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Adam Zeman, "The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
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Adam Zeman
K Pop Demon Hunters Saja Boy's breakfast
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Gregory McNiff
meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?
- [00:39]
Commercial Narrator
It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
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New Books Network Announcer
It is an honor to share.
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Commercial Narrator
No, it's our honor.
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Adam Zeman
It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle.
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Gregory McNiff
Pick a meal to pick a side.
- [00:57]
Adam Zeman
Ba da ba ba ba and participate in McDonald's while supplies last.
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Gregory McNiff
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff, and I'm excited to be joined by Adam Zeman, who is the author of the Shape of Things, A New Science of Imagination. The book is published by Bloomsbury Circus Press in the United States in April of 2025. Professor Adam Zeman is an Honorary Fellow at the center for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary professor of Neurology at the University of Exeter. He trained in medicine at Oxford University, following an undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology. His previous books include Consciousness A User's Guide, A Portrait of the Brain, and Epilepsy and Memory, of which he is the co author. I selected the Shape of Things Unseen because it examines the intersection of neuroscience and subjective experience with both rigor and clarity. It tackles fundamental questions about mental imagery, memory, and the nature of the inner life. With growing interest in consciousness, it feels like a very timely and important contribution to the dialogue. Adam, thank you so much for joining me today to discuss your book.
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Adam Zeman
Thank you very much for having me, Adam.
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Gregory McNiff
I usually start all my interviews with the same question, namely why did you write the Shape of Things Unseen? And who is the target audience?
- [03:34]
Adam Zeman
Yeah, so I think this book had been in the back of my mind for at least a couple of decades, if not longer. So like many people as a student, I'd wondered what was special about the human mind. Is there anything that sets us apart from the rest of creation? And over the years, I had begun to feel that imagination was a strong candidate for the most distinctive capacity of the human mind. So what I mean by imagination in this context is something very broad. It's our capacity to detach ourselves from the here and now, to recollect the past, anticipate the future, lose ourselves in virtual worlds created by artists and by scientists. So I had. I had this background question about what's special about the human mind in the back of my mind for a long while. And I guess that was what impelled my initial thinking about the book. Over time, I developed a kind of professional interest, coincidentally, in the neurology of visual imagery. And that was because I'd come across a patient who'd lost the ability to visualize. And then, as I expect we'll discuss, I came across a large number of otherwise entirely abnormal people who lack a mind's eye. So that added a kind of extra dimension to my interest in imagery and imagination. I've always been fascinated by the neurology of vision, which is one of the best worked out areas of neurology and neuroscience. And that complemented the work I was doing. That interest complemented the work I was doing on people who were unable to visualize It. So that was the kind of cluster of interests that. That led to the book. And it's really intended for anyone and everyone who's interested in the human mind. So I enjoy writing, I enjoy trying to make scientific ideas accessible. And this book is certainly not intended to be technical. It's a book for the general reader. I think, in retrospect, it's quite a heavily burdened book. I had a lot to say. And if you read the book, you'll be taken on a tour of quite a wide range of topics in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, psychology.
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Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. It definitely is wide ranging. And you do a very nice job of covering the disciplines. And I also say you seem to have a very strong background in literature and the arts as well. And maybe we'll get into that briefly. But to start at the beginning here, early in the book, you organize your discussion. And the structure of the book is really organized around four central ideas. Can you walk us through these ideas and how they structure the book?
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Adam Zeman
Yeah, sure. I guess these were ideas that gradually came into the foreground as I was thinking about the topic and how to write the book. So the first thought, the first big idea, if you like, is that we live a great deal of our lives in our heads. And I think this will probably resonate with most people if they simply reflect on the way they spend their time. So much of the time we are detached from here, and we'll be thinking about what happened yesterday, making plans for what we're going to be doing tomorrow. We'll be reading a novel, watching a film, thinking about some topic which may be of great interest to us, but isn't rooted in our immediate environment. So we're often lost in our thoughts. We often live in our heads. And there have been formal studies which have demonstrated this. So with the use of descriptive experience sampling, which is a method which simply alerts people to give a description of their experience at random moments, it turns out that people are actually more often conscious of imagery than they are conscious of their immediate surroundings. So we more often have an image of something that isn't present in our minds, or we are occupied by our stream of consciousness, by our inner speech, than we are by our immediate surroundings. So the first big idea is that we live a lot of our lives in our heads. Second thought is that that becomes a little less puzzling when you reflect that actually our experience of the here and now also, of course, comes from our heads. Now, we may want to talk about this in more detail later, but perhaps this is made most Straightforwardly apparent by reflecting that if, for whatever reason, our brains cease to function, our experience of the here and now ceases. So clearly there is a sense in which our experience, the here and now, is generative. It's generated by activity in the brain. It's not something that is simply given to us on a plate. So our experience, the here and now, comes from within our heads. And what we do when we imagine, for example, when we visualize, is to run offline systems in the brain which give us experience the here and now when they are run online. So if you imagine looking at an apple, you will activate regions of the brain, including visual cortices. When you visualize an apple, you activate those same regions more weakly. But nevertheless, that seems to be a critical part of the process of visualization. So imagination, in that sense of sensory imagery is, as it, I think, subjectively feels, a kind of echo of perception. So when we're imagining, in that sense, we're running offline the systems which we run online when we are experiencing the here and there now. So that's the third big idea. And then the fourth has to do with what's special about human imagination, if anything, is because animals have much, many of the same systems in their brain that we do. And when they perceive the world, they are activating sensory cortices, for example. And it seems quite likely to me that some animals at least can imagine in the sense that they, for example, can dream. So anyone who has a dog or a cat will have the sense from time to time that they may be dreaming. And certainly neuroscience would back up that intuition. So is there anything that distinguishes the human imagination? I think there is, and I think it's that we have evolved the capacity to share. We imagine. And I think that really lies at the basis of human culture and civilization. Sorry, I interrupted you.
