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 1/4 and 1/2 of our
waking hours with our minds wandering elsewhere, away from
the present moment. Doctor Adam Zieman'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 Plake'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 Doctor Zeaman also reveals
imaginations Darker side. A wandering mind can be an
unhappy mind. Excessive rumination contributes
to depression and our ability to simulate future scenarios, and
sometimes trap us in anxiety. From psychospat illness to the
placebo effect. From living with vivid mental
imagery to living without it, Doctor Zeeman shows how
imagination operates at every level of human consciousness.
Today on the podcast, we explore the science of imagination.
A 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.
Doctor Adam Zeeman, welcome to the show.
Thank. You for having me?
Today we're going to be talking about your 2025 book.
I'll lift it up here. It's called The Shape of Things
Unseen, a new science of imagination.
I found it to be a really fascinating, comprehensive look
at, you know, human imagination. You, you kind of made it hard
for a, 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 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 in 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?
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 U.S. special,
you know, whether, 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, and I
believe by scientists. So I wanted to explore this
capacity, which seemed to me was a a distinctively human
possession. Just in terms of like basic
definitions, how would you define imagination?
Like what is it in basic terms? It's not a term of science, of
course, it's a tricky, it's a tricky term.
And I think 1 can distinguish at least three levels or three
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 three 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 that is at least one of the core
senses of imagination. There is a a slightly technical
sense in which the words used by neuroscientists and
psychologists in which one could say that in perception 1 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, of the here and there, 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, in his or her
absence. And then there is a third sense,
a much a very broad sense in which imagination refers to our
capacity to to reconceive and reconfigure the world, 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, they're rather,
they're rather separate, but they're, but they're
interestingly related. I think there are good reasons
why we use the same word, but those senses are a somewhat
distinct. As a kind of footnote, it's
interesting to reflect on the etymology of imagination, so
that the root is apparently a Sanskritic word, which is
something like eym, aim, which means to twin or to pair.
So that idea of twinning pairing is at the root of not just
imagination but also mimesis and imitation.
And one can see how that that idea of twinning or pairing
suddenly underpins the idea of representing things in their
absence, as we do when we think about that apple that isn't
isn't in the room. But it also makes sense in terms
of forming A perceptual image, because then you're twinning
within yourself, the world, the world around you, using your
senses. 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'd liked all the quotes at the beginning of each chapter.
One of the quotes I wanted to read was from Shakespeare's A
Midsummer's 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 it did that have something to do with your title?
The shape of things on scene. I'm sure you're right that that
was the origin, though. It was filtered through my own
conscious so that 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've modified it a little.
Titles can be quite potent. And actually, I found The Shape
of Things Unseen was quite a, an appropriate title, particularly
given the interest which sort of coincidentally, I've developed
in the course of writing the book in, in people who are, who
are unable to visualize or to experience sensory imagery, of
course, have, have sense of, have some sense of the shape of
things on scene because they're they're not able to see them in
their mind's eye. It reminded me of when 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. This an interesting test that I
think you introduced me to a long time ago, which is if
someone with a Fantasia like myself, if you ask me the
question, what's a darker green like, 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.
Interestingly, ChatGPT also knows the answer to that
question, though it's never seen anything.
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 A1 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.
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
imaginations, ability to dislocate us from the present
reality, because I think that was a central theme in the book.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm always reminded in this
context of watching my research assistant once crossing the
road, a busy road off, sit 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, 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 the single most
common mental content is visual imagery, more common than
awareness of the here and now, more common than any than any
other other mental content. So, so we really do, I think in
a, in a, in a now empirically proven sense, live in our
thoughts. Of course not, 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, you're pretty much in the here and now.
But but much of the time we're occupied by by imaginative
processes. You're saying we're spending
more time playing messing with visual images on our mind than
we're than we are perceiving the the present?
But you give people buzzes, and the buzzes sound random
intervals, and you ask people to report what what is occupying
their awareness. The most common content is
visual imagery. Not not here and now, but but
imagining something. In your book you referenced a a
Harvard study. I think it was something about a
wandering mind and and you said it, it said like a wandering
mind is an unhappy mind. 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. It's all well and good and has
wonderful outcomes, but it's the IT has a the flip side of the
coin. Is that too much of it can make
us unhappy? In the most extreme case, you
gather rumination, which can lead to clinical depression.
