we came to describe them in a paper in 2015, we thought that this phenomenon deserved a name. Up till then, there had been some reports in the neurological literature, but the terms were pretty unwieldy: defective revisualization and visual irreminiscence. So we thought we could do better than that.

I, I asked a friend who I'd studied the classics and he said, why don't you borrow Aristotle's term for the mind's eye, which is phantasia, and tag an A on at the end? So that was how aphantasia, the term aphantasia, was born. And it caught on. So there was press interest in it. I gave a 3 or 4 minute interview on a breakfast TV show.

When I came back to my room, there were mails coming into my inbox faster than I could count them. And since then, I think I've been contacted by getting on for 20,000 people. Mostly describing aphantasia, so lifelong absence of imagery, but some describing imagery as vivid as real seeing at the opposite end of the spectrum, so hyperphantasia. And it's turned out that these— this contrast is really a really rather interesting one. There seems— there seems to be a pattern of associations with, uh, with aphantasia and hyperphantasia.

They're not, if you like, they're not isolated psychological quirks. They, they seem to travel with a number of other variations. I don't think of them as disorders. I think of them very much as intriguing variations in human experience. I don't think they're problematic in themselves.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:34 --> 00:36:54)
How do you account for the explosion of interest? It occurred to me at the conference that we started at mental imagery for sure, like, oh, you can't see things in your mind too? Interesting, it always blossomed into a bigger conversation about how we perceive the world. And I wonder if that has something to do with it. We don't really think about how other people think.

Adam Zeman (00:36:54 --> 00:38:20)
I think that because we live so much of our life in our heads, we are intrigued to discover that the lives other people live in their heads may be very different to the lives we lead. So I think we're fascinated to discover that there are these big variations in experience. I think people with aphantasia were pleased that they had a sort of flag to fly under, a term to describe their experience, which had been lacking until then. And they were, they were glad that some attention was being paid to, to their experience. And people with imagery were intrigued to find that there were others who lacked it. It's curious that the topic hadn't been highlighted sooner. So Francis Galton, who was a psychologist working in the 19th century, was the first person to try to measure visual imagery, and he actually recognized that there were people who seemed to lack it. He that there were among his participants, there were people whose power of visualization was zero, as he put it. And he thought this was more common among scientists, but he didn't really pursue the observation, and nor did anybody else. There was, I think there's just one paper by an American psychologist who himself lacked imagery, who sampled imagery in his students sort of over the intervening centuries. So for some reason, it was just a blind spot in psychological research. There'd been masses of work on imagery generally, but it had focused on, if you like, the typical imager, um, and had ignored the extremes, which, which turned out to be really interesting.

Dustin Grinnell (00:38:20 --> 00:39:31)
One of the things that interested me as someone with aphantasia was perhaps the correlation with deficits like, uh, poor autobiographical memory, inability to picture lost loved ones, inability to visualize the future, whatever you want. But then there are also where, like, some perceived benefits worth exploring. And in your book, you write that, you say, sad as it is to lack the ability to visualize those we love, people with aphantasia seem to move on more easily than most of us from a breakup or a bereavement. Lacking the glamorous impact of imagery helps them live in the the present. And yep, that did hit, hit my personal experience. And it also was sort of validating in a way, because I thought of myself potentially as like less feeling or more unfeeling than others. But it was correlated with my inability to picture these things, to picture the traumatic imagery. It didn't catch me and therefore didn't hold as much, and it lessened the emotional impact. So I wonder, how have you been thinking about the pros and cons, the benefits and drawbacks of imagery.

