WIt is believed that Elijah Blake's imagination burned so intensely that he needed little reference to the physical world when creating his great works of art. For example, when painting historical or mythical figures, he waited until the “spirit” appeared in his mind's eye. The vision was apparently so detailed that Blake was able to sketch it as if a real person were sitting in front of him.
Like human models, these fictional characters can sometimes act capriciously. According to Blake's biographer John Higgs, the artist can become irritated when the object of his inner gaze casually changes posture or leaves the scene altogether. “I can't go on, it's gone! I have to wait until it comes back,” Blake exclaimed.
Such intense and detailed imaginings are thought to reflect a condition known as hyperphantasia, which is not as rare as once thought, with as many as 1 in 30 people having a hard time believing it. I am reporting a very clear mind's eye.
Consider the experience of Mads Holm, a Norwegian hyper-delusional man living in Stockholm. “You can basically zoom out and see the entire city around you, and you can fly around within that map,” Holm said. “I have a second space in my heart where I can create anywhere.”
This once-ignored form of neurodiversity is now the subject of scientific research, with implications for everything from creative inspiration to mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis. It can lead to insights.
Francis Galton, a racist and better known as the “father of eugenics,” was the first scientist to recognize the enormous diversity of people's visual images. In 1880, he asked participants to rate their “brightness, sharpness, and color as they sat at the breakfast table this morning.” Some people reported being unable to create images at all in their mind's eye, while others, including his cousin Charles Darwin, were able to draw images with great clarity.
“Some objects are clearly defined: a cold slice of beef, grapes and pears, the state of the plate when you're done eating, and some other objects look as if they were photographs in front of you.'' so vividly,” Darwin wrote to Galton.
Unfortunately, Galton's discoveries failed to stimulate the imagination of scientists at the time. “The psychology of visual imagery was a huge topic, but somehow the existence of people in extreme conditions had disappeared from view,” says Adam Zeman, a professor at the University of Exeter. It took more than a century for psychologists like Szeeman to pick up where Galton left off.
Still, much of the early research focused on the poorest end of the spectrum: people with aphantasia who claim to lack the mind's eye. However, within the past five years, interest in hyperphantasia has begun to grow, and it is now an active field of research.
To determine where people fall on the spectrum, researchers often use the Visual Image Vividity Questionnaire (VVIQ). The survey asks participants to visualize and report on a series of 16 scenarios, such as “the sun rising over the horizon into a hazy sky.” Her 5-point scale represents the level of detail that users “see”. You can try it yourself. When you imagine that sunrise, which of the following best describes your experience?
1. I have no image at all. I can only “understand” that you are thinking about the target.
2. Ambiguous and dim
3. Appropriately clear and lively impression
4. Clear and moderately vivid
5. Completely clear and as vivid as what you see in real life
The final score is the sum of all 16 responses for a maximum of 80 points. In large surveys, most people score her around 55-60 points. Only about 1% will score him 16 points. They are thought to suffer from extreme aphantasia. On the other hand, 3% achieved her perfect score of 80, which is extreme megalomania.
VVIQ is a relatively straightforward tool, but Leshan Rieder, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, is currently conducting a series of in-depth interviews with ultra-fantasy people. This is a study that helps reveal their inner peculiarities. “As you talk to them, you start to realize that this is very different from most people's experience,” she says. “It's very immersive and their images have a very emotional impact on them.”
Some people with hyperphantasia are able to merge their mental images with how they see the world around them. Rieder asked participants to hold out their hands and imagine an apple in his palm. Most people feel that the scene in front of their eyes is different from the scene in their head. “However, many people with hyperphantasia (about 75%) can actually see the apple in their hand in front of them. And they can even feel its weight.”
As you can imagine, these visual abilities can influence your career choices. “Aphantasia seems to tend to push people into science, math, IT, or Stem professions, whereas hyperphantasia leads people to work in what are traditionally called creative professions. ” says Zeman. “There are a lot of exceptions though.”
Ms. Reeder recalls one participant who used her own delusions of grandeur as a driving force for her writing. “She said she doesn't even have to think about the stories she's writing because she can see her characters playing out the roles before her eyes,” the reader said. looks back.
HHyperfantasia may also affect people's consumption of art. For example, a novel becomes a cinematic experience. “For me, this story is like a movie in my mind,” says London-based artist Geraldine van Heemstra. Holm offers a similar explanation. “When I listen to an audiobook, I have a movie playing in my head.”
