Instant Genius - Jim Davies: How do you use your imagination?

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

Imagine, just for one moment, that you’re flying. What can you see? How high up are you? Can you feel the rush of wind in your face? Keep these thoughts in mind while you listen to this week's podcast. Your imagination is a strange old thing, with some people experiencing vivid senses while some struggle to picture anything at all. In this episode, we speak to Jim Davies, whose book, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power (£21.99, Pegasus), sheds light on this mysterious function of the brain. As you can imagine, we go deep into the neuroscience of conjuring up mental images, but we also find out why your memory doesn’t need to be perfect, the joys of playing video games after a bad day, the benefits of imaginary friends, and, rather bizarrely, how to make a better door. If you have a burning science question you want an expert to answer, send them to us on twitter at @sciencefocus, and we may answer them in a future episode. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Dean Burnett: What’s going on in the teenage brain? Gordon Wallace: Is an implantable electronic device the future of medicine? Dr Guy Leschziner: What is your brain doing while you sleep? Gustav Kuhn: Do you believe in magic? Helen Russell: What does it mean to be happy? Richard Wiseman: The mindset behind the Moon landing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Well, creativity is separate from imagination too. So it's important to keep in mind that imagination is the generation of something in your head. And creativity is the generation of something that is novel and useful in some kind of way. But you can have very creative acts that are low imagination, like improvisational act of creativity, where actually having a lot of it in your head gets in the way because you can't respond very quickly to. And you have acts of very high imagination in creativity like Mozart, supposedly, symphonies in his head without writing anything down. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team with the UK's bestselling

science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus, and I want you, from one moment, just to imagine that you're flying. What can you see? How high up are you? Can you feel the rush of wind blowing in your face? Keep these thoughts in mind for a while. We'll come back to them in a bit. Your imagination is a strange old thing with some people experience vivid senses

while some struggle to picture anything at all. In this episode of the Science Focus podcast, I speak to cognitive scientist Jim Davies, whose book Imagination, The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power, sheds light on this mysterious function of the brain. As you can imagine, we go deep into the neuroscience of conjuring up mental images, but we also find out why your memory doesn't need to be perfect, the joys of playing video games after a bad day, the benefits of imaginary friends, and, rather bizarrely,

how to make a better door. Imagination is the generation of some kind of a structure in your head, and it comes from memory. So that's the very broad definition. And unfortunately, it includes a lot of things that we don't typically think of as imagination, like dreaming and hallucinations and stuff. But we can't really define it any better than that without destroying it. So, you know, the classic idea is when you might imagine the bedroom you grew up in or something like that. You're bringing an image or something like an image to your attention and you're reconstructing something.

from memory and that's a that's a very broad idea of what imagination is. So if we're constructing something from memory sort of how accurate is that that construction that we're making? Well, I think in general it's it's pretty accurate but I think it's important to realize that it's kind of an assumption of psychologists that the function of memory is to produce veridical and true reconstructions of what actually happened. But there is a movement that suggests that the function of memory is merely to help us behave better in the future. And when you look at it that way, it's usually but not always necessary to get it absolutely right. And in fact, whenever we generate something in imagination, we are reconstructing it from bits of information that we stored in memory.

But these can be distorted. And every time you recall it, it changes it slightly. So it's not completely accurate. And there are some very dramatic cases where those inaccuracies are gross and cause some real problems in the world, but for the most part, they're fairly accurate. Because I sort of think that when I'm thinking back to something from the past, I know I'm liable to make mistakes, yet there are some things that are, I feel like I've got a photographic memory of it, but that might not be completely the case in any way, shape, or form. Is there, at what point is our memory and our imagination, are they both the same thing,

or do they deviate in a way? Well, every time you imagine a hypothetical situation, like something that might have happened to you but didn't or a future situation, you're going to remember the act of imagining it, right? So you might imagine that you could fly. And then if I ask you 10 minutes later to reflect on that time when you imagined it, you're going to pull that from memory. The difference is that usually you're going to know when you recall it later that it was something you imagine. before and it wasn't something that actually happened to you. And this can, but this, this is mainly because you know that you can't fly and you might remember the act of imagination.