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Gregory McNiff
No, that was a great summary of the structure of the book. You pretty much answered this. But at the beginning of the book, you offer an explanation of the imagination, saying, quote, it is not a term of science, but rather embraces, quote, a family of meanings that have survived thousands of years of intensive use and embody profound psychological truth. Could you unpack that a bit?
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Adam Zeman
So, indeed, imagination is not a term of science. It's a colloquial term which has a family of meanings which are interestingly interrelated. I guess the two key senses in which I explore in the book are these. So the first is imagination in the sense of capacity to contemplate things in their absence. So the ability to visualize an Apple when it's not there in front of you, the ability to visualize your kitchen, the face of your best friend or your spouse, the sound of thunder, the feel of velvet. So this is sensory imagery which enables us to represent the sensory qualities of items which aren't immediately present to us. So I think that's one bona fide sense of imagination. There's another rather different sense in which imagination is the capacity that underlies our ability to be creative in the sense of being able to bring into being things which are both new and useful, if you like, our ability to reconfigure the world in our heads. And it's interesting that we use the same word for imagination in this sense, the ability that underpins creativity, the same word that we use to refer to sensory imagery, the ability to represent things in their absence. And it's not immediately clear why we use the same word, but I think it must be that many creative people, not all something we might come on to discuss, but many creative people, I think, use sanscrit imagery in their creative work. So, for example, many novelists, some of whom I spoke to, some of whose work I have read, describe a kind of potent, fertile image lying somewhere close to the source of a book of one of their books. And Einstein, to take an example from science, famously said that he didn't think verbally, he thought in images. So imagery, sensory imagery, is often involved in the creative process. And perhaps that's the link between these two senses of imagination, though they are clearly rather contrasting ones.
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Gregory McNiff
That's fascinating. I have to say, I was open to viewing the role of the imagination in the artistic process. Pretty open to accepting that. You did interview. You quote Einstein. I think you interviewed the cosmologist or astrophysicist, Martin Reeves. And he actually says, I think you almost challenge him in a very polite way. And he says, I don't think imagination, or I don't think I have a very strong definition. You walk away concluding the opposite. And maybe we'll get a little more into this, but I do want to circle back on this artistic notion. And specifically, you begin and end the book with quotes from William Blake. I'll just say the book begins with chapter one, as a man is so he sees, and then the book effectively ends with, you know, William Blake quoting you, quoting him. I apologize. All things exist in the human imagination. Could you talk about the role he might have played in helping you understand imagination or maybe how he viewed it?
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Adam Zeman
Yeah, I mean, Blake was a very unusual thinker, and I'm certainly not A Blake scholar, Though I enjoyed his poetry very much when I was growing up and have enjoyed his prose over the years, he was persuaded that the imagination was an extremely powerful force. And he believed, as some of his successors among the Romantics, particularly Coleridge, did, that the human mind was partially generative. That our experience did wasn't simply a readout of the faithful readout of the world as it presented itself to us, but that our experience was conditioned, deeply influenced by creative generative processes within our minds. And I think that's a theme that recurs through Blake's writings. As I say, I'm not a Blake scholar. I've been quite influenced by John Hanks books about Blake. He's produced two interesting studies of Blake recently. And I felt that my personal story was a little intertwined with Blake's. He was born 200 years before me and he lived in parts of London which I knew quite well. And I describe in the book a jogging route that I often take through London which takes me to the summit of Primrose Hill is a place where Blake stood and said, I have seen the spiritual sun. Words which are engraved on the top of the hill.
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Gregory McNiff
No, Excellent. I do want to go a little closer to your specific expertise, namely this Harvard study in Science in 2010 that was I guess, aimed at determining mind. Wandering is the term you use. And they, I guess the study was 5,000 people and involved their use of their iPhone. The study concluded that, quote, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Why is that?
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Adam Zeman
Yeah, so I think that statement has to be qualified. As I said at the beginning, a number of studies now show that we're very often occupied by our thoughts and by imagery rather than by awareness of the immediate here and our immediate surroundings. So this is the human condition, really. It's not a characteristic particularly of unhappy minds, but it turns out that frequent reflection on the past is associated with a lower than average mood state. And I guess anyone who's had a period of low mood will know that rumination on unhappy experiences from past mistakes we've made, things we feel badly about, ways in which people have treated us is often a feature of depression. So that's the sense in which a 1 degree mind is unhappy mind. All our minds wander. We're all of us often detached from the here and now in itself. That. Doesn't condemn us to unhappiness. But on the other hand, it is true that there is a particular benefit from being in contact with the present. So many people find that flow states are particularly rewarding states in which we are engaged with an activity which is well matched to our abilities, which challenges us to just the right degree, and which allows us to lose ourselves, to lose our regretful thoughts about the past and our anxious thoughts about the future and occupy ourselves with present fulfillments.
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Gregory McNiff
Interesting. Particularly the role of technology. And I'm sure AI will continue to drive artificial imagery and how that will affect us.
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Adam Zeman
Yeah, we're very distracted, aren't we?
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Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I know it seems like. Gosh, I'm blanking. I think it's Elliot who said, we're distracted by distraction from distraction, and I have to say, he nailed it. I don't go off topic here. I love that it's man. I'm not sure we fully understand the implications of what we're creating, but this is probably not the forum to debate AI though. I want any thoughts you have on that. Adam, you certainly. I would. I'm sure they would be pretty insightful. I want to move to this study that you actually led in 2015 on people who, quote, lacked a mind's eye. I think it was a Data set of 21 individuals at Coining the term aphantasia to denote this variation in human experience. Could you talk about what the mind's eye is and how you're defining aphantasia?