And I wonder what other ways imagination can kind of get us
into trouble in this context. As sort of as a way into that,
let me say that I, I think just as you indicate, there's a kind
of deep tension in, in our human lives here.
We, we have a wish to be present.
We get into difficulties when we fail to be present,
psychological difficulties, which we, we, we can come on to,
but we know no human life could be lived entirely in the
present. We, you know, we have to, we
have to take account of what might happen in the future.
And we, we to understand ourselves, we need to take
account of what's happened in the past.
So I think there's a, there's a constant tug in, in human lives
between the, the wish to, to live fully in the present and,
and the wish to understand ourselves longitudinally, so to,
so to speak, and, and to, to, to take account of the imagined
past and the imagined future. So as you say, a few people with
people who who dwell too much on the past are often less happy
than than others. That was the, that was the
finding of the 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 most of the time are
able to ensure that our awareness is reasonably in line
with, with the with the external facts.
What happens in psychosis is that the the experience we
generate loses its moorings it it loses contact with with
external reality and that that's clearly not not a good idea for
us. I absolutely want to talk more
about that in a in a few minutes.
This idea of like, to what degree are we passively like
observing reality versus creating it?
Yeah, fascinating. But it, it, it made me think too
of I, 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 7-8 years ago when I
wrote this fictional story about someone with a Fantasia and they
cured it with a digital technology to create
hypervantasia. 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 and it's all just seems like
wonderful. What inspired the story was I
had a colleague who she was at the top end of hyper Fantasia.
So she told me over lunch once that when she was bored at work
at her desk, she would just go into her mind and lift off and
fly around, fly around the Boston area.
And 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 Frankel in the concentration camp, he literally
used it as a survival tactic. He was able to dislocate from a
incredibly grim catastrophic situation to to specifically
like go into his apartment and walk down the street.
And he said these images brought into tears what an incredible
survival ability. And without that, we would be at
a great loss, I think. Absolutely.
But to illustrate the the the, the tension that we were talking
about a moment ago, there is a risk to indulging one's
daydreams, and there's recently been described as syndrome of
maladaptive daydreaming. Somewhat dissatisfied with their
current situation and who for whom daydreaming becomes
somewhat addictive, they lose themselves in enrich absorbing
daydreams about possible futures to the extent that they that
they they neglect the present, they neglect their their their
current duties. 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?
Well, I think using different approaches in different
circumstances. So you know, psychosis is
generally treated using medication in the hope that the
brain in time will recover its equilibrium and regain its its
recover its moorings, regain its links with reality.
The the approach and psychosis is typically pharmacological,
whereas in PTSD, say post traumatic stress disorder, where
where people's minds are invaded by intrusive images, behavioural
approaches can be can be particularly effective.
If I may just going back a step, you, 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, couldn't we? I mean, our whole, our lives
are, are completely soaked through with culture and culture
is the product of individual acts of imagination in the sense
of creativity. They're they're they're, they're
the, 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 we'd be nowhere really
if we if we liked imagination in that sense.
The question of what sensory imagery does for us is a really,
really interesting one, which we'll perhaps we'll come to.
I think it's, I think it's much less obvious what sensory
usually does for us than it is what human creativity does for
us. Human creativity is really
absolutely fundamental to our to our lives.
Let's go to sensory experience. And, you know, 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. You wrote about Mozart and his
mind's ear, which was seemed to be like off the charts.
You know, he could, he actually heard concertos in his head and
he would rush to the. No pad and and have to write
them down. So talk about, you know, our
ability to imagine sense and the variation among us.
Yeah. So I mean this is an invisible
variation. I think each of us tends to take
his, her, her own experience as the norm.
So it, it comes, it comes for example, as a a huge surprise
for many people with athentasia, many people who lack imagery to
discover that other people actually enjoy sensory
experience, imaginative sensory experience.
So typically people that Fantasia say up to a certain
point, I'd always assume 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, is a
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 in their mind's ear. Many of us can imagine the feel
of velvet has against the feel of satin or of 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 imagery. You know, you can imagine
walking gently down a country lane as opposed to racing to
catch a train. We can enjoy multimodal or most
of us can enjoy multimodal sensory motor experience.