But unfortunately, sometimes a vivid imagination of things gets stored in your memory and later you can't distinguish it from something that actually happened. So I have a false memory, for example, of riding a tricycle down the steps in my childhood home. And I actually did ride my tricycle down the steps, but I'm remembering it in the wrong. house because the story was told over and over in my family and I would imagine it every time it was told. So I imagine it happening in the house that I can remember, not in the house it actually happened in. But it feels no different from a what we might say is a true memory, even though

it's got a substantially manufactured aspect to it. And does that happen often with these? Because I, you know, I've got memories that I know are false memories and that's happening in there. And is there a reason why that we would have, you know, why our brains would be able to hold on to this false memory as opposed to going, actually, that's not right. There's a true memory that you should remember instead. That's a good question. I don't know if there's a function of false memory per se. It might just be an artifact of the nature of memory in general that is absolutely necessary to remember your imaginings. So if you make a plan to how to do something, some goal in your life or whatever could be as complex as a career change

or as simple as who's going to pick up the kids from daycare, if you can't remember that plan, then it's useless, right? So it gets stored in memory. Unfortunately, the tagging system for whether something is just hypothetical is not perfect. That tag, is it an imagination?

Is it a plan? is it something that happened to me, is also a memory that can be forgotten or misattributed with something else. So I don't think it's useful particularly to have false memories, but it seems to be a natural outcome of the way that our memory system works. And does our memory system, so obviously you know, you mentioned things like tagging and that sort of stuff. That sounds very much like it sounds like a lot of the work I do, like running the website, that sort of thing when I'm thinking of like, here's a, here's an article and it's tucked this way and that. Is that something that our brain does with memories in general? Yes. And so what happened, there's a big

literature out there in psychology on what's called source monitoring, which is how you know where the things in your memory came from. So we all have the experience of knowing something, but not knowing where we heard it. Okay. So you might know that whales are mammals, but you can't remember the episode where you learned that. You probably can't bring to mind some scientific citation that proves it. It's just something that you know. And when it comes to distinguishing false memories from imagined situations, we use things like vividness and the realism and reasoning to make an inference about whether it actually happened or not.

We have to look at the memory and make a decision. But after we've done that, so I mentioned a minute ago imagining that you could fly, right? If any of your listeners imagined that, they can probably recall that, but they know that it is just an act of imagination. And if I ask them to recall it tomorrow, they don't have to re-figure it out that it was just imagination. It's been tagged as, oh, yeah, I imagined that when it showed up on the podcast. So this tag is similar to the tags you have like, oh, I heard this from Bobby. or I read it in the latest Harari book or something like that. So we not only have memories, but we have justifications

memories that give us a clue as to where it came from. And then these memories, again, you mentioned with the sort of flying memory, obviously none of us can fly, but when we do imagine something, we can imagine quite vividly what it would be like and what it would be like to fly and what we'd be doing, what we'd be seeing. How is our, you know, how is our brain pulling all these different things together to say this is what you'd imagine flying is like? Well, this points to something very important, which is that we think about imagined situations using the same reasoning processes that we would if we were thinking about a real situation. So if I were to ask you to, for example, to imagine if you could fly like Peter,

pan or something, and you could commute to work that way. Let's say you emerge from your front door, you fly up in the air and go straight to work over the buildings. You can imagine what buildings you might pass over, what they might look like. And that is using the same kind of reasoning that you would use if I were to ask you about a bird. If I said a bird were to make that route, what buildings would they fly over? What would it look like to the bird? And that's a perfectly realistic imagination. but the point is that you're using the same reasoning processes in both cases. And this means a couple of important things. One is that the contents of your imagination,

like the so-called fact that you are flying, you know, how fast you'd be going all that, is written in your mind in the same code as things you actually believe. And this is part of why we can falsely remember things is because the imaginary facts, as it were, the suppositions that you make when you're engaging in imagination are subject, are made of the same stuff and subject to the same kind of reasoning. So that's how you're able to do it. So is there, does that mean that there is like very much similarities between you imagining

something and you believing something, or are they actually quite different? They're similar in that they're, what we say in cognitive psychology and cognitive science is that they're encoded in the same way. They're in the same code. And so that's why you can falsely remember things. People will see something in a movie and think that it's a real business or something. Like I remember some movie came out in the 90s or there was a company called We Sell Your Stuff on eBay. And I remember talking to people who said, oh, yeah, there's a company.

We sell your stuff on eBay. And I'm like, no, no, that's from a film. But they don't remember. They lose the attribution of it. So at that point, I think it's probably a good, good thing to sort of ask. What, so what, you know, when you imagine something and it appears in your head, oftentimes, you know, it appears as a picture. Is that normal? Does everyone think of a picture when they imagine something or are there other things going on?

