If I ask you to imagine something, like the sun peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm,

do you see it with rich visual detail like a movie?

Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you not really have any internal picture at all,

but instead just a concept. In an earlier episode, we tackled the spectrum of internal visual

imagination from hyperfantasia at one end to a fantasia at the other end. How does your experience differ from other peoples?

And what does this have to do with the mind's eye or the mind's ear or how your brain

cobbles together the skills that you have to nail the tasks before you?

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 some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.

Thank you. surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode returns to an issue that I hit a little while ago about how we visualize

on the inside.

Specifically, we talked about Afantasia and HyperFantasia and Hyper-Fantasia.

In A-Fantasia, you just don't picture anything in your head when you're asked to visually imagine something.

And in hyper-Fantasia, it's like a movie going on on the inside. And every one of us is somewhere on this

spectrum between these two endpoints. And if you heard that episode, you know that I talked with

Ed Catmull, who's the founder of Pixar films. And Ed was surprised to discover a while ago

that he is a Fantasic.

And when he quizzed some of the best artists and animators at Pixar,

he was even more surprised to discover that many of them were a fantagic.

So the key lesson that emerged from that episode is that we each have our own experience of reality.

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