Adam Zeman (00:39:31 --> 00:41:30)
Yeah, I mean, just to echo what you say, many people at Fantasia have told me that they've, they've been worried at times that they're cold because they, they don't seem to be as troubled as their friends and relations by, by a breakup, moving on, a bereavement, say. Um, but, but then they, they come to the conclusion that it does relate to the lack of imagery. Imagery, imagery has been described as an emotional amplifier, and if you, if you lack that amplification, it's, it's going to have an impact on your emotional experience and responses. So, so yeah, I think one of the pluses of aphantasia probably is what you might call presentness, the ability to, to, to live a little more in the here and now than those of us who are being distracted by regrets about the future or longings for— sorry, regrets about the past or, or, or longings for events in the future. This is still work in progress, but it does look as if having aphantasia nudges people towards working in STEM professions, so, you know, science, maths, IT, technology. And that makes a kind of sense because I think, other things being equal, people with aphantasia have a more abstract take on, on the world, if you like. Craig Venter is an example. He's a very celebrated American scientist, first person to decode the genome and I think to create artificial life. And he got in touch not long after The time Aphantasia was coined and said, you know, I've known this about myself for a long time and I'd always assumed that it was a help to me in my scientific work not to have my head cluttered with images. I guess those are probably the two of the principal advantages, and together with presentness may come some protection from psychological difficulties which are fueled or fed by imagery, like PTSD, for example, and, you know, possibly psychosis. I think that again needs a lot more work, whether vivid imagery is a risk factor for psychosis is is uncertain, but there is a little bit of evidence that it, that it is.

Dustin Grinnell (00:41:30 --> 00:42:34)
Yeah, I, I sometimes think of this in the context of PTSD, and if I were to be sort of intercepted by an involuntary image or thought of a traumatic experience, it would be just that, a thought. It would be imageless. And if it were not, if it were, if all of a sudden something troubling ripped into my head, it would be way more powerful. And so I think that people with aphantasia may have some sort of vaccination against PTSD. But there's always a flip side too, because I've heard one friend said they comfort themselves often by imagining someone who's not there. They can put themselves back into a positive experience in life somewhere they traveled. They can hang out with old friends during like the golden age of college or something. And this is a source of comfort, actual comfort. So yeah, while I won't be burdened by traumatic images, I also can't comfort myself and get that emotional payoff. There's definitely interesting implications of the spectrum.

Adam Zeman (00:42:34 --> 00:44:07)
And actually, Aristotle wrote the mind never thinks without a phantasm. But it's, you know, people with aphantasia really get along very well. In our small, a small study we did quite early on where we compared a group of about 25 people with aphantasia, 25 with hyperphantasia, and 25 with average imagery, IQ was actually slightly but significantly higher in the aphantasic group. So I don't know that that necessarily holds out with huge samples, but it, but it just makes the point that certainly it's not an intellectual disadvantage. And One fact that is now abundantly clear is that aphantasia doesn't preclude imagination in the broad sense.

So there are many examples of aphantasic people who are highly imaginative, creative, productive. You're a novelist. I've mentioned Craig Venter, Ed Catmull, past president of Pixar Disney, winner of the Turing Prize, Blake Ross, creator of Firefox, Mozilla. So people creative in a whole variety of areas. And one nice surprise in our research was that and we were contacted by a large number of aphantasic artists.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:07 --> 00:45:02)
Yeah, I always say that I figured out how to write without a mind's eye. And when I realized I had something to call that, now I could still write because, you know, there's such a bias to mental imagery, particularly in the narrative arts. You know, there's just the bias that people think that you have to see the scene before you write it. You're just like transcribing some mental image you've already worked out. But it's really not that. In my case, I can't. So I may have a concept of a scene, you know, two— these two people will be in it, they'll be saying these things. And then what I can do is I can arrange the telling details in such a way that I know it will manufacture a visual image in your mind. So it's like, I don't have to see it to get you to see it. I think and imagine just fine without the mental imagery, but it's taking a long time for people to understand that.

Adam Zeman (00:45:02 --> 00:45:10)
That has to be exactly right. But I think conversely, people who do have imagery probably do, do, can and do use it creatively.

Dustin Grinnell (00:45:10 --> 00:46:32)
They do. And I'm aware of all the writers I know actually are pretty high on the imagery scale and they see it, they see it first. So, and I think, wow, that, that'd be nice. You know, it'd be nice to see it first. Um, because I think really I'm sort of, uh, manufacturing it.

