DAVID GEBEL: I wouldn't speak up at pitch meetings, and I remember it was Robert Krulwich who told me, "You know, you can contribute." And I went, "I'm the secretary. What are you talking about?" And he looked at me and went, "You have an opinion. I think we'd like to hear it.

LULU MILLER: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. And before we hop into today's episode, I want to take just a moment to introduce you to someone on our team.

DAVID: I am David Gebel, and I am the administrative assistant for WNYC Studios.

LULU: He is very modest about what he does at the show.

DAVID: I'm just like the paperwork guy.

LULU: But we absolutely could not make Radiolab without him.

DAVID: I can't make an episode, but I can make sure people want to make an episode with us.

LULU: Whenever we hire someone to do some work for the show, David is the person they hear from. And a lot of people hear from David.

DAVID: We can talk fact-checkers. I'm paying them every month.

LULU: Freelance reporters.

DAVID: And I've got our illustrator, brilliant illustrator Jared, that we're paying him all the time.

LULU: Uh-huh.

DAVID: For all of Mixtape, we had a wonderful Chinese translator.

LULU: David also handles all of our sometimes weird reporting expenses.

DAVID: Little roadside hotels and water bottles and bike rentals and microphones and bug spray.

LULU: I submitted a receipt that had, like, $2.99 in there for hand warmers when I was, like, two hours from the Arctic Circle.

DAVID: [laughs] It's a lot of little stuff.

LULU: Yeah.

DAVID: But when I finally hear the darn thing, it's nice to, like, see the costume all put together, not just the pieces of cloth all over the place.

LULU: And, like, see the parts you sewed?

DAVID: Yeah, see the parts that I sewed going, "Oh, that's what that bill was for." And it wouldn't have happened if Grandpa Gebel didn't submit all this paperwork."

LULU: [laughs] And it wouldn't happen without the support we get from our listeners. The only way David is able to write checks to pay for everything that goes into making a show, from the small things like hand warmers to the big things like translators and fact checkers and airplane flights, is with your help.

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU: All right!

LATIF NASSER: All right.

LULU: I'm Lulu.

LATIF: I'm Latif.

LULU: This is Radiolab, and today's story comes to us from producer Sindhu Gnanasambandan.

SINDHU GNANASAMBANDAN: Okay, so this story, it sort of found me.

LULU: Okay.

MARK WHITMAN: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah.

SINDHU: Last year I was working on this episode about memory.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

SINDHU: And I was talking to this neuroscientist, Mark Whitman. And as a sort of aside ...

MARK WHITMAN: You can sort of cut this out anyway.

SINDHU: ... he asked me this question.

MARK WHITMAN: If you—if you close your eyes and you think about, let's say, a red—red apple, yeah? Now open it again, your eyes. Can you tell me what you saw? What did you see?

SINDHU: Um, there was a leaf on it.

MARK WHITMAN: Mm-hmm.

SINDHU: It was two-dimensional. I didn't—I didn't think in 3D.

MARK WHITMAN: Did you have a—did you see a color?

SINDHU: Um [laughs] no. I don't know what it would mean to see a color with your mind.

MARK WHITMAN: Uh-huh. So who knows?

LULU: Wait.

LATIF: So even though he told you 'red apple.'

SINDHU: I saw nothing.

LULU: But you saw a leaf, right?

SINDHU: I—I know. I just—I felt like I had to say something about an apple.

LULU: [laughs] Oh, you were lying? You were cheating on the test?

SINDHU: I mean, I wasn't lying. Like, this has come up a lot in my life, okay? People are like, "Visualize something." And so I just always thought it was a metaphor. Like, I just did my version of that.

LATIF: Which is what? Like a word cloud kind of thing?

SINDHU: No, it's not a word cloud. It's—it's like an abstract knowing. Like I know I love someone. Like, I just know that an apple has a leaf. There's a part of me that knows that that is true, but it's not seeing it. Like, if I close my eyes and think about it, like—like, it's really just black.

LULU: [whispers] Wow!

SINDHU: But of course the thing that was surprising for me was not what's going on in my head. Like, I know—I've lived in that my whole life.

LATIF: Right.

SINDHU: The thing that blew my mind open ...

MAN: I'm picturing a red delicious apple.

SINDHU: ... was what's been going on in everybody else's head.

MAN: It's got a little yellow shine on the bottom left.

WOMAN: Like the ones that are so shiny that they look kind of waxy.