So what you're talking about is mental imagery. And that's different from imagination. So let's talk a little bit about the difference first. Then I'll talk about how people differ in that. If I, some things you can imagine without any pictures or sounds or anything like that. So imagining like being married or not being married or owning, owning something or not owning something. These are make-believe facts, as it were, but they don't really look like anything. Like being married doesn't particularly look like anything. You can be married and be far away from your spouse or whatever. You're not even close by.

So that's like the kind of imagination you can make without any sort of sensory experience. Now, sometimes people imagine things and they have a very vivid sensory experience. So they might, you know, if I say something like, you know, dropping a jar of mayonnaise onto a cat. So some people might like have a very vivid image of what that might be like, what the cat would do. and it seems a little bit like you're seeing it. Okay, so this is what it's like for mental imagery. Also, if you get like a song stuck in your head, okay? That's auditory imagery.

It's still called imagery, even though it's not a picture, but it's a sensory-like representation in imagination. And it is the final and optional step of imagination. So sometimes you can have somebody imagine a situation, then you say, now picture it. And it feels different in their head for some people. Like, now that I'm picturing it, there are more details added or this or that. In terms of differences, some people have extraordinarily vivid imagery, and some people have

none at all. So some people, when you ask them to imagine or a picture like a beach scene or something like that, they do not get an image in their head that is anything like seeing a beach. And they don't even really understand what that would be like. And other people have extraordinarily vivid imagery so much that it can interfere with their perception. They're called hyperphantasic, right? So we've known for a very long time that there are differences in vividness. And now we're starting to explore like some of the ramifications of people who have a lot of or very little mental imagery. So that must be quite a difficult thing to

study in a way. How do you study whether people are able to imagine something or the different levels that they're able to imagine something? Oh, we just ask them. So, well, that's the simple way to do it and it's not bad right we just you can just ask people do you have pictures you know when you imagine your house is it like having a picture in your head and some people and they'll just tell you yes it's very vivid or no i don't get one at all i ask people one exercise i use to help people uh kind of know what this is like is i i ask them to wherever they are to picture like a woman standing in front of them like in a red dress or something and then while your eyes are facing forward and you don't change your point of view in your imagination. The woman walks behind you

so that she's now behind your head. And for most people, when she gets beyond your visual field, the character changes. The color is no longer there. You just sort of know that a woman is behind you, but it's not like you can see her behind you. And for people who don't have mental imagery, that's what everything's like. It's more like a fact. Like you know that the person is there, you know what the color is, but you don't actually have an experience that. it's anything like seeing it. So they'll have fantasies that are so extensive and so engaging that they will constantly be zoning out of conversations, they'll be canceling social plans so that they can lie in bed and just imagine. And there are other people who feel that they have

very low amounts of imagination and don't engage in it very often and have complete control. So there are a couple of ways that it can differ between people. Is that something that you can sort of train yourself to do? So if you, you know, if you do have some, what? people would describe as an overactive imagination or something like that. Would you, is there anything you could do to sort of rein it in or contrary-wise, if you don't feel that you're imaginative enough, something you can do to boost that? So there, you can enhance your imagination in particular domains with practice. However, it does not seem to affect your general ability to imagine.

So if you get trained in architecture or geology, these are, fields and even chemistry. These are fields that it behooves you a lot to be able to think three-dimensionally about different situations. And you will get better over time at imagining those things. But a geologist isn't going to be better at imagining architecture, and an architect isn't going to be better at imagining geology as a result of their training. So it seems to be pretty domain specific. And then when you get to imagery and vividness, for example, like I would love to have a more vivid mental imagery. and the data on that are very interesting and very contradictory.

So on the one hand, there are religious practices where they have people vividly image like Jesus or something like that. And over time, they start to experience hallucinations, some of which are interpreted as actually being Jesus, right? But it seems to be that with practice, they can actually generate really vivid imagery. But on the other hand, all of the very careful scientific studies I've seen when I was researching my book, I was really trying because I really wanted to make my imagery better. So I was trying to find studies that show, but every careful study seems to show that there's no effect. Your imagery vividness declines over time and there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it. Is that just as you get older, you just have this? Yeah, peaks around age 25 and then starts to.

to diminish after that. Is that why perhaps, you know, when we consider, we look back at things and we think that, oh, we were more, you know, creative or imaginative in our youth. Like, you know, we look back longingly at our teens going, I wrote some terrible music, but I really thought it was quite good now out there. Well, creativity is separate from imagination, too. So, you know, it's important to keep in mind that imagination is the generation of something in your head, and creativity is the generation of something that is,

novel and useful in some kind of way. But you can have very creative acts that are low imagination, like improvisational acts of creativity, where actually having a lot of structures generated in your head gets in the way because you can't respond very quickly to the environment, right? And then you have acts of very high imagination in creativity, like Mozart supposedly composing entire symphonies in his head without writing anything down.