In a way. But I figured it out. At our conference, there was a visual artist, and he was so troubled by this realization that he didn't have a mind's eye that he said he was giving up art. And I found that really, you know, tragic in a way, because, you know, you can still make art without it. Like, now, it would have been better for him to have never learned of this at all, it seems.

It very much occurred to me that we could have talked about mental imagery for like 90 minutes. But this book is about imagination. Another big part of your book is imagination in the context of creativity, the way we traditionally think about it. Imagination is like a creative act. And I kind of wanted to talk about some of the things you touched on, one of which is maybe like personality traits that lead to creative thought, one of which is openness to experience, part of the Big Five.

Adam Zeman (00:46:32 --> 00:53:51)
I have a little mnemonic for the psychological capacities which I think underpin creativity in the book, which is SKIDS. So the first 3 letters, S-K-I, stand for skills. So I think there are very, very few, if any, human creative achievements which presuppose considerable skill in a particular domain. Next, D for detachment, which is really a meld of the ability to control our thoughts and behavior and our ability to detach ourselves from, from the world by using symbolic technologies of various kinds. But then the final S in SKIDS stands for spontaneity, and there is a kind of wildcard in creativity which plays into openness.

We have to be open to take advantage of this. Many, many creative people describe their creative ideas, sometimes in their entirety, themes from musical composition, just arriving in their minds. And they clearly don't arrive from nowhere, but they aren't the outcome of a kind of deliberate, controlled, voluntary process. And one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that I think we understand something now from neuroscience of what it is that makes possible these creative moments, these moments of spontaneous creation when an idea appears in someone's mind. I won't give you examples of spontaneous creativity of this kind.

There are many to be found in the book, but I'll say a little perhaps about the— unless you'd like me to, but I'll say a little about neuroscience. Probably the area which is most relevant and least well-known is the study of the resting brain, which has been a really fascinating area of neuroscience over the last couple of decades. So for a long time, when people performed brain imaging studies to see what happens in the brain when people are thinking, if you like, they would compare one condition with another. So what's different between reading a word and looking at a number? Over the last 20 years, there has grown an interest in what happens in the brain at rest.

And it turns out that if you— if somebody simply lies in a brain scanner you can detect activity within all the networks of the active brain. So for example, there's a set of visual regions at the back of the brain in which all the areas talk to one another. Their activity is synchronized within them, as you'd expect, really. There's a set of motor areas which control movement. And again, even when we're lying still, there's activity within these areas.

They're intercommunicating. A particularly fascinating set of areas came to light about 20 years ago, which has been called the default mode network because it's actually the set of areas which is most active in the resting brain. It turns out that when you examine the function of this network, it is particularly active in circumstances in which people are remembering the past, anticipating the future, thinking about other minds, so thinking about other people's thoughts and thinking about moral decisions. So just the kinds of things we do when we are daydreaming, really. You know, you'll think about something you enjoyed yesterday or someone who offended you yesterday or some slightly problematic decision about what you're going to do tomorrow.

So this is the set of areas that's most active at rest in the brain, set of regions which seems to be involved in, if you like, in daydreaming. And it turns out that when people are actually performing creative acts, when they're engaged in creative activities, this network is active because I think one has to kind of dip down into one's past, one's memories to generate creative ideas for the future. And the default mode network is very much involved in recollecting the past. But this default mode network during creative acts is in an unusually harmonious relationship to an executive network, a set of regions which tends to switch on when the default mode network switches off. So if I give you a task like telling me as many words beginning with the letter P as you can in the next minute, that will engage your default mode network, engage your executive network, switch off your default mode network.

So normally they are anti-correlated, but in creative acts they are in a more harmonious than usual relationship. And they are also interacting with a network that's been called the salience network, which is involved in attributing importance, in attributing value to, to things in the world and to our own pursuits. So these networks are all, um, at work in the resting brain. They are in a kind of harmonious relationship during creative acts. And I think understanding this autonomous dynamic activity within the brain gives us a much better understanding of the spontaneous processes which are involved in creativity than we, than we had before, when the brain was regarded as really a reactive organ.