MAN: Waxy.

SINDHU: After that interview, I started obsessively asking everybody I came across ...

SINDHU: Picture a red apple.

SINDHU: ... to describe their apple.

MAN: It's not perfectly red, but ...

MAN: It's red with little streaks of yellow and green.

SINDHU: And do you actually see the color?

MAN: I think so. Yeah.

MAN: Yeah. Yeah.

SINDHU: And every time ...

WOMAN: What do you mean? The image is in my head.

MAN: How could I not see the colors?

SINDHU: I don't know. Your eyes are closed.

SINDHU: ... people would say they could actually see it.

MAN: No, I'm definitely seeing the colors.

SINDHU: Wow!

SINDHU: Do—do you see it?

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah. It's like a shiny red apple.

LULU: Like, I am seeing it right now.

SINDHU: In the way that you see things in real life? Like, how vivid is it?

LULU: I mean, it's decently vivid. Like, it's on a white plate on a kind of cafeteria-style table. Like, I went—I went middle school. I know the grade I went, because it's when I had Miss Piccioli, so it was sixth grade. I threw it into that particular cafeteria.

LATIF: Holy cow!

LULU: Soft touch.

LATIF: You got that from an apple?

LULU: Yeah. When she said, "Picture an apple."

SINDHU: How about yours, Latif?

LATIF: Okay, mine—mine is—mine's not that vivid. But mine's—like, it's kind of a cartoon of an apple, I think. Like, I don't know. The more I think about it, I'm like, "Am I seeing it?"

SINDHU: Yeah. Like, what does seeing in the mind even mean?

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Yeah, I guess it is just words. Like, how do we know? Maybe I see the same blur as you, but I get all excited and poetic about it and you're just like, "Meh, there's not much there," you know? How can we be sure?

SINDHU: I mean, well, for a long time we couldn't be sure.

JOEL PEARSON: We had to sort of take someone's word for it that that's what they were imagining, that's what their experience was like.

SINDHU: Then I found out about this guy, Joel Pearson ...

JOEL PEARSON: I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales.

SINDHU: ... who sort of like stumbles into this way of showing that there really is a difference here.

JOEL PEARSON: It was almost an accidental discovery.

SINDHU: One day he's in his lab.

JOEL PEARSON: I was programming an experiment.

SINDHU: He was playing around with this thing called binocular rivalry.

JOEL PEARSON: It's an amazing illusion where you present very different pictures, one to each eye. And you can ...

SINDHU: Basically, you put on these sort of, like, VR goggles that give each eye a different image. So let's say your left eye gets a green square, and your right eye gets a red circle.

LULU: Wait. Okay, so each eye only gets one of those?

SINDHU: Yeah. Exactly. Each eye can't see what's going on in the other eye.

LULU: Okay, got it.

SINDHU: And, you know, typically, when you're just looking around at things—like, your eyes are getting slightly different images.

JOEL PEARSON: Right. Your brain's fusing those two different images together.

SINDHU: But, like ...

JOEL PEARSON: When those images are very different like this experiment, your brain can't do that.

SINDHU: So instead ...

JOEL PEARSON: You get these beautiful oscillations.

SINDHU: ... your brain just sort of, like, randomly switches between the two. It's like green square, red circle. Green square, red circle.

LULU: Huh!

JOEL PEARSON: So literally your consciousness is changing back and forward in this sort of really random manner. So I was programming an experiment to look at that, and for some reason—and today I don't remember why—I thought, "Huh. I'm gonna imagine one of these two pictures."

SINDHU: Before he turns on, like, the images in the goggles, he's like, "Okay, let me just imagine a green square."

JOEL PEARSON: And then ...

SINDHU: He turns it on.

JOEL PEARSON: And I was like, "Huh! I saw the thing that I imagined."

SINDHU: Joel only sees the green square.

JOEL PEARSON: What? No. This can't be. Let me try that again. Now I imagine the red one. Huh! And now I saw the red picture in the binocular rivalry.

LULU: Whoa!

LATIF: Whoa!

SINDHU: It's like, just imagining the red circle made his brain actually choose to show him that one. Like, what he thought actually changed what he saw.

JOEL PEARSON: Turns out that what we imagine does change our visual perception. It literally changes how we see the world. With the caveat, you know, if you have mental imagery.

SINDHU: If someone like me does it ...

JOEL PEARSON: We don't see that same response.