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Adam Zeman
Yep, sure. So the mind's eye is what enables us to visualize things in their absence. So if you can call to mind an apple and you see a shiny object which is green or red and has a stalk in which you can make twirl in your imagination, then you are experiencing imagery. If you can visualize the look of your kitchen or the face of a good friend. Most of us have imagery to some degree. It's a variable intensity. So I'm a very average imager. But there are people who say that when they visualize, what they are looking at is pretty much as vivid as it would be as if they were really seeing it. But it turns out that about 4% of the population lack imagery altogether. And the way in which that came to light, at least in my work, was that 20 years or so ago, I encountered a patient who'd lost the ability to visualize, probably because he'd had a minor stroke or something of that kind. But he very abruptly lost the ability to visualize. We described his case in a scientific paper. The story was picked up by an American science journalist called Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine. And then over the next couple of years, people began getting in touch, saying, I'm just like the man described in this Discover article. Except that I always have been. I've always realized that there's something a little bit different about my mind. And so it seemed that there was a group of people who black to mind's eye who realized at a certain point that when people were talking about visualization, they weren't talking entirely metaphorically. They really were able to have an experience that was somewhat visual and these folk couldn't. So we responded to these initially 21 contacts by sending the Vividness Questionnaire. And all of them scored very low. And also a questionnaire asking a set of common sense questions about their experience. For example, how did you discover what emotional impact did it have? How has it affected your memory? Do you dream visually? And it seemed that these folk were telling a fairly consistent story. So we thought there was a phenomenon that deserved a term. There were some terms in the medical literature which had been used to describe people who'd lost the ability to visualize, but they were very unwieldy, like visual irreminescence or defective revisualization. So I consulted a classicist friend, asked him if he could come up with a term that could be used to describe this lack, and he suggested that we borrow Aristotle's term for the mind's eye, which is fantasia and tigone at the end. So that was how aphantasia came to be born. And words are powerful things that the term caught on. It was quite widely reported. And essentially my life has revolved around aphantasia ever since because I've been contacted by about 20,000 people, um, since then, most of them at the aphantasic end of the spectrum, but a. But a fair number also at the hyperphantasic end of the spectrum. So we decided we needed a term to describe the high end as well. So the, the aphantasia hyphantasia contrast seems to be an interesting one.
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Gregory McNiff
Yeah, absolutely. I want to briefly move to vision. You write, vision is not simply a reactive process, but rather a generative one.
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Adam Zeman
Quote.
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Gregory McNiff
We tend to think of perception as occurring outside in, but it mostly occurs ins, inside out. In the words of Anil Seth, the contemporary expert on consciousness. Could you. Could you talk about why you say vision is generative rather than reactive?
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Adam Zeman
Yeah, sure. So I think there are two ways of getting at this idea. One is through a number of psychological phenomena which we can talk about, and the other is neurologically. So thinking in terms of the psychological phenomena. I mean, most people will be familiar with some illusions. So one illusion, which I reproduce in the book is a size distance illusion. So there's a picture in the book of a woman who is running over a bridge. Each image is actually of the same size, but the further away from you she is in the image, the larger she seems. And that's because your brain makes an unconscious correction for distance. And we can't overcome that unconscious correction. There's a range of similar illusions. Ambiguous figures give another related example. So if you look at a line drawing of a cube, as you gaze at it, it will reverse in depth. Its appearance changes radically. But of course nothing is changing on the page. The change is occurring only in your head. Pareidolia provides another example. So we very often find patterns in the world where there are none. The man in the Moon is one good example. Once you've seen the man in the moon, it's very difficult to unsee him. Random built stereograms are a slightly more obscure example, but a very compelling one for anyone who knows these. So if you. These were devised by a psychologist called Bella Ulish. Each eye looks at a different image. You wear a pair of specs, one with a red lens, one with a green lens. Each eye seems a slight, sees a slightly different image. When you look with both eyes without the specks, all you see is a meaningless pattern. When you put the specs on and look after a few seconds, and it can be 20, 30 seconds, you begin to see a wonderful three dimensional form which clearly your brain has computed for you if you like, it's not there on the page. And then to take a more dramatic example, an example I give in the book from my own experience is an occasion. When I woke up as a teenager, I was sleeping in a garden room. I must have forgotten to draw the curtains. I woke up in the early hours and standing at the foot of my bed, there was a burglar wearing a striped football shirt. And I screamed. And over the next few seconds the striped football shirt and the burglar dissolved into a pattern of light and dark shining through a fancy which my window gave onto. So these are all examples in which it's clear that we are contributing substantially to our experience. So those are. That's some psychological evidence, if you like, that perception is at least to some degree inside out. Of course there's input coming from the world, but we're constantly using our experience, our immense background of stored knowledge to interpret the information that's coming from the world. And indeed we are making predictions about what we're going to find there. So it's that kind of psychological body of evidence. And then there's the neurological evidence, which is just very straightforward. Your brain is constantly receiving a supply of oxygen and glucose. If you deprive it of that supply for more than a few seconds, experience ceases. So, you know, that's a very simple biological sense in which our experience is generated by the activity occurring in our brains.
- [25:18]
Gregory McNiff
Quick follow up. You refer to perception as, quote, controlled hallucination. What do you mean by that?
- [25:24]
Adam Zeman
So that's really another way of stating the idea which I've been developing that perception is, in a sense, more inside out than it is outside in. We wouldn't be able to make sense of the world if we came to it fresh, so to speak. It would be overwhelming and uninterpretable. So the reason we can make sense of the world is that we know what's out there. Because we've had an extremely long schooling in. We have gradually learned to perceive the world. We've learned to hear and see and touch. We've learned to make sense of the input from the senses. So we're constantly making predictions about what we're going to find out there, which then get corrected, of course, if what we're expecting isn't there or if it's changed in some way. So in a sense, we are predicting the world into existence. We are hallucinating the world. It's the sense in which the hallucination, which is our experience is controlled is that it is indeed corrected by what's out there. Whereas if you're psychotic and you're hallucinating, then that correction is no longer operating corrected systems broken down.