And the, the most common analogy was with a computer. We now have an understanding of it as a highly dynamic living organism, if you like, or organ, which spontaneous activity of the kind that underpins creativity is quite— occurs quite naturally. Another example which I discuss in the book is the phenomenon of replay. Turns out that if you explore a new environment, cells will become active in your hippocampus as you explore the environments. The hippocampus is a region in the temporal lobes which contains a kind of spatial map of the environment.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:51 --> 00:55:02)
I'm working on a short story. There's really two processes that I'm always toggling back and forth with in my brain, which is, you know, the default mode network and the executive functioning. So the executive prefrontal cortex work is like, you know, at the computer willfully moving things around and banging things out and solving problems essentially. But then it's, you know, you hit, you hit an impasse, you don't know where you're going and you just back off and you go for a walk or have a shower or just live your life. And that's when the more unconscious processes, the default mode network, that's when it starts to kick off things, connections, patterns, and you just write them down and then you go back to the computer for work, work. Something about the creative life is developing like a facility with that toggling back and forth, being comfortable with it and kind of knowing that if you are stuck, just throw it to your unconscious, you know, and it'll work itself out. And being able to work— you talked about working with uncertainty a lot too. And the John Keats's negative capability, that's a big part of it too.

Adam Zeman (00:55:02 --> 00:55:31)
Yeah, I had a lovely interview with the musician David Gray, which I talk about in the book, and he says that when he's in a particularly creative phase, he has the sense that his mind is both more objective and more subjective simultaneously than it normally is. And I think he's talking about just what you describe. There can be kind of alternation between those two states, but there are times, aren't there, where you're in both kind of drawing from the depths, but you're also controlling from above, right?

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:31 --> 00:57:02)
And to kind of know when to turn those on and off. You know, being a creative person is being receptive but also willful, going back and forth, you know, knowing the kind of limits of both. The other— I feel like, you know, if your next book's going to be Fantasia, you gotta write about— write a book on creativity. Uh, you know, I think that would be fascinating, and it always does well, any book on creativity. Does extremely well with the business community, with, you know, there's a lot in this, in your book too, about like an appreciation for art and artists' work.

And you, you taught, you said the task of art is to kind of evoke the living texture of experience, which I thought was really interesting. You met with a writer, Philip Pullman, and you talked, you visited his home and talked about his writing process. And I want to just read this this short portion here where you got some insights into his process. He said, he told me that he rarely needs to stop and think, entering a mild dissociative state during his productive hours. He plans only minimally.

Adam Zeman (00:57:02 --> 00:57:22)
There's so much to say there. I think that training is crucial, isn't it? I mean, I, I think there's no discovery favors the prepared mind, as, as I think Pasteur said. A lot of prep, a lot of training, a lot of preparation has to have happened in the background. But once it's happened, yes, then the spontaneous unconscious processes are key.

Dustin Grinnell (00:57:22 --> 00:57:31)
Yeah. And it's something they don't teach you in MFA programs too. You can learn craft, that's great. You need to know it. But how to actually create is another thing that you have to get on your own.

Adam Zeman (00:57:31 --> 00:58:07)
I don't know if you're a Philip Pullman fan, but those who have read The Northern Lights will know that one of the heroes of the book, Lyra, has a strange instrument called the alethiometer. She uses to— I forget whether to see future events or to see distant events, but so there's a kind of precognitive telepathic function. And the aletheometer can only be used when you're in a certain state of mind. You have to clear your mind to make it possible to use this instrument. And I think it's just a metaphor for the imagination.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:07 --> 00:59:02)
Your book is so comprehensive. One of the things I want to talk about is, you know, mental disorders in the context of imagination. So really fascinating aspect of your exploration, where you talk about the placebo effect, you talk about hysterical symptoms, psychosomatic disorders, really nice science writing, you weave in stories of, of patients and and research and bring it to life. And I want to talk about hysteria first. This is something that's always fascinated me. Even myself, I've had what you could call psychosomatic symptoms. Talk a little bit about how these— how psychosomatic symptoms or hysterical symptoms, when they're not a neurological illness, how is it— how is it happening? What is the— what is the mechanism of hysterical blindness, or—