SINDHU: ... my mind doesn't linger on the imagined object. It just kind of switches between the two.

LULU: Huh!

LATIF: Wow!

JOEL PEARSON: It was actually the first sort of objective method to measure visual imagination. Since then, we've developed a few other ways.

SINDHU: And Joel's continued to find these, like, objective ways to see a difference. Like, he did this one experiment looking at people's eyes.

JOEL PEARSON: If we look up at the light, our pupils contract, right? When you're in the dark, of course, your pupil opens right up.

SINDHU: People who have imagery, if you ask them to imagine, say, looking at the sun ...

JOEL PEARSON: Your pupil actually constricts.

SINDHU: As if they were actually looking at the sun.

LULU: No!

LATIF: Wow!

SINDHU: But if someone with no images in their head does this ...

JOEL PEARSON: You don't get these effects.

SINDHU: Not at all?

JOEL PEARSON: Not at all, yeah. Yeah.

LULU: Oh.

LATIF: Wow!

SINDHU: And there's even a name for this, for not being able to see in your head: aphantasia.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Aphantasia?

LULU: What does that word mean, just so we really—"phantasia?"

SINDHU: "Phantasia" means imagination.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: Hmm.

SINDHU: And "aphantasia" means ...

LULU: No imagination!

SINDHU: ... no imagination.

LATIF: Wow!

SINDHU: I know! So there's, like, about one percent of us who don't see anything. Most people see something, like maybe vague lines, or cartoons like you, Latif.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

SINDHU: Or even more vividly like you, Lulu. But then there are these other people ...

WOMAN: I would fabricate these stories, and I would see them. I would see them like they were movies.

SINDHU: ... who say their imagery is as vivid as real seeing.

WOMAN: I create this entire world where I'm, like, flying on a pegasus back, you know? And it's as real to me ...

LATIF: Whoa!

SINDHU: It's called 'hyperphantasia.' About two to three percent of people have it. And when you ask these people to imagine staring at the sun, their pupils super-constrict.

LATIF: Whoa!

MAN: I go into the backyard. I can walk to my friend's house. I can walk to the Catholic school where we used to play on the tree.

SINDHU: One guy described being able to, like, walk through his childhood world.

MAN: I can run into old friends. I can just keep walking.

SINDHU: Wow. Wow.

WOMAN: It keeps me company so, like, I never actually feel lonely, usually.

SINDHU: This woman described reading books being like ...

WOMAN: As if I was watching a film, except that I'm standing in the film.

SINDHU: ... being in a movie.

LULU: Whoa!

LATIF: Whoa!

SINDHU: Or when this other person reads, the visuals are so strong that he'll sometimes just leave the page like ...

MAN: I'm just over here in the saloon and going upstairs, and the story doesn't even take place up there.

LATIF: Oh, so it's like he's in the world of the book, leaves the page of what the author is saying and just is like, "Hmm, I'm just gonna go explore this fictional world."

LULU: [laughs]

SINDHU: Yeah.

MAN: I just wanted to know what it looked like. [laughs]

WOMAN: Like, I cannot hear music without having a complete—I guess you could say music video.

SINDHU: [laughs]

WOMAN: I've had the experience of, like, trying to find a music video that then I find out doesn't exist. It was just in my mind.

SINDHU: This woman described having these, like, images that just constantly play in the background of her mind. Like, in the middle of the interview, I asked her. I was like, "Are you seeing something right now?"

WOMAN: It's like a really touching, like, love moment between two characters. She passes away and visits him before she dies. And he thinks it's a dream.

SINDHU: [laughs] Oh my God!

WOMAN: And then she climbs up onto, like, a unicorn. She's wearing the most beautiful dress, and then he wakes up to watch her ride the unicorn into the wall and disappear.

SINDHU: So you are experiencing that in your head while you're answering my questions?

WOMAN: Yeah. Yeah, that just happens. It's like I have a TV on in the background.

LULU: Wow.

LATIF: And when you were talking to this woman, like, what is the—are you feeling jealousy? Are you feeling like—like they're getting something you aren't?

SINDHU: Oh my God, are you kidding? I am so jealous! Just to know that there's this, like, whole part of being a human that I will just never get to experience.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Yeah.

SINDHU: Like, I was listening to this old Radiolab episode.

LATIF: Never heard of it.

SINDHU: [laughs]

LATIF: What show is that? Anyway, yeah.