- [26:36]
Gregory McNiff
I want to turn back to this discussion of the role of imagination in the arts versus the science sciences. I think you interview the author, Philip Pullman, you also discuss Picasso, Bach,
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Adam Zeman
and
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Gregory McNiff
you write that the arts, quote, turn us back to our senses, slowing us down so that we savor the notes of experience rather than brushing them off. And I think we all intuitively could agree with that. But could you briefly talk about how the role of imagination functions differently in the arts versus sciences?
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Adam Zeman
Yeah, sure. I think the sense of achieve different things. And if I were to state that very briefly, I'd say that the arts are in the business of evoking experience, Whereas the sciences are in the business of providing explanations. So it's a kind of contrast between evocation and explanation. So the aims are rather different. But I think the fundamental cognitive capacities which allow us to be creative in the arts and the sciences are shared. And I think many of the rewards of creativity are shared. So thinking of the fundamental capacities, just briefly, I use a little mnemonic in the book, which is skids, to try to remind myself of what imagination, in its creative sense fundamentally depends on. So the ski in skids stands for skill. I don't think there are any creative achievements I can think of which don't presuppose a very high degree of skill that I think is shared between sciences and the arts. And in the book I discuss the underpinnings of skill, but I won't do that just now. Sort of biological and social culture, sociocultural underpinnings of skill. Then the D in SCIDS stands for detachment. And I really have two things in mind by detachment. One is this capacity we have to control our minds, which is what, what allows us to detach ourselves from the here and now. And this depends substantially on our very well developed frontal lobes, which give us a high degree of cognitive control. So that's one element of detachment. The other end of detachment comes from our symbolic technologies. So our ability to represent the world in ways that allows us to communicate with one another, language being the preeminent symbolic technology. So I think skill detachment in the sense I've explained, and then the kind of wild card in the mix, the s in skins, is spontaneity. And this was an idea I really wanted to explore in the book because I think neuroscience has reached a point at which he has really interesting things to say about spontaneity. What I have in mind here by spontaneity is the phenomenon which is very widely described by creative people, of creative ideas arriving, whether it's a line of poetry, an idea for a story, solution to a mathematical problem, an idea for an experiment. It comes as if from nowhere. Now, of course, it's not coming from nowhere, because it doesn't come. Chance favors the prepared mind. Such ideas don't come to people who haven't trained their minds to a very high degree. But there are crucial, unconscious, subterranean, subliminal processes at work which we can't do without in the creative process. And I think those elements, the skill, detachment in the sense of cognitive control and use of symbolic technology and spontaneity, I think those are all shared between scientists and artists. They have those in common. And many of the kind of the thrilling rewards that people obtain once they produce to create a result are again shared, I think, between scientists and artist.
- [30:21]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, it's a really fascinating framework. I want to move to part two, the science of imagination. Can you talk about Francis Galton's contribution to our understanding of visual imagery.
- [30:32]
Adam Zeman
Yeah, so Galton was a slightly eccentric 19th century thinker, something of a. Of a polymath. He was Charles Darwin's cousin. He's got himself, earned himself a bad reputation, contemporary reputation, because he became interested in eugenics. In fact, I think he coined the term. And that leads some people to dismiss his contribution. But, you know, I think those ideas were of his time. I think he regarded himself as having what he thought was an inherited interest in poetry, the mind and statistics. He thought that these three interests sort of travel down through his family. And what he's now celebrated for is developing techniques for measuring psychological processes. And he was the first person to try to, so far as I know, to try to measure the vividness of imagery. And he did this using what was called his breakfast table questionnaire. So he invited people to recollect, it's a nice Victorian instrument. He invited people to reflect on their breakfast table, as they recall leading it this morning, and then to try to describe the. The appearance and to rate their image of the table along a variety of parameters, but essentially rating the vividness of their recollection. And he distributed his questionnaire to a variety of people, to many of his colleagues who were mostly scientists, and to women and children, among others. And he came to the slightly provocative conclusion that women and children had rather vivid imagery, whereas scientists, this surprised him initially, scientists seemed to have rather weak imagery. So he recognized that there was a spectral, a big range for the vividness of visual imagery. And he also recognized that there were a few people whose power of visualization was zero, as he put it. So he realized that there were people who we would now call aphantasic, though he didn't follow up that observation. So his contribution to this topic really was that he developed an instrument to measure aspects of imagery in a way that no one previously had and which was very fertile for the field. There are many descendants of his breakfast table questionnaire, one of them being the Vivinda Civil Imagery Questionnaire, which is the instrument that we've mainly used in our research, developed by someone called David Marx.
- [32:52]
Gregory McNiff
I was going to ask you to define and correct my pronunciation. Synesthesia.
- [33:00]
Adam Zeman
Yeah. So synesthesia is probably most easily described as a kind of merging of the senses. So the most common form of synesthesia, people will see letters or words or numbers in characteristic colors. And typically people with syllaesthesia develop this ability early in life or become aware of this ability early in life, become aware of these pairings early in life, and they then remain consistent throughout their lives, and they tend to assume that it's that way for everyone. So we all take our experience to be the norm. People with synesthesia tend to be surprised when they find that 9 is not maroon for everyone as it is for them, but it exists in a very wide variety of forms, so a very wide range of inducers and concurrences they're called. So there are, for example, people who taste shapes or for whom musical notes are colored and so forth. So it's a kind of interesting crossing over of one domain of experience in inch to another lifelong and consistent in people with true synesthesia.