Adam Zeman (00:59:03 --> 01:01:38)
That's become a somewhat pejorative term, and The politically correct term is now functional neurological disorder, which has its advantages and disadvantages. But to give a specific example, somebody who appears to be having an epileptic fit, who may even be admitted to hospital because the initial impression has been of a prolonged seizure, may turn out not to be, but to be having what's called a dissociative attack or what used to be a psychogenic seizure, an attack which looks very like an epileptic seizure, but simply isn't when you you record brain activity, you don't see the signature of epilepsy. You see essentially normal wakeful activity. I describe in the book a patient who I encountered when I was a young neurologist who had a disabling spasm in one leg, which one of my senior colleagues then induced by rubbing one shoulder and relieved by rubbing the opposite shoulder. So often suggestion is quite powerful in the context of of these disorders, but they're common, they're often disabling, and they are really rather mysterious, and they often excite strong emotions in doctors.

So when doctors discover that there actually isn't an underlying disease, the response can be one of indignation. There is a risk, and it's a risk that has to be avoided at all costs really, of blaming people for having such disorders because All the current evidence suggests that people are not aware that they are manufacturing them. They're not aware that they're putting anything on, though it is rather as if they were. So that's— so they're a puzzle, these disorders. And in the book, I suggest that, that three key elements are involved, and the third of them is relevant to imagination.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:38 --> 01:01:38)
It's—

Adam Zeman (01:01:38 --> 01:03:50)
So one of the sources of psychosomatic symptoms seems to be excessive attention to a process that that happens perfectly satisfactorily until we start paying attention. There's often a kind of emotional component. So many people who develop such problems have a background of anxiety or depression or trauma. Sexual abuse has classically been one of the sources of hysteria and functional neurological disorder. And indeed, that is the case.

It's not by any means universal, but it's certainly in the mix. But then there's a third element which was very nicely described by a 19th-century neurologist as illness according to idea. You have a notion of an illness which perhaps you've seen because a close relative has suffered from it, perhaps a friend has had it, and you're terrified that you may develop it, and you kind of bring the disorder into being as a consequence of your imaginative preoccupation with it. So I, I, I tell the story, or I, I report a case in the book described by that 19th century urologist who's called Russell Reynolds, of a, of a young woman who had cared for her father, who'd fallen on hard times, um, had to return to work unexpectedly and had a stroke. And she then had to live in and look after him, and she became preoccupied with the the possibility that she might have a stroke.

Dustin Grinnell (01:03:50 --> 01:04:26)
I remember reading a book by a neurologist, I think, uh, recently. It was called Is It All in My Head? And, um, there was a big exploration on, on, uh, like, um, social contagions. And I think there was recently like a On TikTok, there were like influencers who were, uh, that had Tourette's syndrome and they were kind of exploring their Tourette's, uh, their symptoms. And then, um, like users who didn't have Tourette's started developing Tourette's symptoms, which is a, like a psychogenic disorder in that case.

Adam Zeman (01:04:26 --> 01:04:57)
Yeah. We're very good learners, aren't we? We're, we're, we're, we're very, we're, we're a highly imitative, highly mimetic species. It's, it's, it's often to our advantage.. But in this particular context, it can be to our disadvantage. And just to reemphasize, most people with functional neurological disorder are just as puzzled as, as their doctors are. So it's, you know, it, it's not a deliberate simulation. It's, um, the, the processes which give rise to it are happening somehow below the threshold of consciousness as, as a rule.

Dustin Grinnell (01:04:57 --> 01:06:17)
They said like they are always very kind of aware of their guts. They're all— they're always just kind of focused on it, you know? And, and I wondered out loud, like, could that have something to do with it? Could you try to forget it? Could you try to break that?

Could you try to uncouple that? And that in and of itself might be helpful. And that just more or less falls on deaf ears, unfortunately. You know, it is a good insight and actually could be very therapeutic, but it's just not helpful. I'm sure you experience this all the time in clinic, which is you need to find some positive strategy.

