Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. And this is one of our From the Vault selections.

Yeah, this particular episode, originally published May 10th, 2016, and it concerns

Aphantasia, blindness of the Mind's Eye. The idea that if you're reading a description

in a book or someone's explaining something to you, certain individuals will not be able

to form that mental picture. And this is a fascinating topic. When we originally

aired this, we heard from a lot of people. Some people who suddenly realized, hey, I think

this is how my mind works. I think this episode generated some of the

most listener mail of anything we ever did. Yeah, we did a whole additional listener mail

episode that came out after this. Yeah. And we'll make sure to link to that on the landing

page for this episode. Anyway, we hope you enjoy this episode from the old days.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works.com.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick.

And today's episode concerns the Mind's Eye, concerns mental imagery. And so we decided

that the best way to kick off this episode is to take you on a little guided mental journey.

Yeah, so close your eyes unless you're driving or doing something that requires your eyes to be

open. And in that case, don't close your eyes. If you are able to close your eyes, close your

eyes, if not just imagine you're eight years old and you're walking along a beach with your

mother, your barefoot, the tide is coming in. And you see trails of footprints leading back and

forth along the beach where other people have walked the same path today. But the waves are

coming higher and higher and slowly smoothing all those footprints away. But then you look up at

your mother and you notice something strange. She's wearing armor, a steel chest plate and a

...