LULU: Sounds boring.

SINDHU: It's like some old episode called "Who Am I?"

LULU: Uh-huh. Yeah.

SINDHU: With Robert. And he goes on this little—actually, you know what? Do you guys want to hear it?

LATIF: Yeah! Yeah, for sure!

SINDHU: Okay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Krulwich: Any human being ...]

SINDHU: Can you hear that?

LULU: Mm-hmm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Krulwich: ... can take a white car and make it in their imagination ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, V.S. Ramachandran: He can paste red on it in his imagination.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Krulwich: But a monkey you don't think can do it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, V.S. Ramachandran: It cannot.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Krulwich: And this is so simple for a human being to do. And just—let's run through a quick exercise.]

LULU: No.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Krulwich: Okay, imagine for me a bird in your head. Got a bird in there?]

SINDHU: I'm just gonna cut forward a little bit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Krulwich: Only a human being could do this, because only humans can take images from the real world, pull them into their heads, divide them into parts, and then start turning those parts into abstractions. Monkeys, says Ramachandran, can't do that.]

LULU: And you're sitting there like, "Aah!"

LATIF: He basically just called you a monkey.

SINDHU: No, like, monkeys can visualize. Like, most of them just can't change the image. Robert says I'm worse than a monkey.

LULU: [laughs]

SINDHU: And, like, I know it's funny but, like, it's just—it also makes me sad. I want to disappear into books. When a book is, like, really descriptive, I'll just read the same paragraph, like, five times and nothing will enter my brain.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Dense wall of words. Huh.

LATIF: Yeah.

SINDHU: And also, I was just thinking about—oh, I don't get to—I just don't get to hold memories the way that all of you get to. Like, my memories aren't places I go. Like, I don't get to see or feel or touch them.

LULU: Hmm.

SINDHU: I don't know. I almost want to make you guys, like, picture someone you love right now.

LULU: Got it.

SINDHU: And just, like, share what you see and how it feels.

LULU: Yeah. It's weirdly, like, intimate, but just yeah, because you're picturing—I mean, I'm thinking of Grace, my wife, and I'm thinking of, like, the little peach fuzz on the—on her high part of her cheek. And, like, a little crinkle—like, the crinkles around her eyes. And yeah, I'm just kind of imagining her, like, softening after a long day. Like, I could picture the bathroom door light on behind her. She's turning back. Like, that moment where, like, the stress of the day melts, and it's just like a little, like, "Ha," like a laugh, a little face-shifting, duties are done, quick moment of connection. And yeah, it's very vivid. It's just like her face at a three-quarter profile.

LATIF: Okay, I had this flash to my—my great-grandmother. Like, she has bright red hair, because she would, like, henna-dye her hair.

SINDHU: Yeah.

LATIF: And I can picture her sitting on a chair, just sort of sitting there and, like, kind of laughing.

SINDHU: Like, that! Like, I want that!

LATIF: Yeah.

SINDHU: You know? And it's like, "Ah."

LULU: Hmm.

SINDHU: And at one point in that conversation with that scientist, Joel ...

JOEL PEARSON: Can you give someone who has aphantasia imagery?

SINDHU: Yeah.

JOEL PEARSON: With the right approach, I think it would be possible, yeah.

SINDHU: He said he thinks he can give it to me.

LULU: Whoa!

LATIF: [gasps]

LULU: Wait, how would he even do that?

SINDHU: Yeah, so Joel found that when he ran this, like, very low electrical current through people's visual cortex, their imagery actually got stronger.

LATIF: Whoa!

SINDHU: Now he does think it would be more complicated for people who are starting out with no imagery.

JOEL PEARSON: I can't stimulate your brain and you can start speaking a new language. You have to learn that content first. You have to learn how to connect your frontal cortex with your visual cortex to drive visual cortex.

SINDHU: But ...

JOEL PEARSON: I think there are ways we can do this.

SINDHU: ... with practice ...

JOEL PEARSON: Training with brain stimulation over some time could probably do it.

SINDHU: Have you tried?

JOEL PEARSON: We haven't done that yet. If you took someone who'd never had imagery and you gave them imagery, let's say in a week, I think that could be quite a dangerous thing.

LATIF: What?

LULU: Why?

SINDHU: I'll tell you why after the break.