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Gregory McNiff
What is the imagery debate and who are the principal people involved?
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Adam Zeman
So this was a debate towards the end of the last century which concerned the degree to which imagery represented a distinctive mode of thought, if you like. And there were two schools of thought on this question. One school was led by the psychologist Stephen Coslyn, who was a very influential, still is, very influential American psychologist, who devoted much of his work to imagery. And he believed that imagery was in some sense depictive and that it did provide a distinctive mode of thought and brain operation. Whereas on the other side of debate, there were those who argued that all forms of thinking were essentially propositional, and so there was nothing really special about imagery. Imagistic thinking could be rendered into simple, straightforwardly rendered into words. And interestingly, one of, I think, Stephen Coslyn's students at some point sent a vividness mimicry questionnaire to a number of people involved in this debate. And it turned out that people who were on Koslyn's side tended to have relatively vivid imagery, whereas people who were on Pilicin's side tended to have relatively faint imagery. So the views that people took in this debate to some extent reflected their own personal, subjective experience. And a few years ago, with some colleagues, I looked at history of thinking about imagery, and it does seem that one can discern over the centuries, really, two sort of teams of thinkers, and they correspond to the two sides of this debate. So there are people for whom, as for David Hume, for example, for whom imagery seems to have been very vivid, Aristotle, perhaps, they tended to assume that imagery was critical to thought. Aristotle writes, the mind never thinks without a phantasm, whereas there were others whose imagery seems to have been faint, who regarded it as a relatively unimportant aspect of the human mind.
- [36:30]
Gregory McNiff
That's interesting. I think I'm going back a number of years here, but I think in ancient Greek, the word oida, I see, also means I know so there's definitely some correlation there, I think, between the mental process and vision. And I want to move to that specific idea. You write, like any active thought, forming an image as a process rather than an instantaneous event. You sort of just discussed that, but could you maybe unpack that a little more, what that process involves?
- [36:57]
Adam Zeman
Yeah, sure. So if I ask you to visualize an apple, a whole series of things have to happen in your mind and brain. First of all, you have to fall in with my plans. So you have to be willing to follow the instruction, which requires a decision on your part. You have to understand what I'm saying, of course. You then have to look up the appearance of an apple in your memory system. So somewhere in your brain, clearly there's knowledge of what apples look like, because you can recognize them, but you have to access that knowledge. And then recent neuroscientific work would suggest that what happens is that you then use that knowledge to drive the visual system in reverse. So normally, when you're looking at the world, information is streaming in through the eyes, reaching the visual cortices and being interpreted. When you visualize, you're running that system backwards. You're remembering what something looks like, and then using that knowledge to activate the visual system. Now, that series of steps takes a bit of time. So if I give you the instruction to visualize an apple and then ask you to indicate when the image comes before your mind's eye, there will be a measurable delay, and that reflects the operation of that series of processes in your brain.
- [38:20]
Gregory McNiff
I want to move to creativity. You write, to study creativity, one first needs to find a way of measuring it. How do we measure creativity?
- [38:29]
Adam Zeman
Yeah. So again, as I mentioned earlier, creativity is a rather broad term, and it's been defined as the ability to bring into being things which are both new and useful. Or as Jerome Bruner put it, to create effective surprise. Clearly, there's an immensely wide range of ways in which people can be creative. It's not an easy thing to measure. One approach is simply to ask people about their creativity and, if possible, to provide evidence of creative outputs. So if you've written a few novels or filed a few patents or conducted a few influential experiments, then that's going to be very strong evidence that you're a creative person. Of course, many people never achieve creative outputs of that kind, big C creative outputs, as they've been called. But nevertheless, they can be perfectly creative in a small C sense. So a way of getting at small C creativity is to use tests like the Alternate uses, tests. So how many uses can you think of for a paperclip, a piece of paper, a cardboard box? And it's possible to produce norms for tests of that kind and then to use them as proxies for creativity. And there are a number of other similar psychological measures that can be used to provide rough and ready, but nevertheless useful estimates of creativity.
- [40:01]
Gregory McNiff
You cite, I guess, the difficulties or roadblocks Elliot and Einstein faced in their processes. How did they overcome these mental roadblocks?
- [40:12]
Adam Zeman
Yeah, so I don't think I'm going to be able to answer specifically in their cases, except really they did overcome them. But in general, what seems to be required is a period of incubation. So people very often, creative people, very often find that they just need to defocus for a while. It may be just for a few minutes, it may be that they need to sleep, maybe that they need to distract themselves comprehensively somehow from the problem in hands and to allow their unconscious brains to get to work on the problem. And answers then tend to arrive in moments of illumination or insight, which do seem to be an indispensable part of the creative process. And as I mentioned earlier, I think we now have some neuroscientific scientific insight into such processes, which maybe you will come to later.
- [41:08]
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- [41:25]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, you sort of nailed your own quote here. But you do write preparation, incubation and illumination. Deliver something to work with. It may be an equation, an image, a phrase, a poem, an idea. So for those wondering how to kickstart the creative process or overcome those roadblocks, I think that's a pretty good way to approach it initially. Okay, I want to move now to the brain here. And specifically, could you talk about the role that MRI technology has helped us understand the creative process as it's reflected in the brain.
