I’ve been contemplating how robot minds could succeed at explaining reality if they didn’t suffer the errors and hallucinations that current AIs do. Current AI minds evolve from training on massive amounts of words and images created by humans stored as digital files. Computer programs can’t tell fiction from fact based on our language. It’s no wonder they hallucinate. And like humans, they feel they must always have an answer, even if it’s wrong.
What if robots were trained on what they see with their own senses without using human language? Would robots develop their own language that described reality with greater accuracy than humans do with our languages?
Animals interact successfully with reality without language. But we doubt they are sentient in the way we are. But just how good is our awareness of reality if we constantly distort it with hallucinations and delusions? What if robots could develop consciousness that is more accurately self-aware of reality?
Even though we feel like a being inside a body, peering out at reality with five senses, we know that’s not true. Our senses recreate a model of reality that we experience. We enhance that experience with language. However, language is the source of all our delusions and hallucinations.
The primary illusion we all experience is time. We think there is a past, present, and future. There is only now. We remember what was, and imagine what will be, but we do that with language. Unfortunately, language is limited, misleading, and confusing.
Take, for instance, events in the New Testament. Thousands, if not millions, of books have been written on specific events that happened over two thousand years ago. It’s endless speculation trying to describe what happened in a now that no longer exists. Even describing an event that occurred just one year ago is impossible to recreate in words. Yet, we never stop trying.
To compound our delusions is fiction. We love fiction. Most of us spend hours a day consuming fiction—novels, television shows, movies, video games, plays, comics, songs, poetry, manga, fake news, lies, etc. Often, fiction is about recreating past events. Because we can’t accurately describe the past, we constantly create new hallucinations about it.
Then there is fantasy and science fiction. More and more, we love to create stories based on imagination and speculation. Fantasy exists outside of time and space, while science fiction attempts to imagine what the future might be like based on extrapolation and speculation.
My guess is that any robot (or being) that perceives reality without delusions will not use language and have a very different concept of time. Is that even possible? We know animals succeed at this, but we doubt how conscious they are of reality.
Because robots will have senses that take in digital data, they could use playback to replace language. Instead of one robot communicating to another robot, “I saw a rabbit,” they could just transmit a recording of what they saw. Like humans, robots will have to model reality in their heads. Their umwelt will create a sensorium they interact with. Their perception of now, like ours, will be slightly delayed.
However, they could recreate the past by playing a recording that filled their sensorium with old data recordings. The conscious experience would be indistinguishable from using current data. And if they wanted, they could generate data that speculated on the future.
Evidently, all beings, biological or cybernetic, must experience reality as a recreation in their minds. In other words, no entity sees reality directly. We all interact with it in a recreation.
Looking at things this way makes me wonder about consuming fiction. We’re already two layers deep in artificial reality. The first is our sensorium/umwelt, which we feel is reality. And the second is language, which we think explains reality, but doesn’t. Fiction just adds another layer of delusion. Mimetic fiction tries to describe reality, but fantasy and science fiction add yet another layer of delusion.
Humans who practice Zen Buddhism try to tune out all the illusions. However, they talk about a higher state of consciousness called enlightenment. Is that just looking at reality without delusion, or is it a new way of perceiving reality?
Humans claim we are the crown of creation because our minds elevate us over the animals, but is intelligence or consciousness really superior?
We apparently exist in a reality that is constantly evolving. Will consciousness be something reality tries and then abandons? Will robots with artificial intelligence become the next stage in this evolutionary process?
If we’re a failure, why copy us? Shouldn’t we build robots that are superior to us? Right now, AI is created by modeling the processes of our brains. Maybe we should rethink that. But if we build robots that have a higher state of consciousness, couldn’t we also reengineer our brains and create Human Mind 2.0?
What would that involve? We’d have to overcome the limitations of language. We’d also have to find ways to eliminate delusions and hallucinations. Can we consciously choose to do those things?
For years now, I’ve been reading about people who create a second brain to record what they want to remember. Most of these second brain systems use software, but not all. Many base their ideas on the Zettelkasten system, which was originally stored on note cards.
Over the years, I’ve tried different methods and software applications. I’m currently learning Obsidian. I’ve used note cards, notebooks, Google Docs, Evernote, OneNote, InstaPaper, Recall, and others. I love reading – taking information in – but I don’t like taking notes.