And it turns out, I don't know whether you want to come on to
this at this point, but it turns out that what happens in the
brain when we are, for example, visualizing has quite a lot in
common with what happens in the brain when we're seeing.
So there is an important sort of neurological overlap between
perception and imagery, if you like.
What is happening when we engage in sensory imagery is that we
run offline the systems in the brain that we engage online when
we are perceiving, when, when, when we are sensing.
That the apparent differences between people's experience in
this regard is not simply a matter of description.
That it goes deeper than that. So like in like sports
psychology, like Olympians right now, skiers are preparing for
their events, right? So they talk about, you know,
visual as the power of visualization and running
through the event in your mind's eye before doing it.
And are are you, are you saying it's almost like a neurological
match between doing it? There is there is a neurological
match. So let me give you a couple of
examples, if you It 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 in
was 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 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 had
never thought about this, but it turns out that surgeons very
often plan for and reflect on their operations and and they do
so using imagery. They, they kind of re replay
the, the video if you like and they imagine themselves
performing the operation and they think, think through what
they're going to have to do and they, and afterwards they
analyse difficulties they ran into all mistakes they made
again using using sensorimotor imagery.
So it's, it's, it's a widely used form of thought.
Yes, the 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. I want to run something by you.
I I instantly knew I wanted to ask you this question when I saw
it. So basically Alex Hannell, 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 know 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 like playing out
emotions. How do you what do you think
about that? No, that's, that's fascinating.
So it sounds as if he's sort of able to inoculate it or
inoculate himself against the, the, the emotion to, to some
degree. I mean, it makes sense.
The, 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 little
burn on the skin kind of thing that experimenters use, which is
bearable, but they're distinctly unpleasant.
Remembering that episode a few hours later or maybe in 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 you'd
expect, but there's, there's substantial overlap.
I'll give you another example and this this is quite old work.
There is a particular brain region which is strongly engaged
by disgust gets engaged if you if you are disgusted, but
exactly that region gets engaged if you look at a photograph of
somebody with the facial expression of disgust and if you
imagine disgust. This is a little bit something I
hadn't thought about, but is there, does it work with
affection in love? Like if we like imagine a loved
one versus seeing one in person? Like is there a neurological
signature? I believe that there is.
I'm trying to. I'm trying to call to mind the
evidence. I think that Semi Azeki 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 tried to remember what the
details of the experiment in which he studied romantic
partners was. But I think, I think the broadly
the answer I think is yes was was the question going in
particular to particular destination?
No, It just reminded me of the movie.
Contact was one of my favorite movies based off a Carl Sagan
novel. And the movie kind of plays with
this idea of like, can you prove love can?
How do you prove experiences that aren't quantifiable, that
aren't measurable? Yeah.
Well, so the 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. Just out of curiosity, what is
the brain region that is in question here?
It's a it's a matrix of brain regions, as it's called, which
includes the amygdala areas in the cingulate cortex, areas in
the orbital frontal cortex. It actually maps quite closely
onto the 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.
I wanted to get back to something that you touched on
earlier about perception and this phrase of controlled who's
and is a hallucination. You write about this like very
fascinating idea that like maybe our perception of reality of the
world's 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 of our perception is
an actual like creative act? Well, I would say it is.
It is creative act and it may seem at first sight a kind of
outrageous thing to say, but I think 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 is more inside out than it is outside in.
The evidence for this comes really from 2 main directions. 1
is kind of set of psychological data and reflections, and the
other more neurological. In the psychological domain,
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 three 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 the image you find it's the same size but
it but but it looks looks different.
Another example would be the NECA cube.
So you this is the 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 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.
As a kind of extreme example, I think I'd I relate the the story
in the book of an experience I had as a teenager when I slept
in a the garden room 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 front 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,
looking at through the through, through the windows.
That was an utterly compelling hallucination.
So a good example of the generative nature of perception.
So there's that, there's that set of sort of psychological
observations which takes one to the conclusion that perception
is generative. And then there's the the
neurological evidence, which is in a way may much simpler.
Our brains are constantly at work.
They're constantly consuming oxygen and glucose.