- [42:01]
Adam Zeman
So I guess what is particularly distinctive about the creative process is that it's highly dynamic and autonomous. And one way of thinking about the brain makes it rather mysterious how we can achieve that kind of dynamic creativity. And that way is thinking about the brain is a lot of old fashioned computer. You have to program it, you have to give it instructions, and then it will do your bidding, but it's not going to come up with anything surprising. And of course, the brain isn't a Computer, it's a living organism. And living organisms tend to be rather dynamic, autonomous entities. I think neuroscience has given us an insight into particular form that autonomy and dynamism takes in the brain through studies of what has been called the brain's resting state. And these have been done only over the last 20 years or so. So it turns out that if you ask somebody simply to lie in a brain scanner and to chill, activity won't cease in the brain. Indeed it will continue at much the same level that it would have been carrying out if you'd given the person a specific task to perform. Within the activity in the resting brain, you can actually discern all the networks of the working brain. So for example, areas in the brain that are concerned with vision will be active in a synchronized fashion. So this sort of wide range synchronization between brain regions that have a common purpose, a common function. So visual regions will be behaving in that way, motor regions will be behaving in that way, auditory regions. There's one particularly interesting network which is the most active in the resting brain. Sense activity kind of stands out above the activity of other areas. This has been called the default mode network. And it turns out that the function of the development network, if you like, the psychological processes which particularly call on it, are thinking about the past, anticipating the future, thinking about other people, thinking about moral decisions, just the kinds of things we do when we daydream. So there's a network of regions in the brain which becomes particularly active when we're at rest, which is the functions of which correspond to the themes of our daydreams. And I think that provides a kind of helpful insight into the way in which the brain might function autonomously and dynamically in a way that could give rise to creative output. More particularly there a number of studies of people when they're actually engaged in creative work. And it turns out that the default mode network which I just described is active at those times, but it's in a kind of harmony, seems to be in a harmonious relationship with a couple of other networks which are often anti correlated with it or opposed to it. So one is the executive control network. This is a set of regions in the frontal lobes and parietal lobes which is really involved in. And typically the default mode network is active when the executive network is relatively quiet. So when you're chilling in the scanner, your executive network relaxes, your default mode network becomes very active. When you're given a task, the executive network switches on, the default mode network switches off when you're involved in creative work. They both seem to be active in an unusually harmonious relationship. And they're also in a harmonious relationship with a network that's been called the Salience Network, the network which attributes value to our activities and things in the world. So this conjures up an image of creative processes which I find intuitively very appealing, that it has to do with dreaming lucidly about things that matter to us. The dreaming, if you like, coming from the default mode network, the lucidity coming from the collective control network, and the value, the mattering, coming from the Salience network. Now, this is, of course, something of an oversimplification of the caricature, but I think neuroscience is beginning to give us a really illuminating way into understanding these dynamic, spontaneous, creative processes, which previously looked very mysterious. I think the brain's become a much more conducive, natural home to creativity in the human soul, if you like, than it certainly than it looked when I embarked on a career in neurology 30 or 40 years ago.
- [46:34]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. Adam. No, I really found this the most fascinating part of the book. One follow up here, because I think we all wonder this, but to what extent is the brain still working, or I don't want to say processing or predicting, but working through problems during sleep?
- [46:51]
Adam Zeman
Yeah, I mean, it certainly is doing. There's a range of illustrations, so let me mention a couple. I guess most of us dream and dreams. We still don't fully understand the function of dreaming, but it is a really extraordinary, extraordinary phenomenon by which we tell ourselves elaborate, sometimes fascinating, sometimes bizarre stories, which clearly, to some degree, reflect preoccupations and experiences of recent days, weeks and months and years. So it's a highly creative generative process, as I say, function not entirely clear, but among other things, it's likely to play some role in consolidating memories. And on that theme, there's another phenomenon which is now relatively well understood, which I think is again relevant to making sense of the creativity and autonomy of the brain. And this is phenomenon of replay. So this was first explored in animals. If an animal finds its way around a maze, a sequence of cells will become active in the hippocampus, the part of the brain which is very much involved in memory and which among other things, contains a spatial map of our surroundings. So that's interesting in itself that the hippocampus should be a cognitive map, a discovery for which John o' Keefe won the Nobel Prize a few years back. What was subsequently discovered was that when the animal rests, those cells Will replay their activity. They rehearse, if you like, the route which they took through the maze, Sometimes in a forward direction, Sometimes in a reverse direction. And they do this both during periods of rest and in periods of sleep, probably unconsciously. This happens in the human brain, too. So we have this unconscious, subliminal, revisiting, Rehearsal of experience in moments of rest during sleep, probably important, certainly important for consolidating our memories for those events. And there's still more to discover about this process. But there's some evidence, some recent evidence that replay is not always entirely faithful to our experience. It can actually introduce creative elements. It will sometimes reorder our experience In a way that makes better sense of it Than the order in which we were initially presented with the facts, so to speak. So another, I think, really striking example of the dynamic, autonomous, in this case, largely subconscious activity of the brain, Activity of a kind that I think is potentially relevant to understanding the processes that lead to creating solutions.
- [49:34]
Gregory McNiff
I want to talk to you briefly about prediction. You write, prediction is challenging In a complex, changeful world. Brains that can generate novel solutions to unfamiliar problems Will be at a great advantage. How good are we at making predictions?
- [49:47]
Adam Zeman
Well, we vary. I think we have to be moderately good at making them to survive. I think that we're to be much better at making them if we take account of the facts. And I think a rather harsh example of this Was provided by the COVID epidemic. There were. And then I'm not going to go. I don't want to be politically prerogative, but there were leaders in the world who kind of faced up to the facts and took action accordingly on the basis of predictions that turned out to be accurate and saved many thousands of lives. There were leaders who did not and who didn't who lost many thousands of lives. So I think prediction is clearly important at many levels. It's important sort of from moment to moment. I need to be able to predict the trajectory that my arms should take to pick the coffee cup up from the table. But it's also important in sociopolitical ways of the kind I just indicated. There is in the background. Somebody. The next question you're going to ask A very popular contemporary theory of brain function in terms of prediction. The fundamental idea being that the brain is a kind of predictive organ. It's constantly trying to make sense of the world and to minimize surprise, to allow us to navigate the world as efficiently as possible. So this meshes with the idea I was explaining earlier, that perception is more inside out than outside. In where we're predicting what we will proceed next and what actions we should take in relation to what we proceed next. And the world then adjusts our predictions rather than governing our behavior.
