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Multisensory Aphantasia: The Mind’s Silent, Scentless, Soundless World
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if you've been hearing about this thing
a Fantasia This inability to visualize
to see things in your mind's eye and
you've also noticed you don't have an
inner voice when you're reading you
don't hear a little internal monologue
reading out the words that you can't
replay the latest song you've just heard
you can't remember and
re-experience the smell of good coffee
the smell of rain on cement this is
something called multisensory a Fantasia
so Fantasia can go beyond just the pure
visual hello my friends welcome to the
channel I'm Joel Pearson professor of cognitive
cognitive
neuroscience and I'm here to tell you
about multisensory a Fantasia in some
recent research we've done looking at
all the different subgroups of a
Fantasia and multisensory a Fantasia so
first up a mini recap if you new to the
channel if you're new to a Fantasia let
me tell you first what mental imagery is
for some people so when some people
think about what an apple looks like
what anything looks like they have a
fleeting conscious sensory like
experience of what the apple is this is
absolutely not like holding an apple in
your hand and looking at it it's nowhere
near as strong as that perceptual
experience if you do have imagery you do
have some kind of experience it's
fleeting you might see the details you
might zoom in now some people have a
much stronger experience I'm describing
my experience just then some people say
they experience is almost photol likee
they can replay a whole movie in their
Mind's Eye so a Fantasia is a word
recently given to this blind Mind's Eye
we've known about a Fantasia for well
over a hundred years but it's really
been only the last sort of handful of
years that it's really been moved into
the general uh awareness through media
through new papers new
Publications so it turns out that a
Fantasia goes beyond the domain of
vision just like our sensory experience
of the world involves all the touch
smell sounds of course mental imagery if
you like can also include all those
senses and hence you can have all these
different types or subtypes of a
Fantasia so in a recent paper that we
did in the in the lab here we sent out
two different surveys or you like we
sent out two different uh questionnaires
to two different groups and this
questionnaire looks at all all the
different uh sensory domains of mental
imagery not just Vision so this is not
looking at the visual vividness of
visual imagery it's looking at all the
different senses about sound taste touch
so matter sensory across the board and
everything I going to be talking about
we sort of replicated it so we ran it in
one group with a th000 participants and
then we ran it in another group with a
th000 participants then what do we do we
got a number of different what's called
clustering algorithms and this is sort
of automated algorithm based way of
looking at the clustering the grouping
of the data and there's lots of these
different clustering algorithms we did
uh use three different methods to do
that so the idea here is to see what are
the natural groupings of people with a
Fantasia for example are they all just
pure visual a Fantasia are they all
multi- sensory maybe they're all just
pure smell a Fantasia and clustering
analysis like this is a sort of
non-biased way to look at the different
natural groupings so the job of the
algorithm is to find which groups of
people naturally cluster together and
find nice ways of separating those
without us bringing our bias as
scientists onto the data so what do we
find we found there are two main groups
no matter which clustering algorithm you
use there are two clear groups and that
is of course pure visual a Fantasia so
that's a Fantasia just localized if you
like to the capacity of vision visual
information and the other big group
which according to one of the clustering
algorithms was almost half of those
people we tested was full multisensory a
Fantasia so that's not being able to
conjure up any sensory experience in any
of the sensory domains so not being able
to uh read out loud in your mind not
being able to replay your favorite tune
not being able to re-experience the
taste of some yummy food or coffee or
wine um but also touch movement extends
to all the different sort of Senses so
that's multisensory a Fantasia and it
turns out that almost half of the people
we tested of those 2,000 had that
multisensory a Fantasia so they the two
groups pure Visual and what's called
multisensory a Fantasia now as you drill
down in the data we saw other groups but
very small groups for example one of the
small groups was about 5% of the
participants had what we call somatus
sensory intact so they had a Fantasia on
all the other senses except when it came
to somata sensory the internal
Sensations their body their feelings if
you feel hungry full you could describe
as physical Sensations um were intact
everything else gone so they could
imagine that internal feeling that
feeling of full things related to their
body so that was about 5% of the
populations we tested auditory intact we
saw in about 4% of the groups we tested
so again that's a Fantasia and all the
other sensory domains no visualization
capacity no smell no taste but auditory
sounds was fairly normal so we saw that
about 5% of the top populations we
tested so what's interesting here is as
you drill down you find very smaller and
smaller groups of very specific uh
patterns of a Fantasia so as you get to
1% and Below 1% we did find these very
small groups in sort of almost all the
categories and all the um having one
sense of imagery but not the others so
what does this tell us about a Fantasia
in general and this inability to
visualize and how it relates to all the
senses well it paints a very interesting
picture it really tells us that it's
really bespoke that a fantas is very
bespoke and it's very different across
different people and so the general
experience of this internal model of the
world the internal virtual reality
simulator you have in your head is going
to be very different from one person to
the next one of the other really
interesting things I found about this
study was that there is no perceptual
equivalent if you think about it for a
moment so with imagery you can be blind
if you like across all the sensory
domains does that ever happen in terms
of perception can you think of anyone
you've ever come across who is blind de cannot
cannot
taste uh can cannot smell cannot feel in
their skin that just I don't think that
ever existed so it tells us something
that you can have full multisensory a
Fantasia but you can't really have full
multisensory sensory blindness or
perceptual blindness so this thing
exists in the mind or with imagery but
not with perception and that is a
striking difference between perception
and imagery and that tells us something
that's really fascinating I think what
does it tell us why is it fasc fting
well it suggests that imagery these
internal experiences are different to
perception they might be controlled by
one overall arching Factor whereas
perception that's probably not the case
to the degree it is with imagery so
whenever we find differences between
imagery and perception that's really
interesting because it shows us how
these systems are different in the brain
tells us more about a Fantasia more
about understanding the condition and
potentially more about switching imagery
on in people if that's what they want
not everyone wants that so which of
these senses do you think you have do
you not have let me know in the comments
I'd love to hear from you do you think
you have full multisensory a Fantasia or
do you have a very unusual specific kind
I've heard things from people that say
they can imagine everything but they
can't imagine faces for example we
haven't had a chance to study that yet
but is there some very unusual form of a
Fantasia you think you might have I
would love to hear about it and so would
the uh the community so the other so
please share in the comments we'd really
appreciate that so thanks for watching
stay curious stay imagery conscious keep
trying to imagine represent the world in
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