Aphantasia: Seeing the world without a mind's eye | Tamara Alireza | TEDxGoodenoughCollege

you close your eyes go ahead close them picture yourself sitting on a beautiful beach gazing out over the water feel the warm Sun on your skin are you sitting in a chair perhaps on a towel in the sand keeping your eyes closed raise your hands when you can see yourself on the beach okay open your eyes and look around leave your hands up if you can still see the beach clearly okay you can put them down you can see that most of us were able to visualize an image using the mind's eye now what if I told you to think of yourself on a beach without picturing it go ahead try do not picture a beach with turquoise clear water and white sands no get rid of the image can you do that now look around most of you pictured beaches but since you can never share a mental picture with the person next to you you take it for granted everyone's Beach must be more or less the same as yours right well I hate to burst your bubble actually no I really love it but we all see things entirely differently while some people see in color so vivid it is as real as life or they can paint it any color they wish others may have more faded images or see only in black and white but you all use your mental imagery every single day let me pause and ask you this with your life be any different if you suddenly lost this ability to visualize such images in your head did you know that there are actually some people like that who cannot create any images in their minds whatsoever as if their minds eye was completely blind yes it's definitely possible I know because mine is blind I promise it is not through lack of trying hard enough I would spend hours willing myself to see images which is weird if you think about it I mean who goes around wishing to hear imaginary voices in their heads right so why imaginary pictures nevertheless I would squeeze my eyes so tight that I would see little spots when open them again and I wondered does that count once I discovered this hidden ability I was sure that it was an even split with half of people being able to see images and the other half like me who could not so being a scientist at heart I decided to test this theory I proceeded to ask anyone that would listen a series of questions in order to determine if they could see in their mind as well I mean anyone once I proceeded through friends and family and went on to people in school or at a bar or even once waiting in line for the bathroom you could not escape me 463 people later I realized I concede in defeat I was the only one amongst them as it turns out there was a term for this condition where people lack the ability to manifest images called effect Asia isn't that a great name I have FN Teta what do you got gout well I have a Fantasia ah Fantasia is a new name to an old story the term was disk owned last year when a cognitive neurologist reported of a patient who lost his visualizing capabilities after undergoing cardiac surgery now you could live with a Fatiha for years and never even realized you had it I was 23 when I figured it out because how can you miss something you never had or even knew existed it took someone having mental imagery and then losing it to realize it was something that could be lost so after the study was published more people like me came forward saying that they had never had this visualizing ability to begin with and so a Fantasia was born well it had always been there just now people are starting to know about it so what is this mental imagery but when you conjure up the pictures of the characters as you read your novel or the outfit you plan to wear out tonight or the answer to the science test that you can see on the left hand side of the book you've been studying you're creating a consciously controlled representation of the information in your mind by the way seeing that textbook answer during the test just like cheating in my opinion all of your daily experiences are translated into this information via sensory input which you organize and store in your brain and are then able to retrieve by a coordinated effort of different brain regions to recreate a perceptual experience a lot of research has been done into mental imagery with various uses from psychological disorders where they visualize the mental imagery is enhanced or distorted to sports visualization where the players execute the winning move in the mind first is life any different for people that cannot visualize in their heads let me give you a few examples do you paint a picture of the characters as you read a book has it ever happened to you that when you then see the movie you go on that's not all how I imagined Ron Weasley to look like well when I see a movie it's more of an O so that's what he looks like because when I read a book there is no picture at all since my visualization process is entirely absent so let me give you a few examples on how it is if you cannot see in your head so if I say what is an elephant look like how many of you can actually see an elephant okay now what if I say what is the next word to this twinkle twinkle little how many of you actually saw star first or did you just know it was the word star so that's the difference between a verbal cue versus a visual cue I always only remember things as a verbal cue either it's there or it's not I know whether I don't but I still know what an elephant looks like because I can retrieve the information from my semantic memory the information is there it's just not stored as a visual memory however if you asked me to paint an elephant it's a different story without the image to refer to it'd be a far less detailed representation resembling a child's cartoon like drawing so using the same mental process retrieving factual memories and verbal cues I am able to quite accurately tell you how many windows there are in my house recognize a horse as a horse or describe what a beach looks like because I can reconstruct the facts without referring to an image everyone assumes that their way is the only way so how could you that the person next to you has one completely different or even a blind one the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire is a test aim to determine the strength of your mental imagery so now you know where you are in the skin but as having a Fantasia detrimental or beneficial well that's a good question that has not really been studied yet memories can be linked and associated with visual images so it makes sense that memory can be a difficult thing to have for people that lack visual imaging memories of events and certain facts and recognizing unfamiliar faces can be a problem however the brain adapts to this so I do have difficulty recognizing faces that I do not know very well and this has certainly put me in some awkward situations in the past I am quite adept at recognizing mannerisms the way you walk or dress or seeing the recognition in your eye when you see me so can you really say that this is has a negative effect well I could say that it does close certain doors being an architect is definitely out of the question for me but is that everyone has different strengths that they play to what is amazing here is that this opens a new door into how everyone's mind works in a different way I Fantasia breaks through the boundary that we've all created because our bodies all function alike and our hearts pump in the same way so we assume that we generally function cognitively equally but a Fantasia can break through this boundary proving that there is a subset of people who seemingly operate similarly but use an entirely different brain mechanism to accomplish the same task so breaking this boundary is a new way in to showing how everybody processes and retrieves information in a completely different way thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 295,692

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Life, Biology, Body, Brain, Cognitive science, Emotions, Empathy, Language, Neurology, Science, Senses, Visualization

Id: arc1fdoMi2Y

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/pukkandan]

It's a bit old, but I just came across it today and couldn't find it in this sub. So thought I'd post it.