This is not necessarily an advantage. Laura Ruiz Alvarado, a trade unionist also based in London, said she was disappointed by the scene. golden compass, Film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman's novel his dark material. “I already had a clear idea of what all the characters would look like and how they would act,” she says. The director's choices did not match up at all.
Zeman's research suggests that people with hyperphantasia enjoy particularly rich autobiographical memories. This is certainly the case with van Heemstra. When thinking about her trip to the countryside, she can remember every step of her own walk, even the seemingly insignificant details. “You can imagine even small things, like if you dropped something and picked it up,” she says.
Where exactly these abilities come from is unknown. Since aphantasia is known to run in families, it is reasonable to expect that aphantasia may be similar. Like many other psychological traits, our imagination probably comes from a combination of nature and nurture, which together shape brain development from infancy to old age. .
Professor Zeman has taken the first steps to investigate the neurological differences that underpin surprising changes in the mind's eye. He used fMRI to scan people's brains at rest, and found that people in a hypersensitive state had lower prefrontal cortex, which is involved in “higher-order” thinking such as planning and decision-making, and areas responsible for visual processing. I have found that the connection between is better. , located at the back of the skull.
“My guess is that if you say 'apple' to someone with hyperphantasia, the linguistic representation 'apple' in the brain will immediately transmit that information to the visual system,” Zeman said. To tell. “For people with aphantasia, the word or concept 'apple' functions independently of the visual system because the connection to the visual system is weak.”
Further research will no doubt reveal the nuances of this process. For example, a detailed survey by Professor Liana Palermo of the University of Magna Graecia in Catanzaro, Italy, suggests that there may be two subtypes of vivid imagery. The first is object hyperphantasia. This, as the name suggests, involves the ability to imagine objects in great detail.
The second is spatial hyperphantasia. This includes an enhanced ability to imagine the relative orientations of different items and perform mental rotations. “People also report an increased sense of direction,” Palermo says. This seems to match Holm's description of his detailed 3D cityscapes that allow him to find routes between any two locations.
Many mysteries remain. Extensive research by Professor Ilona Kovács of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary suggests that hyperfantasy is much more common among children and disappears through adolescence and into adulthood. She thinks this may reflect differences in how the brain encodes information. During early childhood, our brains store more sensory details, which are slowly replaced by more abstract concepts. “Children's memories give us a more concrete perception of the world,” she says, but only a small percentage of people seem to retain it into later life.
Leaders, on the other hand, are interested in studying the effects of overfantasy on mental health. For example, it's easy to see how vivid memories of upsetting events can worsen symptoms of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rieder also studies how people's mental images influence the symptoms of diseases such as schizophrenia. She said that if someone is already at risk for psychosis, hyperphantasia may cause them to experience vivid hallucinations, while aphantasia may increase the risk of non-sensory delusions such as fear of persecution. I think there may be.
For now, this remains an interesting hypothesis, but the leaders showed that people who have more vivid images in everyday life are also more likely to have harmless “pseudo-hallucinations” in the laboratory. She had participants sit in a dark room looking at flickering lights on a screen. This is a setting that gently stimulates the brain's visual system. After a few minutes, many people will begin to see simple optical illusions, such as geometric patterns. However, people with higher VVIQ scores tended to see more complex landscapes, such as stormy beaches, medieval castles, and volcanoes. “It was pretty psychedelic,” says Luis Alvarado, who participated in the experiment.
Rieder emphasizes that the participants in her study were fully aware that these pseudo-hallucinations were a figment of their imagination. “I don't think people who have never had problems with reality discrimination are more susceptible to mental illness.” But for people with mental illness, a deeper understanding of the mind's eye can help patients experience may provide insight into.
For now, Rieder is hopeful that increased awareness of Hyperphantasia will help people reach their full potential. “This is a skill that can be leveraged,” she suggests.
Many of the people I interviewed certainly appreciated being able to learn a little more about the mind's eye and how their eyes differ from the average person's.
Luis Alvarado, for example, first encountered the term while listening to a podcast about William Blake, which ultimately led him to contact Reeder. “For the first month or so, I couldn't get it out of my head,” she says. “It's not something I talk about often, but I think it helped me understand why I experience things more intensely. It was comforting.”
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David Robson is the author of The Law of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Change Your Life, published by Canongate on 6 June (£18.99). In order to support guardian and observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.Shipping charges may apply