The trouble is, information goes through my brain like a sieve. When I want to tell someone about what I’ve learned, or think I’ve learned, I can’t cite my source, or, for that matter, clearly state what I think I know. And I seldom think about how I’ve come to believe what I believe.
I’m currently reading False by Joe Pierre, MD, about how we all live with delusions. This book makes me want to rededicate myself to creating a second brain for two reasons. First, I want to take precise notes on this book because it offers dozens of insights about how we deceive ourselves, and about how other people are deceived and are deceiving. Second, the book inspires me to start tracking what I think I learn every day and study where that knowledge comes from.
One of the main ways we fool ourselves is with confirmation bias. Pierre says:
In real estate, it’s said that the most important guide to follow when buying a house and trying to understand home values is “location, location, location.” If I were asked about the most important guide to understand the psychology of believing strongly in things that aren’t true, I would similarly answer, “confirmation bias, confirmation bias, confirmation bias.”
Pierre explains how the Internet, Google, AIs, Social Media, and various algorithms reinforce our natural tendency toward confirmation bias.
Pierre claims there are almost 200 defined cognitive biases. Wikipedia has a nice listing of them. Wikipedia also has an equally nice, long list of fallacies. Look at those two lists; they are what Pierre is describing in his book.
Between these two lists, there are hundreds of ways we fool ourselves. They are part of our psychology. They explain how we interact with people and reality. However, everything is magnified by polarized politics, the Internet, Social Media, and now AI.
I’d like to create a second brain that would help me become aware of my own biases and fallacies. It would have been more useful if I had started this project when I was young. And I may be too old to overcome a lifetime of delusional thinking.
I do change the way I think sometimes. For example, most of my life, I’ve believed that it was important for humanity to go to Mars. Like Elon Musk, I thought it vital that we create a backup home for our species. I no longer believe either.
Why would I even think about Mars in the first place? I got those beliefs from reading dozens of nonfiction and fictional books about Mars. Why have I changed my mind? Because I have read dozens of articles that debunk those beliefs. In other words, my ideas came from other people.
I would like to create a second brain that tracks how my beliefs develop and change. Could maintaining a second brain help reveal my biases and thinking fallacies? I don’t know, but it might.
Doing the same thing and expecting different results is a common fallacy. Most of my friends are depressed and cynical about current events. Humanity seems to be in an immense Groundhog Day loop of history. Doesn’t it seem like liberals have always wanted to escape this loop, and conservatives wanted to embrace it?
If we have innate mental systems that are consistently faulty, how do we reprogram ourselves? I know my life has been one of repeatable behaviors. Like Phil Conners, I’m looking for a way out of the loop.
Stoicism seems to be the answer in old age. Is it delusional to think enlightenment might be possible?
While listening to the Radio Atlantic podcast, “What If AI Is a Bubble?,” a conversation between host Hanna Rosin and guest Charlie Warzel, I kept thinking I had heard this information before. I checked and found that I had read “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens” by Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, which Rosin had mentioned in her introduction.
Over the past year, I’ve been paying attention to how podcasts differ from long-form journalism. I’ve become disappointed with talking heads. I know podcasts are popular now, and I can understand their appeal. But I no longer have the patience for long chats, especially ones that spend too much time not covering the topic. All too often, podcasts take up excessive time for the amount of real information they cover.
What I’ve noticed is that the information density between podcasts and long-form journalism is very different. Here’s a quote, five paragraphs from the podcast:
Warzel: There’s a recent McKinsey report that’s been sort of passed around in these spheres where people are talking about this that said 80 percent of the companies they surveyed that were using AI discovered that the technology had no real—they said “significant”—impact on their bottom line, right?
So there’s this notion that these tools are not yet, at least as they exist now, as transformative as people are saying—and especially as transformative for productivity and efficiency and the stuff that leads to higher revenues. But there’s also these other reasons.
The AI boom, in a lot of ways, is a data-center boom. For this technology to grow, for it to get more powerful, for it to serve people better, it needs to have these data centers, which help the large language models process faster, which help them train better. And these data centers are these big warehouses that have to be built, right? There’s tons of square footage. They take a lot of electricity to run.