- [51:42]
Gregory McNiff
When you say it's an iterative process in the sense we're constantly updating our. Our model. Predictive.
- [51:48]
Adam Zeman
Yeah, absolutely. So that's very much part of the predictive brain idea, that the brain is making predictions, but also taking account prediction errors to update the model.
- [51:58]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah. No, that's fascinating. I want to move to the chapter titled Evolving Imagination. You write, anyone who claims to be by choice, myself alone is making a brave but futile effort to cut himself right radically free from the social world. Despite appearances to the contrary, our thoughts and our imaginings are never all our own. Why is that?
- [52:22]
Adam Zeman
So this relates to the book's fourth big idea. The idea that what is special about us is that we have evolved to share what we imagine. And I think this is profoundly true. I think that we are fundamentally social animals. What distinguishes us from the apes, the kind of difference that those crucial four or so million years of evolution made is that we became highly cooperative, highly collaborative animals. This is partly through developmental processes that have made us extremely accomplished mind sharers. And that ability to share our minds, I think, actually underpins language. Language, of course, immensely increases our power to share our minds, to share our thoughts. But lying beneath language, there is an ability, a developmental ability which comes online in the first year or so of life, and that allows us to get very close to one another. It's on show even at about four to eight weeks when in human infants, and I think no other infant in the ape family begins to have intense musical exchanges with the kegger, usually with the mother of a kind, which allow a sharing of attention that then, over the course of the first year, ploughs into early language.
- [53:52]
Gregory McNiff
In this chapter, you offer a brief summary of evolution, the past 6 million years of human development. What would you say is the distinctive mark of humankind?
- [54:04]
Adam Zeman
Well, it's very kind of you to ask that question, because, as you'll know, the conclusion of the chapter is that one shouldn't really be looking for one, because there are at least three candidates, and each clearly has a case to be made for it that the three interact with one another. And the three candidates which I discuss in that chapter are our ability to mind share, which I've just described, which is sometimes described as our possession of a theory of mind, understanding that others like us, have experiences, beliefs, desires, which we can to some extent enter into. So that's one key psychological capacity. I think our ability to develop symbolic technologies, specifically to use language, is the second. And the third is our ability to use tools. And I think that those three capacities, theory of mind, tool use and language, have interacted with one another in the course of human evolution. And one really fascinating idea, which I still think isn't widely appreciated, but which is very relevant here, is the idea that we are fundamentally cultural creatures. We are biologically cultural creatures because what drove the growth of the brain, the threefold growth of the brain from its size in a chimp to the size of a man, was the emergence of culture. So the period during which that brain growth occurred, that brain evolution occurred, was the period during which human culture was getting going through. First tools were developed about 3 million years ago. I suspect language goes back a very long way. And it seems extremely likely that the driver of brain growth was the emergence of culture, which would have made it ever more useful to have additional spare brain with which to develop more sophisticated, more powerful cultural tools. But if you put me against the wall and said, what is it that distinguishes man? I'd revert to my original theme, which is that it's the capacity to touch ourselves in the here and there. It's imagination. But I think there's a great deal to say about that idea has to be unpacked along the lines I've been discussing.
- [56:28]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely. The next chapter, entitled Learning to Imagine. You address the issue of evil and you note or you conclude by saying, childhood adversity shrinks possibility in part by stealing the tools of imagination. Can you talk about that?
- [56:48]
Adam Zeman
Yeah. So in the relevant section of that chapter, I discuss the fate of the Romanian orphans, some of whom, Ceausescu's children, some of whom were cared for in orphanages for 2, 3, 4 years with extremely minimal human interaction. And they have been. Those unfortunate children have been studied now in some detail. And it turns out that the absence of loving contact with caregivers has profound long term implications, for example, substantially increasing the rate of autism. And of course, much to say about autism. But traditionally, one of the characteristics of autism has been regarded as a lack of symbolic and imaginative capacity. So that was really a thought in the back of my mind.
- [57:42]
Gregory McNiff
Then I want to move to chapter three. I'm sorry, part three, which I think is entitled the Besieged Imagination. You talk about loss and bereavement and you actually suggest these in some way reveal the brain's hidden creativity and its role in predicting the world into being. Can you talk about that interplay? How the, how the Brain adapts or loss. Yeah.
- [58:06]
Adam Zeman
So I think Golten sends something along the lines of the visionary capacity is much commoner than we normally suppose. So I think most of us have will have some experience of hallucination, just as I described my teenage hallucination with a burglar at the foot of the bed. And there are a number of circumstances in which people are particularly prone to hallucinate and those often involve deprivation. So if you put people in a sensory deprivation tank after a matter of hours, they will often begin to experience unformed or even formed visual hallucinations and sometimes hallucinations in other modalities. To I give the example of bereavement hallucinations in the book. So if you lose a spouse, you're at a 50% or so chance of having some kind of hallucinatory experience of them over the next few days and weeks. And that makes much sense because of course, your brain will be predicting their presence very strongly. And once in a while, the activity associated with that prediction is quite likely to rise above the threshold that allows you to experience their presence as if they really were there. Other examples, pilots on long haul flights, prisoners in solitary confinement, people walking across deserts, ascetics living in conditions of deprivation very often hallucinate, it seems. I think what is happening there is that the lack of sensory input, which normally, if anything, inhibits the generative activity of the brain, releases that activity, giving rise to illusionations. So our brain is constantly active, constantly making predictions about the world. If you deprive the brain of input, those predictions become apparent as hallucinatory experience.