DEREK FORGIONE: If I want to experience flying, I can imagine it. And it's kind of like really flying. There were stars coming from the center of my vision to the outer edge of my vision. Or even planets. It depends on what I'm passing by. Large clouds that are, like, pink and yellow and maybe a little bit of blue mixed in there. I can feel the coolness of the air as it—as it hits my skin. Kind of like a "flap-flap-flap-flap-flap-flap" sound.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif. Radiolab. We've been talking to our producer Sindhu, who cannot make images in her mind.

SINDHU: That's right. Yeah. And the person you just heard, his name is Derek, and he is the opposite of me. Like, when I asked him to describe his apple, his description was wild!

DEREK FORGIONE: I can make it red or I can make it green or golden. I can make light radiate off of it. Like, right now, I think it's interesting to, like, make a cloud with thunderbolts coming off of the top of the apple, and now there's like a village with people and they're, like, running away from the storm because there's a tornado dropping down from the cloud. And there's one guy that jumped off of the apple, and now he's falling into this ocean down below the apple. And ...

LULU: Wow. What?

SINDHU: And earlier we learned that there's this scientist who, like, maybe could give me that ability, to be a little more like Derek.

LATIF: Right. But he said it could be dangerous?

SINDHU: Yeah, exactly. And the reason I'm telling you about Derek is because he's actually the one that helped me understand why.

LULU: Huh. Okay.

SINDHU: So Derek ...

DEREK FORGIONE: Let's see ...

SINDHU: ... he's about my age.

DEREK FORGIONE: I'm about to be 30.

SINDHU: He was born in New England.

DEREK FORGIONE: Massachusetts.

SINDHU: Moved to Texas when he was eight.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

SINDHU: And he says as a kid, he loved having this supercharged imagination.

DEREK FORGIONE: I could just live in my head and imagine whatever I wanted. It was like living in virtual reality or whatever you want to call it.

SINDHU: Which was nice for him, because real reality was pretty hard.

DEREK FORGIONE: My mom and I, we were pretty poor. We stayed in a homeless shelter for a short while. We didn't really stay in one place for very long, so I never got to know people. And it was very, you know, here and there.

SINDHU: But whenever Derek got sad or scared or, like, even just bored, he would close his eyes and just go into his imagination.

LULU: Hmm.

SINDHU: Or sometimes he'd even do this thing where he would take something from his mind and plop it out into, like, physical space, like out into the physical world.

LULU: Huh!

DEREK FORGIONE: Yeah, so I would be in a car and I'd be looking out the window. I would imagine this man. He would look like a superhero or something. And he would just be running really fast along all of these cars, and then jumping and flying and, like, doing flips. And by focusing really intensely, it's almost like I can switch to primarily the visualization. and it can start to replace what I'm seeing more fully.

SINDHU: Yeah. And you can always tell that it's a projection and not reality?

DEREK FORGIONE: Yeah, I can tell it's a projection.

SINDHU: But at a certain point, he said that started to slip.

DEREK FORGIONE: I graduated high school a year early, and I didn't really want to go off into university, so I ended up moving to Seattle because I'm into computer programming.

SINDHU: He figured that'd be a good place to get his foot in the door in the tech industry, but, you know, not having computer programming experience, he ended up getting a job at the Dollar Tree.

DEREK FORGIONE: Couch-surfed for a while.

SINDHU: And a few months in, it wasn't going great.

DEREK FORGIONE: Yeah, I was sleeping in a bed in someone's laundry room in their basement. So it was very much just like being on the sidelines of life, really badly wanting to find some kind of escape.

SINDHU: One day he's sitting in his room, and he has this idea.

DEREK FORGIONE: I remember I had these coins.

SINDHU: He picks up two dimes he has lying around and he decides he's gonna play a little game with himself, flipping both coins, trying to get them to land the same way. He flips them in the air, looks down at the coins, and they're both the same. They're both heads or tails. He doesn't remember which. And then he flips them again. They land. The same. He does it again. The same.

DEREK FORGIONE: I was flipping over and over again.

SINDHU: And he starts to believe that he can control them.

DEREK FORGIONE: That I could make them land on whatever I wanted them to.

SINDHU: Like, using his mind.

DEREK FORGIONE: If I wanted them to both land heads up, then they would land heads up. If I wanted them to land heads down, they would land heads down.

SINDHU: So he'd flip the coins and think to himself ...

DEREK FORGIONE: Heads up.

SINDHU: And he'd see they were both ...

DEREK FORGIONE: Heads up.