But one of the problems is with this is it’s incredibly money-intensive to build these, right? They’re spending tons of money to build out these data centers. So there’s this notion that there’s never enough, right? We’re going to need to keep building data centers. We’re going to need to increase the amount of power, right? And so what you have, basically, is this really interesting infrastructure problem, on top of what we’re thinking of as a technological problem.
And that’s a bit of the reason why people are concerned about the bubble, because it’s not just like we need a bunch of smart people in a room to push the boundaries of this technology, or we need to put a lot of money into software development. This is almost like reverse terraforming the Earth. We need to blanket the Earth in these data centers in order to make this go.
Contrast that with the opening five paragraphs of the article:
The AI boom is visible from orbit. Satellite photos of New Carlisle, Indiana, show greenish splotches of farmland transformed into unmistakable industrial parks in less than a year’s time. There are seven rectangular data centers there, with 23 more on the way.
Inside each of these buildings, endless rows of fridge-size containers of computer chips wheeze and grunt as they perform mathematical operations at an unfathomable scale. The buildings belong to Amazon and are being used by Anthropic, a leading AI firm, to train and run its models. According to one estimate, this data-center campus, far from complete, already demands more than 500 megawatts of electricity to power these calculations—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. When all the data centers in New Carlisle are built, they will demand more power than two Atlantas.
The amount of energy and money being poured into AI is breathtaking. Global spending on the technology is projected to hit $375 billion by the end of the year and half a trillion dollars in 2026. Three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks; the value of every publicly traded company has, in a sense, been buoyed by an AI-driven bull market. To cement the point, Nvidia, a maker of the advanced computer chips underlying the AI boom, yesterday became the first company in history to be worth $5 trillion.
Here’s another way of thinking about the transformation under way: Multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was. Much like how Saudi Arabia is a petrostate, the U.S. is a burgeoning AI state—and, in particular, an Nvidia-state. The number keeps going up, which has a buoying effect on markets that is, in the short term, good. But every good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.
America appears to be, at the moment, in a sort of benevolent hostage situation. AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and by another calculation, those AI expenditures accounted for 92 percent of GDP growth during the first half of 2025. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in late 2022, the tech industry has gone from making up 22 percent of the value in the S&P 500 to roughly one-third. Just yesterday, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet all reported substantial quarterly-revenue growth, and Reuters reported that OpenAI is planning to go public perhaps as soon as next year at a value of up to $1 trillion—which would be one of the largest IPOs in history. (An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters, “An IPO is not our focus, so we could not possibly have set a date”; OpenAI and The Atlantic have a corporate partnership.)
Admittedly, the paragraphs in the article are somewhat longer, but judge them on the amount of facts each presents.
Some people might say podcasts are more convenient. But I listened to the article. I’ve been subscribing to Apple News+ for a while now. I really didn’t use it daily until I discovered the audio feature. And it didn’t become significant until I began hearing major articles from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine.
Whenever I listened to a podcast, including podcasts from those magazines, I was generally disappointed with their impact. Conversational speech just can’t compete with the rich informational density of a well-written essay. And once I got used to long-form journalism, the information I got from the internet and television seemed so damn insubstantial.
These magazines have spoiled me. I’m even disappointed with their short-form content. Over my lifetime, I’ve watched magazines fill their pages with shorter and shorter content. Interesting tidbits came to magazines long before the internet appealed to our ever-shortening attention spans.
As an experiment, I ask you to start paying attention to the length of the content you consume. Analyze the information density of what you read, either with your eyes or ears. Pay attention to the words that have the greatest impact. Notice what percentage of a piece is opinion and what percentage is reported facts. How are the facts presented? Is a source given? And when you look back, either from a day or a week, how much do you remember?
What do you think when you read or hear:
According to one estimate, this data-center campus, far from complete, already demands more than 500 megawatts of electricity to power these calculations—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. When all the data centers in New Carlisle are built, they will demand more power than two Atlantas.
Don’t you want to know more? Where did those facts come from? Are they accurate? Another measure of content is whether it makes you want to know more. The article above drove my curiosity to insane levels. That’s when I found this YouTube video. Seeing is believing. But judging videos is another issue, but that’s for another time.
I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.
I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.