Adam Zeman (01:06:17 --> 01:06:49)
So there are many examples in treatment of a functional neurological disorder. I think one I mentioned in the book A colleague treated a patient who had become almost unable to walk forwards, but when asked to walk backwards, found he could do so, and asked to imagine skating, found he could do so. I have a lovely video of another young teacher who'd become unable to walk, but when she was put on a treadmill, found she could run.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:49 --> 01:06:53)
As soon as the activity was varied a little in a way which Did that break the spell?

Adam Zeman (01:06:53 --> 01:06:54)
Yeah, it broke the spell.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:54 --> 01:06:58)
It broke the spell. And they could walk again?

Adam Zeman (01:06:58 --> 01:07:18)
With a bit of assistance from a physio, yep, yep. So full recovery is entirely possible, but you need skilled help from people who understand the mechanisms of this kind of process. And what you don't need is to be told that it's all in your head and you should pull yourself together.

Dustin Grinnell (01:07:18 --> 01:07:50)
Because that doesn't work. That's very invalidating. And it tends to drive people away, I think, from the healing process. Yeah. The last part of the conversation is, is, you know, you putting together a book, you said you thought about this many years ago, before you even started studying aphantasia. I just wonder, you know, how was the experience of going from clinician and research scientist to writing popular science? Like, why Not everybody makes that leap. You did. How was it, and why did you want to do it?

Adam Zeman (01:07:50 --> 01:08:58)
I came— I have, in a way, a background in literature. That was a particular interest at school. So I've always been very, very happy to have opportunities to write. I'd written a couple of books previously, one about consciousness and another, a kind of introduction to the brain, level by level, from atom to psyche, with a case history at each level of description. So I knew, I knew that I enjoyed writing.

This particular book had been in my mind probably for 20 years, and I'd had one or two false starts. And I think actually COVID was a help with it because I, I had a, um, a little bit more, more time than usual and was able to focus on it in a way I'd, I'd not before. As you say, the aphantasia/hyperphantasia work, um, wasn't the initial trigger, but it But it helped, I think, because it, it meant that I was thinking about imagery and imagination in my research as well as in my sort of more philosophical moments at leisure. And I, I enormously enjoy writing. I'm always happiest when I have something to tinker with.

Dustin Grinnell (01:08:58 --> 01:09:33)
You can, you can take yourself off and lose yourself in the project in a very therapeutic way, even if We don't get all the things we want, like we can only make art for money, or that's all we can do, or we don't achieve the level of, you know, notoriety that we may want. We have something to do. We have somewhere to go to put our mind, to forget about our problems. That in and of itself is medicine. And perhaps one reason why we make art is to make life a little easier to live, and or at least forget about how hard it can be.

Adam Zeman (01:09:33 --> 01:09:38)
It allows moments of flow, which are very rewarding. It's intrinsically rewarding, isn't it?

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:38 --> 01:09:38)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:38 --> 01:10:29)
And I think it was the creativity researcher Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi, he wrote a famous book on creativity and this TED Talk, he talked about how the more moments of flow you have, the happier you are scientifically. To kind of close, maybe close with a bit of lessons you learned from exploring human imagination. So much of this exploration is like the double-edged sword nature of it all. We can dislocate ourselves from the present, which allows us to plan and, you know, you know, imagine future scenarios, but it can also lead us into darkness. We can become preoccupied with traumatic events and so on and so forth. So how do we get a better control on our imagination? How can we get the best of it without— while avoiding our pitfalls? I wonder I wonder if you thought about that in the process.