SINDHU: Do it again.

DEREK FORGIONE: Heads down.

SINDHU: And they'd both be ...

DEREK FORGIONE: Heads down. Heads up. I remember feeling like it was some superpower. Heads up. Heads down. Heads up.

SINDHU: Derek says what happened next gets kind of foggy.

DEREK FORGIONE: Unfortunately I don't—I don't remember much from the night. I don't remember much from the psychosis.

SINDHU: But he now knows that as he was flipping those coins ...

DEREK FORGIONE: Whenever they would land, I would project onto them whatever I wanted them to look like. So I would see them heads up if I wanted them to be heads up, but whether or not they were really heads up I don't really know.

SINDHU: I see. So you stopped being able to tell the difference between imagination and reality.

DEREK FORGIONE: Yeah, basically.

SINDHU: And at some point later that night ...

DEREK FORGIONE: I couldn't tell you what time it was but it was dark.

SINDHU: ... Derek's roommates kicked him out.

LULU: Mmm.

DEREK FORGIONE: You know, I wasn't hurting anyone. I wasn't harmful or anything like that. They just didn't know what to do with me and they didn't want to—they didn't want it to be their responsibility, because they couldn't get me to go to the hospital or anything.

SINDHU: Derek wandered around all night, and actually ended up living on the street for several years.

LATIF: Wow.

SINDHU: He does eventually get a diagnosis—schizophrenia, and he gets on medication for that. And he says that things are better, but he still sometimes experiences psychotic episodes.

LULU: Is—is the hyperphantasia a common symptom of schizophrenia? Or ...

LATIF: Or like common co-occurrence? Yeah.

LULU: Yeah.

SINDHU: So according to neuroscientist Joel Pearson ...

JOEL PEARSON: You see this link between very strong imagery and schizophrenia.

SINDHU: ... they do seem to be correlated.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Hmm.

SINDHU: And it's not just schizophrenia.

EMILY HOLMES: It broadens beyond that.

SINDHU: This is clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Holmes.

EMILY HOLMES: People who are highly disposed to thinking images may be slightly more anxious.

SINDHU: She brought up certain anxiety disorders, things like phobias.

EMILY HOLMES: For example, if you were afraid of spiders, you might experience bits of imagery of spiders with terribly big teeth and fangs.

SINDHU: And also ...

EMILY HOLMES: Perhaps the hallmark disorder is post-traumatic stress disorder, in which people relive vivid mental images of events that have been traumatic in the past.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Hmm.

SINDHU: Now of course, having strong imagery doesn't mean you're gonna have any of these disorders, or not having it doesn't protect you from them.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Okay.

SINDHU: But it does seem that being able to make really vivid pictures in your mind makes them more likely.

WOMAN: Laying in bed and remembering stupid stuff you said when you were, like, in third grade or eighth grade, or, you know, times you were bullied.

SINDHU: And the people with hyperphantasia that I spoke to, they also told me about these other ways that mental imagery actually makes their life harder.

WOMAN: Very difficult to listen to news where, you know, there's a war going on. You know, when there's a mass shooting. When the boys were trapped in the mine in Thailand, like, I am, like, in the mine. You know, it's just like the sound of the water dripping off and falling into the water below. And, like, the boys being stressed, and their breathing and the humidity. Like, anybody suffering at all, I cannot not see it.

LATIF: Wow.

MAN: I can visualize, you know, being yelled at. I can see the looks on everyone's faces. My muscles will tense up. I think when I was a child, I think I was a little bit more in the moment before—before I had stacked up layers and layers of trauma.

SINDHU: Hmm.

LULU: Hmm. So whether it's looking back in sort of like PTSD or looking forward in anxiety, like a potential worry, it's just so visual that it—it kind of, like, drums up the body's emotional ...

SINDHU: Yeah, exactly. Like, imagery can really turn up emotions.

LULU: It is—I mean, it's like—it's the whole blessing and a curse, or like a gift, but not without a cost. Like, you get an escape hatch. Like, Derek can just fly off into space.

SINDHU: Yeah.

LULU: And that can be a gift, but then it sounds like you get this—sometimes these hauntings that then you can't escape.

LATIF: Well, and that it's kind of a control. Like, if you can control this, this is an amazing superpower, but if it controls you ...

SINDHU: Right.

LULU: Right.

SINDHU: Right.

LATIF: ... you're—that's—this is terrifying.