However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.
I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.
At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.
I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.
Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.
Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.
This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?
Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.
I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.
I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.
I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:
Climate gentrification
Heat islands
Climate dead zones
Insurance market collapse
Climate change acceleration
Economic no-go zones
Corporate takeover of public services
Climate change inequality
Histofuturism
Sacrifice zones
Corporate feudalism
Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.
I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.
Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.
The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.
That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?
If you don’t know what aphantasia or hyperphantasia then you should read “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.” by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, so I’m going to reiterate the high points to encourage you to find a copy. I highly recommend subscribing to the magazine or Apple News+.
The article is about a condition called aphantasia, one that I have. I wrote about that when I first discovered it in 2016. This new article by MacFarquhar describes the condition and its discovery in much greater depth than I have previously read. It also describes the opposite of this condition, hyperphantasia.
If you don’t know what aphantasia and hyperphantasia are, then you need to read this article if you have a certain kind of mindset such as artist or scientist, have trouble remembering the past, have difficulty recognizing faces, feel disconnected from your self, think you might be autistic, and many other personality traits that make you wonder if you’re different.
Aphantasia is the inability to remember mental images. Most people can close their eyes and recall a scene from their life. The face of a loved one, their desktop at work, the home they lived in as a child. About 2-3 percent of people can’t. But it turns out there all many degrees of not being able to see mental images, including some people who are overwhelmed with mental imagery. That condition is called hyperphantasia.
This article taught me a great deal about this condition I didn’t know. From my previous readings, I simplistically thought aphantasia meant one thing, but it’s not. For many people with the condition, they can’t remember their own past. I can. In fact, I’m obsessed with my past. I was particularly impressed what aphantasia did to artists and scientists.
I’m not like the extreme members of The Aphantasia Network or the people interviewed in the book Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle. That’s comforting, but I still miss mental memories. Yet, I’m lucky. Some people have aphantasia so severe they can’t remember anything about their past, and they feel like living corpses.
For most of my life, I assumed everyone perceived reality pretty much the same if all their sense organs were healthy. Of course, I knew some people had better sight or hearing than others, but I assumed what we perceive was the same reality. That’s because I naively thought we observed reality directly.
I now know we don’t. Our senses are used to construct a model of reality inside our heads. And we all model reality differently. This is called our Umwelt. I highly recommend reading An Immense World by Ed Yong if you want to learn more about that.
MacFarquhar’s article explores how the ability to recall mental images affects our personality, memory, sense of self, and our Umwelt. When I first learned that I lacked the common ability to consciously recall mental images, I felt deprived. Some call it mental blindness. MacFarquhar suggests I would be a different person if I had what I missed. More than that, aphantasia affects people in various ways, and I could have been very different in other ways.
MacFarquhar begins her article by profiling Nick Wakins. He thought he was normal, but couldn’t understand why other people could remember their past and he couldn’t. He abstractly knew about his earlier life from what people told him and photographs. He started researching his condition and discovered that some 19th century scientists had discovered people like him. Then in the 1970s, psychologists again explored visual memory, but it didn’t go far.
In 2010 Adam Zeman and colleagues published research in Neuropsychologie about “blind imagination.” The journalist Carl Zimmer wrote an article for Discover magazine. That caused dozens of people recognizing the condition in themselves to contact Zeman. Zeman coined the term aphantasia with the help of a friend, and published “Lives without imagery–Cogential aphantasia” in Cortex in 2015.
That inspired an article in The New York Times and Zeman got around seventeen thousand emails. It was around this time that I heard about it and wrote my blog piece.
Zeman was now hearing about many related conditions that people claiming to have aphantasia experience. Since 2015 a tremendous wealth of research has gone into this topic, information I didn’t know about. Larissa MacFarquhar does a fantastic job of catching me up.
This article is as exciting as anything Oliver Sacks wrote about. He also had aphantasia. And it’s more than just visual memories. It also relates to being remember sound, smells, tastes, and touches.
We all peceive the world tremendously different.
Nick Wakins thought he was absolutely normal until he uncovered this research. Nick has a PhD. He didn’t know what he was missing until he researched how other people peceived. We seldom compare notes like that.