Kanye West claims that for his first several albums, he never wrote down a single lyric. He just had all the words in his mind, right? So these are creative acts that involve imagination, right? But I think that there's a really persistent myth that kids are super creative that I want to dispel. Feel free. Kids are unblocked.

Kids are unblocked. That's what's great about kids. So when you see them come up with something, You're like, thank God that, you know, I would never have thought of that. Like, they don't have a lot of the restrictions that adults do about what's possible. And so their imaginations are very free. But you'll notice that all of the wonderful works of imagination out there, none of them came from kids. Like, you can't point to like a movie franchise or even a book series or anything, scientific discoveries that were generated by the immense imagination of a child.

So is that something that we can do if we just let our minds sort of be open to more outlandish imaginations, we might be able to sort of harness that a bit better? Well, relaxing constraints is one strategy for being more creative, right? So you might think like, oh, if I wanted to make a better door, like what are some of the constraints on a door that we take for granted that we might question? Does it have to have hinges? Does it have to have a handle? Does it have to be made of solid material?

You can question those things. And most of them, you have to understand that most of them are going to lead to dead ends. Part of being competent in the world is understanding that the world actually does have constraints. And that's how you're able to make useful things? And if you start asking, like, how do I make a door that's made out of liquid water, they might not go anywhere. So it might be a waste of time. So there's a tradeoff between the potential usefulness of something and the what we call divergent thinking involved with creative acts.

So I think it's good to have a balance of it and to have, you know, to let loose on constraints sometimes. But if you like ignore all constraints, you'll never come up with anything useful. And so did children do that? You know, as they grow older, do they sort of take in the world around them and start constraining their imagination? Yeah, exactly. Right. And that's why their, like people's ideas as they get older become maybe less divergent and surprising. but actually more useful.

On the theme of children and their own imagination, obviously, there's lots of children have imaginary friends. Now, is that something that's a normal thing to happen or an all thing to have, or is that a deviation of your imagination at that point? It's normal in two ways. It's normal in the sense that many, many, many children have them. And it's also normal in the sense that it's not anything to worry about. So imaginary companions, the best we can tell, are at worst, harmless and at best, helpful.

Okay. So how do they become helpful? Well, the function of them seems to be company. Children will have an imaginary friend to have a playmate. It's like an imaginary playmate. And it's similar to like when you play with a doll or a toy or something that you sort of talk to and give personality to, but it's just not embodied in any kind of physical object. I mean, people don't really worry about like a kid playing with a doll and like caring for it, talking to it.

People don't think that's weird. But for some reason, if the imagined entity is not visible to the parents, sometimes people think that's a little strange. But it's really no different. You'll find that children will sometimes create imaginary companions when they have a younger sibling. Okay. And they don't get as much time with their parents or they will play with an imaginary companion when they're alone.

But often that imaginary companion will vanish when they have playmates like real human playmates, right? Now, sometimes imaginary companions can be generated in response to something bad happening. So neglected children are more likely to have them. But in those cases, it's helping the kid, right? the kid has an imaginary companion in that case because there's something wrong, but the imaginary companion is more like the bandage and less like the wound, right? So they are self-soothing and helping themselves by playing with the imaginary companion. And does that, you know, you mentioned there that, you know, some children have it

because, you know, something bad has happened and they use their imaginary friend as a way of dealing with it. Can our imagination also be helpful in that sort of situation? for, you know, throughout life, dealing with traumas or that sort of thing? Oh, God. Well, I mean, with trauma, most of the stories, the imagination is, is, gets in your way. So many people who have been traumatized can't stop imagining this, the trauma, right? So Freud had a very popular idea that, that traumatic events can be repressed, but there's very little evidence that that ever happens. People who are traumatized, usually their problem is they can't stop thinking about the trauma. People with PTSD, people have been assaulted. They want to be

able to stop their imaginations. Now, can the imagination help? Well, sometimes with the aid of a therapist, you can use your imagination to kind of reframe the situation into something more meaningful in terms of your life story. So you can sort of reframe it in a positive way to help you interpret it a little bit better. But generally, imagining and recalling bad things that have happened to you can make it worse. I guess on the other side of that as well, also imagining things that are positive can improve things. Yeah, yeah, you can put a positive spin on things and change the memory. And one of the nice things about the fact that every time you recall a memory, you change it is that you can change it so that it's helping you with your goals instead of hurting you.