Adam Zeman (01:10:29 --> 01:11:48)
Yeah, I mean, that's really a general question about mental hygiene, really, rather than imagination specifically. I think, I think we just— we, we all of us have somehow to, to walk this, this tightrope. Um, we need— we all of us need satisfaction in the present. We all of us need to enjoy the here and now. But I don't think any human life would be complete If we were entirely immersed in the present, we need to have a sense of where we come from and where we are going. So we somehow need to apportion our lives between present enjoyment and long-term possibility. I agree with what you said earlier about the, the kind of toggling that we all learn to achieve in, in creative pursuits between receptive state in which we, we kind of lower a bucket down into the, into the well of our unconscious, and a more active state in which we, we examine what comes up and see what kind of use we, we can make of it. And I guess we have to toggle in the same way between present enjoyment and longer-term projects. So I think it's a, it's a big, it's a big human challenge. I don't think there's any simple, simple answer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:48 --> 01:12:24)
Oh, no, you've picked a very complicated topic. So there is no simple answer. It kind of makes me think of maybe what meditation is for. It's the idea of just getting a, like, a look at your own mind, watching it, so to speak. Watch the watcher. Developing that awareness of yourself and your own thinking processes maybe is a goal here so that you can see, oh, maybe I've been spending a little too much time dislocated from the present. Or maybe I should be in my head a little bit more, using it, using its powers. But to just see both, to see where you are in the proportions.

Adam Zeman (01:12:24 --> 01:13:49)
And if I had any key takeaways, insights from the research that the book involved, and I think there were two things really. One, I am, you know, as we all should be, hugely impressed by the astonishing creativity of human minds. It's human creativity is irrepressible and we're surrounded by it, and it really is something to celebrate. And at the same time, I was impressed by the ubiquitous creativity of our experience moment to moment. So I really do believe that even if we're not at all engaged in creative pursuits, we are performing a kind of act of creation in every moment of our lives. And I was I close the book with a graffiti which I came across as I was jogging through London. I was sort of musing on, on the book's themes, and I just found this on, on a wall: "I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in distress the shining light of your own being." Written, I think, by an Iranian poet in the 15th century or so. So I, I do believe all of us contain a kind of shining light which underlies our creative experience of the world from moment to moment. And if we had a better kind of complexity detector in our heads, we'd be astonished by the complexity that each of us contains within his head, or her head, I should say.

Dustin Grinnell (01:13:49 --> 01:13:52)
I literally was going to read that quote out.

Dustin Grinnell (01:13:52 --> 01:13:52)
It's great.

Dustin Grinnell (01:13:52 --> 01:14:09)
Great way to conclude. It makes me think of the Camus quote, I think, you know, in a winter, there is a An infinite light or infinite summer or something like that.

Adam Zeman (01:14:10 --> 01:14:10)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:14:10 --> 01:14:12)
And what are you working on next?

Adam Zeman (01:14:12 --> 01:14:36)
These imagery extremes. So I'm planning to write a book about aphantasia and hypophantasia, which have opened all kinds of interesting windows, which I want to climb through. I'm very much enjoying my conversations with people who lack imagery or have it in abundance. I think it's a topic which takes you rather quickly to a quite intimate place in people's lives.

Dustin Grinnell (01:14:36 --> 01:14:54)
In how they perceive the world and how it differs and that there was variation we weren't aware of, basically. We thought we all thought the same. Turns out that was not right. Let us know where we can get your book. Let us know where we can follow your work and find you online.

Adam Zeman (01:14:54 --> 01:15:20)
I think from next week, it's The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination will be published in paperback in February. You can visit a personal website. I have an academic one. The work on extreme imagery has been under the auspices of the Eyes Mind Project, as we've called it. So there is an Eyes Mind Project website at the University of Edinburgh. So if you're interested in finding out more about that particular line of work, you'll find plenty there.

Dustin Grinnell (01:15:20 --> 01:15:35)
Well, I'm looking forward to your next book. I, I can't wait to read it. And thank you so much for coming on to talk about the Shape of Things Unseen, and I really appreciate your time.

Dustin Grinnell (01:15:35 --> 01:16:07)
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Adam Zeman. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with someone and starting a conversation. And if you've got a minute, I've got a new survey up and I'd love your feedback on the show. Just head to www.curiouslypod.com/feedback. Tell me what you like, what you don't like, what you want more of, what you want less of. I'll read every response, and there's a good chance your feedback will shape future episodes. Thanks again for listening, and stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.