- [60:02]
Gregory McNiff
Interesting. What is sleep paralysis and how common is it?
- [60:07]
Adam Zeman
So sleep, sleep paralysis is a rather terrifying experience. I don't have it, but I'm close to some who do. A rather terrifying experience in which people will come to awareness in the course of the night and realize that they are completely unable to move. So when you first have that experience, it tends to be terrifying, less so once you become accustomed to it. Often there will be a dream in the mind's eye, though not always. And sometimes there will be a strong sense of the presence of an intruder, possibly somebody standing close to the bed, often in a threatening way. And there's often a sense of respiratory embarrassment, difficulty in breathing. And the underlying explanation of sleep paralysis seems to be that when we dream normally, we are paralyzed. The brain paralyzes itself, if you like, to prevent us from acting out our dreams, to prevent us from enacting our dreams. Sometimes that mechanism fails to cut off when we wake. And so the paralysis can persist into wakefulness, giving rise to this inability to move. And sometimes the contents of the dream, which was occurring just before we came to consciousness, also persists, giving rise to dreamlike experience. And it occurs. Sleep paralysis occurs on at least one occasion in really quite a high proportion of the population, about a third of people. So it's not an uncommon experience. It's less common for it to occur regularly, but it occurs regularly in a smaller, but still we lived substantial group of folk.
- [61:44]
Gregory McNiff
Do all of us have an inner voice, Luke?
- [61:47]
Adam Zeman
Most of us do, but it's rather like visual imagery. It's very variable. There are people who describe a constant commentary on their actions, which they experience as an inner voice. There are others who have very little in the way of an inner voice. I thought that my mind was a very quiet place. And when I first began thinking about this, and it took me quite a bit of introspection to detect the presence of the voice. And there have been descriptive experience sampling studies which look at this in a more objective, more rigorous way, which show just that there's indeed quite a range. The inner voice typically is not so much heard as experienced. So it's very often rather as if you were producing speech sub vocally. So it's kind of generative experience. It's not like hearing someone else's voice in your head.
- [62:46]
Gregory McNiff
As a rule in ptsd, what gives traumatic images their, quote, oppressive, searing power?
- [62:53]
Adam Zeman
That's a much debated question. One experimental study suggests that it is, as you might guess, the level of emotional arousal at the time they are encoded. Such memories then come to haunt folk with ptsd, so they become intrusive and distressing. There is a school of folk that they are laid down in a separate system to the one which normally receives memories from events from the past. But I think that's controversial. But clearly it's the. The extraordinary level of emotional arousal at times when we believe that we are at risk of our life or we're watching someone we love in circumstances in which they're at risk of losing their life. So it's that intensity of emotional arousal that appears to etch them in the brain.
- [63:51]
Gregory McNiff
What is predictive coding theory?
- [63:53]
Adam Zeman
So, as we've discussed, it's the idea that the brain is a predictive organ, that its role is to enable us to navigate the world with as little surprise as possible, making us as efficient biologically as possible. And it has the implication that our experience is less dependent than we normally take it to be on information reaching us from. From the world and more dependent on knowledge of the world and the predictions that that enables us to make. And in predictive coding theory, as you mentioned, in predictive coding theory, we are constantly updating our models of the world on the basis of discrepancies between what we predict and what the world provides us with. So we're sensitive to a prediction errors and those allow us to update our models.
- [64:49]
Gregory McNiff
What is extreme imagination and how common is it in children and adults?
- [64:54]
Adam Zeman
Extreme imagination can have a number of senses, but one, the sense of which I primarily discuss in the book, has to do with aphantasia and hyperphantasia, which we touched on earlier. Aphantasia being the absence of a mind's eye, hyperphantasia being having a mind's eye which is as varied as real seeing. It seems that hyphantasia occurs in round about 4% of people, depending a little on where you draw the line. Whereas hyperphantasia is rather more common, probably at carrying in around 10% of the population. I can't give you an accurate figure for children as opposed to adults, so that those figures are based on adult samples.
- [65:32]
Gregory McNiff
Could you talk about the benefits, you say, the unexpected benefits of aphantasia? Yeah.
- [65:39]
Adam Zeman
So aphantasia might be thought of as a deficit, but actually we have innumerable examples now of highly successful, productive people with aphantasia, and most people with aphantasia get along just fine. So I think it's an intriguing variation in human experience rather than a disorder or a disability, and it probably has some pros and cons which mirror those of hyperphantasia. So it seems that it nudges people gently in the direction of working in the sciences. So you're a little more likely to work in STEM if you're aphantasic. You're a little more likely to be working in a traditionally creative industry if you're hyperphantasic. So that suggests that it might have some benefit for more abstract ways of thinking about the world. It may be somewhat protective against ptsd, for example, against disorders in which intrusive imagery is an important component. And it might help people to be a little more present than they otherwise would be because they're going to be less distracted by regrets about the past and musings on the future.
- [66:45]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, fascinating. I mean, I know throughout the book you talk about the brain constantly being inundated with data and updating it, and maybe that ability or that, I guess, quality to block out certain amounts of stimuli is actually a benefit to the creative process.
- [67:02]
Adam Zeman
Yeah. So, Craig Venture, the first person to decode the genome, got in touch with me soon after he coined the term and said that he'd always recognized that he was aphantasic and had attributed some of his scientific prowess to the fact that his mind wasn't cluttered with imagery.
- [67:15]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, that's fascinating. As has been conversation. That concludes our interview. Again, the book is the Shape of Things Unseen, A New Science of Imagination by Adam Zeman. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. This really was a great conversation.
- [67:29]
Adam Zeman
Okay, great. I enjoyed it.