SINDHU: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And actually, like, part of what Emily does is teach people how to gain some of this control.

EMILY HOLMES: So if we take the spider example, you could shrink it or turn it green and push it away like it's more distant. Like literally visually. And it's a way of showing, "I'm controlling you, you're not controlling me and you're not real."

LULU: Wow.

LATIF: Wow. It's like she's like the real-life, you know, Professor Xavier, teaching the X-Men how to control their powers.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: That's so cool. But what about you? Do you still want imagery?

SINDHU: I mean, after all of my reporting, like, honestly no.

LATIF: Really?

LULU: Really?

SINDHU: Yeah. I mean, I have no practice with it. I feel like it could be kind of a bad trip that I, like, can't get out of.

LATIF: Well, what if you could just get, like, a little bit?

SINDHU: Yeah. Yeah. Although, you know, the more I've been thinking about it, the more I'm like, I just have such a clean, empty space inside of me.

LATIF: Oh, so it's like it's not the fear of having the pictures. It's, like, appreciating ...

SINDHU: Not having them, yeah.

LULU: Huh!

SINDHU: Yeah. Like, I am not gonna see poetry the way you see poetry or, you know, experience my memories in some sort of, like, rich sensory way. But, like, I do have a meditation practice, and I was like, whoa! Like, there's so much more to quiet if you're dealing not just with words and, like, ideas, but actually, like, images.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: More stuff to sweep out of there, yeah.

SINDHU: So I think I'm good.

LULU: You're good with where you are. You reported your way out of lust. You were like, "Actually, I don't want it." [laughs]

SINDHU: But also just beyond myself, I really do think it's a good thing for the world that there is a spectrum and, you know, there's all these different brains thinking in all these different ways, you know?

LATIF: Hmm. But there's also a kind of, like—like, the diversity means we're more, like, marooned in our own heads a little bit.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Like, where there's a novel that you'll love and I'll, like, look at it and I'll be like, "I just—I can't even—like, I don't even—I do not understand."

LULU: You can't read the description of a rhododendron bush. Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah. Or—or, even a memory. Like, it's like we were both in the same place at the same time, experienced the same thing. And then a year later we're talking about it and it's like we remember it in a totally different way. Yeah, I don't know. Like—which is—there is something sad about that.

LULU: Yeah.

SINDHU: And that probably leads to, like, so much miscommunication and misunderstanding.

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah, and conflict.

SINDHU: Conflict.

LULU: Yeah. Right.

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

SINDHU: You know, it's like, being like, why are you so obsessive about this thing that happened? It's like ...

LATIF: Why can't you see this?

SINDHU: Yes. Exactly.

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.

SINDHU: But I think for that problem it's like we all just need to understand better, I think, just how differently our brains work.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Hmm.

SINDHU: Wait, can I play you guys one last thing?

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Yeah, of course. Go for it.

SINDHU: Okay. So, you know, I was just talking about mediating, something I love to do. When I was talking to Derek, the guy with that super-intense imagery, I asked him what he likes to do, like what he does for fun. And I just need to share it with you.

DEREK FORGIONE: Um, I also practice harsh metal vocals just for fun. People have told me I should try and get into a band, but I don't think that's really my goal or anything.

SINDHU: What is 'harsh metal vocals?'

DEREK FORGIONE: Do you want an example?

SINDHU: Yeah.

DEREK FORGIONE: Okay. Prepare your eardrums. [laughs]

SINDHU: Okay.

DEREK FORGIONE: Or, uh, [guttural scream].

SINDHU: Wow!

DEREK FORGIONE: [screams]

LATIF: This episode was reported and produced by Sindhu Gnanasambandan. Yow!

LULU: With help from Annie McEwen and edited by Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pat Walters! Mixing help from Jeremy Bloom!

LATIF: And Arianne Wack!

LULU: Fact checking by Natalie Middleton. [laughs]

LATIF: Special thanks to Kim Nederveen Pieterse, Nathan Peereboom, Lizzie Peabody, Kristin Lin, Jo Eidman.

LULU: Mark Nakhla, Brian Radcliffe and Andrew Leland!

LATIF: Catch you next time and sorry to every heavy metal enthusiast.

LULU: Big sorry. Catch you soon!

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Rhianne and I'm from Donegal in Ireland, and here at the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumurad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Valentina Powers, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Jeremiah Barba, and I'm calling from San Francisco, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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