If they stop, perception stops. So, so clearly the experience
stops. Experience, like human
experience is entirely dependent on the, on the metabolic
activity of, of metabolic and neural activity occurring within
our brains. So clearly there's, there's some
biological process at work which is responsible for experience
and, and in particular perception.
So I think there are really compelling reasons for regarding
our experience as as a generative creative act of a
biological kind. 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
a Fantasia lacking a mind's eye. I was wondering, can 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. It may be worth telling the
story from from the beginning, making a little deech.
I first encountered somebody who couldn't visualize in 2003, I
think, when I was referred to 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 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 him to activate those visual regions that most
people with imagery activate when they 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. 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 two or three 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, we don't.
And these 21 people told quite a consistent story.
We we sent them a vividness questionnaire which just
measures how valid 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 ear
reminiscence. So we thought we could do better
than that. I asked a friend who had studied
the Classics and he said why don't you borrow Aristotle's
time for the Mind's Eye, which is Fantasia, and tag an ale at
the end. So that was how a Fantasia, the
term a Fantasia was born and it caught on.
So there was press interest in it.
I gave a a three or four minute interview on a breakfast TV
show. When I came back to my room
there were males coming into my own 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 we're 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 with adventation adventasia.
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.
I think that they they carry with them pros and cons,
strength, advantages and disadvantages.
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 blossom 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.
I think that because we live so much of A life in our heads, we
are intrigued to discover that the lives other people leave in
their heads may be very different to the lives we lead.
So I think we're fascinated to discover that there are 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 turn 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
like it. He said that there were among
his participant, there were 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
the observation, and nor did anybody else.
There was, I think there's just one, one paper by an American
psychologist who himself lacked imagery, who sampled imagery and
his students sort of over the intervening centuries.
So for some reason it was just a blind spot in the in, in
psychological research. There'd been masses of work on
imagery generally, but it had focused on, if you like, the
typical image and had ignored the extremes, which which turned
out to be really interesting. One of the things that
interested me as someone with a Fantasia was perhaps the
correlation with deficits like poorer 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 clamorous impact of
imagery helps them live in 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 on
feeling than others. But it was correlated with my
inability to picture these things that to picture the
traumatic imagery, it didn't catch me and then therefore it
didn't hold as much and it lessened the emotional impact.
So I wonder, how have you been thinking about the the pros and
cons, the benefits and drawbacks of imagery?
Yeah. And 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 break up, moving on to bereavement, say.
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 like 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 that I had tased you probably is what you might call
presentness the the ability to to, to live a little more in the
here and now then. Those of us who are being
distracted by regrets about the future or longings for sorry,
regrets about the past or or or or or longings for events in the
future. This is still a work in
progress. But it does look as if having a
Fantasia nudges people towards working in STEM professions,
science, maths, IT, technology. And that makes a kind of sense
because I think other things being equal, people that
Fantasia 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 at Fantasia was kind and said, 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, and together with
presentness may come some protection from psychological
difficulties which are fuelled or fed by imagery like PTSD for
example, and you know, possibly psychosis.
I think that that again needs a lot more work.
Whether whether maybe imagery is a risk factor for psychosis is
is uncertain, but there is a little bit of evidence that it
that it is. Yeah, I, I sometimes think of
this in the context of PTSD. And if I were to be sort of
intercepted by a involuntary image or thought of a traumatic
experience, it would be just that, a thought.
It would be imageless yet. 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 ETSD.
But there's always the 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 in
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 payouts. There's definitely interesting
implications of the spectrum. No, that's, that's absolutely
right. And I guess another
consideration here is that you, some people when they first
encounter the idea of Fantasia are really puzzled and they,
they ask how, how can people think or remember anything
without imagery? And actually, Aristotle wrote,
the mind never thinks without a phantasm.
But it's, you know, people with that Fantasia 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 that Fantasia 25 with hyperphantasia and 25 with
average imagery IQ was actually slightly but significantly
higher in the athantasia 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 athantasia doesn't preclude
imagination in the broad sense. So there are many examples of
authentic people who are highly imaginative, creative,
productive. You're a novelist.