Melinda Utal had an extreme case of no past memory that is very sad:
One of Kendle’s interviewees was Melinda Utal, a hypnotherapist and a freelance writer from California. She had trouble recognizing people, including people she knew pretty well, so she tended to avoid social situations where she might hurt someone’s feelings. When she first discovered that she was aphantasic, she called her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and living in a nursing home in Oregon. He had been a musician in big bands—he had toured with Bob Hope and played with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. She asked him whether he could imagine a scene in his head, and he said, Of course. I can imagine going into a concert hall. I see the wood on the walls, I see the seats, I know I’m going to sit at the back, because that’s where you get the best sound. I can see the orchestra playing a symphony, I can hear all the different instruments, and I can stop it and go backward to wherever I want it to start up and hear it again. She explained to her father what aphantasia was, how she couldn’t see images in her mind, or hear music, either. On the phone, her father started to cry. He said, But, Melinda, that’s what makes us human.
Melinda had an extremely bad memory for her life, even for an aphantasic. She once had herself checked for dementia, but the doctor found nothing wrong. She had become aware when she was in second grade that she had a bad memory, after a friend pointed it out. In an effort to hold on to her memories, she started keeping a journal in elementary school, recording what she did almost every single day, and continued this practice for decades. When, in her sixties, she got divorced and moved into an apartment by herself, she thought it would be a good time to look through her journals and revisit her younger days. She opened one and began to sob because, to her horror, the words she had written meant nothing to her. The journals were useless. She read about things she had done and it was as though they had happened to someone else.
MacFarquhar profiles many people for her long article, but I was particularly taken by two artists she interviewed. Sheri Paisley had aphantasia:
Among the e-mails that Zeman received, there were, to his surprise, several from aphantasic professional artists. One of these was Sheri Paisley (at the time, Sheri Bakes), a painter in her forties who lived in Vancouver. When Sheri was young, she’d had imagery so vivid that she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing it from what was real. She painted intricate likenesses of people and animals; portraiture attracted her because she was interested in psychology. Then, when she was twenty-nine, she had a stroke, and lost her imagery altogether.
To her, the loss of imagery was a catastrophe. She felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. She no longer saw herself as a person. Gradually, as she recovered from her stroke, she made her way back to painting, working very slowly. She switched from acrylic paints to oils because acrylics dried too fast. She found that her art had drastically changed. She no longer wanted to paint figuratively; she painted abstractions that looked like galaxies seen through a space telescope. She lost interest in psychology—she wanted to connect to the foundations of the universe.
On the other hand, Clare Dudeney had hyperphantasia.
In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.
At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.
An interesting aspect of new research is showing that some people have aphantasia since birth, but others acquire it later in life, often due to a physical injury. Other reseach suggests that visual memory is better in children and women, and that many children might have hyperphantasia. I believe I did see mental images when I was young. And other studies suggest that taking drugs brings back the ability to create mental imagery. I can testify to that. I used to get great flashes of imagery when I got high. Other studies show that people repress the ability to create mental imagery because of psychological trauma. All of this makes me wonder if I could retrain myself to create mental pictures in my head.
It is quite common for people with aphantasia to dream with vivid imagery, although others claim their dreams are thin and dark. As I’ve gotten older, my dreams have become dark and shadowy. However, the other night I had a dream that was intensely vivid, bright, and colorful. I was even aware in the dream to a slight degree. I said to myself that I was in a dream and I couldn’t believe it was so damn real. It felt so real that I was afraid I couldn’t get back to my old life. I was on a street looking at buildings I didn’t know, and was worried that if I became stuck in the dream I wouldn’t know where to go. I was quite relieved to wake up.
Scientists who are very good at thinking abstractly often forget how to create mental imagery. And some even theorize that spending so much time reading and staring at words have ruined our capacity to create mental pictures.
At first I envied people with hyperphantasia until I read this:
Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.
I believe I’ve copied as much of this article as I ethically should.
I’m using this blog to encourage you to go read the article. I’m also encourage people to subscribe to magazines. If you want good information it costs. We need to get away from always assume information should be free. Free information on the web is corrupting our society. Subscribing to magazines supports the spread of better information.
My new effort at home schooling myself is to read one great article a day from magazines with solid editors. I look for articles that expand my mental map of the world. This one certainly has.
Auxiliary Memory 