If you had to guess about the internal life, the conscious experience of the guy who co-founded

Pixar, the computer animation studio, what would you guess about what's happening inside his

head? And how do any of us picture things internally? How do we visualize?

These sound like simple questions, but strap in for some very wild surprises today about our

internal experiences. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we dive deeply into our three-pound universe

to uncover the most surprising secrets about our lives.

Today's episode is about visual imagery.

Now, I'm not talking about vision when something is in front of us and photons are bouncing off it and hitting our eyes and our brains are doing the

analysis. Instead, I'm talking about when you're sitting there, let's say, listening to a podcast

and the speaker says, hey, imagine watching a bluebird landing on a tree branch in the spring.

Imagine the bird looks around, moving its head curiously,

and then it flaps its wings for a moment,

then it hops to a different spot,

then it flies away.

Now, there's no blue bird.

Instead, your brain is taking everything

it's ever learned about bluebirds in the past and generating internal visual imagery,

all in the pitch blackness of your skull.

How does that work?

And how did recent discoveries here completely changed the debate in psychology and neuroscience?

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