I've mentioned Craig Venter, Ed Katmal, past president of Pixar,
Disney, winner of the touring prize, Blake Ross, creator of
Firefox, Mozilla. So people created in a whole
variety of of areas. And 11 nice surprise in our
research was that we were contacted by a large number of
authentic artists. So actually, I think we went to
art school, you would find that on average the imagery vividness
is a bit higher than usual. So.
So I think having vivid imagery does predispose you to to
traditionally creative activities, but lacking imagery
certainly doesn't prevent you from pursuing a career in them.
Yeah, I always say that I figured out how to write without
a mind's eye. And when I realized I 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 bad. In my case, I can't.
So I may have a concept of a scene, you know, 2 and 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. That has to be exactly right,
but I think conversely, people who do have imagery probably do
do kind of do use it creatively. They do.
And I'm aware of all the writers I know actually are pretty high
on the imagery scale and they see it at, they see it first.
So, and I think, wow, that that'd be nice.
You know, it'd be nice to see it first because I think really I'm
sort of 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, 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 the 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. The part of the Big 5.
I wonder if you can talk about how that you know tendency leads
to more creative creative work. How does how does that interplay
happen? So openness is rather difficult
to to define, isn't it? It seems to be a kind of amount
of intelligence and openness in the sense of attentiveness to
1's own experience and and a willingness to undergo new
experiences and and explore new territory of of every kind.
And certainly that kind of openness does seem to be
important in the creative process because good ideas often
come to people from unexpected places.
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 ski stand for skills.
So I think there are very, very few, if any human creative
achievements which don't presuppose considerable skill in
a particular domain. Next D detect D for detachment,
which is really a meld of the ability to control our thoughts
and behaviour and our ability to detach ourselves from from the
world by using symbolic technologies of various kinds.
But then the final S in skid stands for spontaneity, and
there is a kind of wild card in creativity which plays into
openness. We have to be open to to take
advantage of this. Many, many creative people
describe their creative ideas, sometimes in their entirety
themes from musical composition just arriving in in their in
their minds. And they clearly don't arrive
from nowhere. But they aren't the outcome of
the kind of deliberate, controlled, voluntary process.
And one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that I
think we understand something, though, from neuroscience of
what it is that makes possible these creative moments, these
moments of spontaneous creation, when when an idea appears in in
someone's mind. I won't give you examples of
spontaneous creativity of this kind.
You 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 the, about the neuroscience.
Probably the the area which is most relevant and least well
known is the, 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, what what happens
in the brain when people are 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
real visual regions of the back of the brain in which all the
areas talk to one another. Their activity is synchronized
within the mass as you'd expect really.
There's a set of motor areas which contain control movement.
And again, even when my lying still, there's activity within
these areas, they're into communicating.
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 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 set of regions which seems to be involved in,
if you like in, in daydreaming. And it turns out that when
people are actually performing creative acts, when they're
engaged in creative activities, this network is, is active
because I think one has to kind of dip down into the, into one's
past one's, one's memories to generate creative ideas for the
future. And the default by network is
very much involved in, in recollecting the past.
But this default by 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 node network switches off.
So if I give you a task like telling me as many words with
the letter P as you can in the next minute, that will engage
your default mode, your engage your executive network, switch
off your default mode network. So normally they are anti
correlated, but in creative acts they are in a 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 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 has 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 campus is a region in the
temporal lobes which contains a kind of spatial map of the
environment. That's interesting that there
should be such a spatial map, but what's really fascinating is
that after you've explored at times of rest or during sleep,
the cells which became active during exploration replay your
your journey, replay the the pathway, if you like, which you
took through the new environment, both forwards and
backwards, as if you were learning how to how to escape
from the destination, so to speak.
There's evidence even that the order in which the the cells
become active can be reorganized spontaneously, as if the brain
were trying to make better sense of what you'd experienced.
So here is here's another example of spontaneous activity
within the brain, which is probably mostly, if not entirely
unconscious, but which is important, probably plays a
particular role in consolidating memories.
But it's just the kind of spontaneous activity which one
can imagine might give rise to the ideas which people make use
of in in creative work. I'm working on a short story.
There's, there's really two processes that I'm always
toggling back and forth within my brain, which is, you know,
the default mode network and the, 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, 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 process sees 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 the 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, and
the John Keats's negative capability, that that's a big
part of it too. Yeah.
I had a lovely interview with the musician David Gray, which I
talk about in the book. And he 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, I think he's
talking about just what you describe.
There can be kind of alternation between those two states, but
there are times on there where where you're in, you're in both
kind of drawing from from the depths and but you're also
controlling from above. Right.
And you 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, and knowing the
kind of limits of both the other the I feel like, you know, if
your next book's going to be a Fantasia, you got to write
about, write a book on creativity.
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 artist 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 visit 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. He attributes this to like
lifelong cultivation of the part of the brain that asks what if?
All of us ask this question once in a while.
But like Philip Pullman, Sandy, another character you talked
about, believes that his well trained subconscious is
constantly exploring narratives. When he writes this subliminal
process finds its voice. It's interesting.
There's so much to say there. I think that training is
crucial, isn't it? I mean, I think there's no
discovery favours the prepared mind as, as I think Pastor said,
Hugh, there's a lot of prep, a lot of training, a lot of
preparation has to has to have happened in the background.
But once it's happened, yes, then then there's the
spontaneous unconscious processes are are key.
Yeah, and it's something they don't teach you in MFA programs
too, but 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.
I. Don't know if you're a Philip
Pullman fan, but those those who have read the Northern Lights
will know that one of the heroes of the book, Lyra, has a strange
instrument instrument called the alatheometer she uses to.
I can't, I forget whether to see future events or to see distant
events. But so there's a kind of
precognitive telepathic function.
And the allythometer can only be used when you're in a certain
state of mind. You have to, you have to clear
your mind to make it possible to, to use this instrument.
And I, I think this is, it's, it's just a metaphor for the
imagination. 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 yeah. This is a really common
phenomenon for neurologists, in fact for doctors working in all
areas of medicine, but but it's certainly very common for
neurologists. So getting on for 1/3 of what we
see in clinic and and in the emergency room turns out not to
be explained by disease, but to have a broadly psychological
explanation. And many cases will will fit
within the the remit of what used to be called hysteria.
That's that's become a somewhat pejorative term and the
politically correct time is now functional neurological
disorder, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
But to give a specific example, somebody who appears to be
having a an epileptic fit who may even be admitted to hospital
because the the initial impression has been of of a
prolonged seizure may turn out not not to be, but to be having
what's called a dissociative attack or what is a psychogenic
seizure. An attack which looks looks very
like an epileptic seizure but but simply isn't when you record
brain activity you don't see. The the signature of epilepsy,
you see essentially normal, normal wakeful activity.
I describe in the in the book a patient I encountered when I was
a young urologist who had a disabling spasm in 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, in the context of, of these disorders, but
they're, they're common, they're often disabling and they are
really rather mysterious and they, 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, 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, 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.
So first of all is often a disturbance of attention.
So if you focus your attention very intensely on any normal
activity, it's quite likely to go wrong.
If you try to remember how to walk and, and focus very
intensely on your walking as you're walking, it'll trip you
up. It's, it's, there are all kinds
of things that we do very successfully automatically that
we find really rather hard to do when we focus our attention on
them. So one of the sources of
psychosomatic symptoms seems to be excessive attention to a
process that that that happens perfectly satisfactorily until
we start paying attention. There's often a kind of
emotional components. 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 that, that that is the case.
It's not by any means universal, but it's 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, a
notion of an illness which perhaps you've seen because
we're 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 was called Russell
Reynolds of a, of a young woman who had cared for her father,
who'd fallen on hard times, had to return to work unexpectedly
and had a stroke. And she then had to living and
look after him. And she became preoccupied with
the, the possibility that she might have a stroke.
And then lo and behold, suddenly she loses the power in her legs
and she's successfully rehabilitated by by Russell
Reynolds using sort of a 19th century approach, which is
essentially a kind of multidisciplinary rehabilitation
with a mix of physiotherapy and, and, and psychotherapy.
And that's certainly a kind of imaginative preoccupation with
an illness, a set of symptoms can bring it into being.
You kind of you. You predict your own your your
affliction in into existence. I remember reading a book by a
neurologist I think recently it was called Is It All in My Head?
And there was a big exploration on on like social contagions.
And I think there was recently, like on TikTok, there were like
influencers who were, that had Tourette's syndrome and they
were kind of exploring their Tourette's, their symptoms.
And then like users who didn't have Tourette's started
developing Tourette's symptoms, which is a like a psychogenic
disorder in that case. 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 re emphasize, most people with functional
neurological disorder are just as puzzled as as their doctors
are. So it's, you know, it it, it's
not a deliberate simulation, it's the the processes which
give rise to it are happening somehow below the threshold of
consciousness as as a rule. Yeah, I mean, I remember it was
like 10 years ago when I developed low back pain for
several months, and it was beyond my understanding.
I got through everything at it, you know, from physical therapy
to psychotherapy. And it turns out just the
intense preoccupation with it, with my back, with the pain was
driving the disorder. And I wonder too, if you want to
talk about some curative elements here which you've
explored, which is just the power of distraction, pulling
yourself out of the preoccupation, the fixation, the
focus can in and of itself be curative.
I, I've said this before to someone, to a friend where they
had always had like GI symptoms, very much like irritable bowel
syndrome. 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 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.
So there are many examples in in treatment of a functional
neurological disorder. I think 1 I mentioned in the
book a colleague treated a patient who had become honest
unable to to walk but forwards, but when asked to walk
backwards, found you could do so and asked to imagine skating,
found you could do so. I have a lovely video of of
another the young teacher who'd become unable to walk but when
she was put on a treadmill found she could run.
So as soon as, as soon as the activity was very little in a
way which. Did that break the spell?
Yeah, it broke the spell. It broke the spell.
And they could walk again. With with a bit of from a physio
yeah yeah. So full recovery is entirely,
entirely possible, but you need, you need skilled help from
people who understand the, the mechanisms of, of this kind of
process and, and you, and what you don't need is to be told
that it's all in your head and you should put yourself together
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 a Fantasia. 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 and why did you want to do it?
So I, I love writing. I came, I, I have a way of
background in literature that was a particular interest at
school. So I've always been very, very
happy to, to have opportunities to write.
I've written a couple of books previously, one about
consciousness and another 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've had one or two full
starts. And I think actually COVID was a
help with it because I, I had 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 Adventasia Adventasia work 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. I think it's a bit like having a
shed at the bottom of the garden, isn't it?
You can, you can take yourself off and lose yourself in 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 might 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.
It allows moments of flow which which are very rewarding.
It's, it's intrinsically rewarding, isn't it?
Yeah. And I think it was the
creativity researcher Mikhail Chiksen.
Yeah, he wrote a famous book on creativity and this Ted talk, he
talked about how the more moments of flow you have, the
happy 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 our
pitfalls? I wonder if you thought about
that in the process. 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.
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 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 a receptive state in
which we, 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, 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
human challenge. I don't think there's any simple
simple answer. 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 just
see where you are in the proportions and if I had.
Any key takeaways, insights from from the the the research that
the book involved? And I, I think there, 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's, it really is, is something to celebrate.
And at the same time, I, I'm, I was impressed by the, the
ubiquitous creativity of our experience moment to moment.
So I really, I, I really do believe that even if we're not
at all engaged in, in creative pursuits, we are performing a
kind of active creation in every moment of our lives.
And I was, I closed the book with a, 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. Within his head, or her head I
should say. I literally was going to read
that that quote out. It's great.
Great way to to conclude it. It makes me think of the Camus
code. I think, you know, in a, in a,
in a winter, there is a, an infinite light or infinite
summer or something like that. Yeah.
And what are you working on next?
These imagery extremes. So I'm I'm planning to write a
book about Adventasia and Adventasia, which have opened
all kinds of interesting windows which which I want to decline
through very much enjoying my conversations with people who
lack imagery or or have it in in abundance.
I think it's it's a topic which takes you rather quickly to a
quite intimate place in people's lives.
In how they perceive the world and how it differs and that
there was variation we we weren't aware of.
Basically we thought we all thought the same.
Turns out that was 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.
I think from from next week it's it's the the shape of things
unseen. A new Science of Imagination
will be published in Pick back in February.
You can't 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, University
of Edinburgh, so if you're interested in finding out more
about that particular line of work, you'll find plenty there.
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.
I. Hope you enjoyed this
conversation with Doctor Adam Zeeman.
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