You know, there are interesting studies that show that if you have a traumatic experience, let's say a cop has a, you know, I just had a really bad night dealing with some terrible things. If they like vividly imagine it over and over again and talk about it over and over again, what they can do is they can reinforce the memory as a traumatic event. And then they will suffer more in the long run rather than not thinking about it. In fact, there's a study that shows that if you play Tetris, right? after something bad happens, you'll remember the event less and less emotionally. Because you're crowding your memory with vivid imagery from a video game. And it inhibits your mind's ability to turn the short-term memory of the traumatic event into long-term memories. So sometimes if I, like, have a really bad day or get into a fight with somebody or whatever,

I will play video games to lessen the effect of the, to save my future self, emotional distress. So a good excuse to curl up with a controller and just get lost in the world of online gaming or something like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Is there a time of day or something like that that we tend to imagine more, or is there their moments where it's just, it's more active than other times? I wouldn't say time of day affected as much as your imagination is more active when

you are doing something routine or boring. So there's a part of your brain called the default mode network that gets activated when you don't need all of your attentional capacities to do what you're doing. So if you're folding laundry or taking a walk, these kind of things that do not require, like compared to like playing squash or something, right? Or, you know, your mind can focus on other things. That's called, and it goes into the default mode. And the default mode, people tend to think about their future plans, their longer term values. It seems to have some function in helping you refocus on what's important in your life and that kind of thing. And that very often happens when you're lying in bed at night, right?

So you don't have distractions. The lights are off. Your perceptual system doesn't have much to take in. and some people will do a lot of imagining in bed before they go to sleep. Now, that can be a problem if they're stressed and they have anxieties. It can keep them awake and they can't stop their mind from thinking of these things. So it's not always a good thing. But it also, you know, some people will think about what they're going to do the next day or,

oh, geez, I really should read that book or I really should talk to that friend who's having a hard time. So, you know, it's a double-edged sword. It can, it helps you refocus on future priorities. also you can get into spirals of anxiety. Does, you know, at that point where if you're lying in bed and you're thinking about something and imagining and concentrating hard on it, in that situation, I'd normally just fall asleep. Standard. Well, then you're lucky.

The downside of that is I'm really, like, quiet. I have very, like, vivid and strong dreams. Now, like, are those dreams my mind imagining things, or is there a different process going on there? So dreams are like imagination in that they are drawn from memory, as some hallucinations are. But it has a couple differences. One is that there's less executive control. What I mean by that is your frontal lobe and the part of your brain that is involved with conscious deliberative processing is very active when you're doing daydreaming or engaging in imagination while you're awake and much less active while you're dreaming. And this might explain why we don't have insight, which is another big difference between dreaming and imagination, is that usually when we are imagining, we know that we're imagining and the things that we are experiencing perceptually are just results of imagination and they're from our memories rather than from the real world.

When we're dreaming almost all the time, we are unaware of that and we take what we see at face value. And that might be a result of the frontal areas and the executive areas of your brain being deactivated. It also might be a design feature. So one of the big theories of why we dream is that it's practice for future situations. It's a safe way to plan what you would do if something bad were to happen. And in defense of this theory, most dreams are negative in terms of feelings. They're anxiety dreams or fear dreams or discomfort dreams or something like that. And, you know, if you didn't believe it while it was happening, you might not act appropriately, right?

So if you are facing a person chasing you, what you should do is run and hide or fight or something like that. But if you don't believe that there's actually a person chasing you, you know it's a dream. You're not going to react realistically, and that means that it's less valuable as practice. So it's important to realize that evolution doesn't care one wit about how happy we are, all it cares about to the extent that it cares about anything, it's all metaphorical, of course, but, you know, is that we reproduce. So if evolution can, something can arise in evolution that makes us miserable, but it makes us have more children, it will happen. That's a sobering thought, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, it is. You can't, yeah, and that's, you know, evolution is not there for your best

interests. I guess that's, I guess that's why when, when we're having a dream, you know, whatever's happening it, it feels very real as compared to something which is like if I'm just daydreaming, as it were, if I'm just imagining and thinking about something, but dreams feel a lot more, like, you know, there's a lot more sensory stuff going on there. Yeah, that's, I mean, this is one theory of dreaming. There are, there are dream researchers who know a lot more about it than me who, um, say that dreams don't mean anything at all and they're just a function of, um, they're just there, dreams are just there because of other things that your brain needs. And There's no real reason that we dream.

It just sort of happens. But according to the theory of the usefulness of dreams that I just outlined, that it's practice, yeah, that would be an explanation for why we believe them while we have them. Now, during that, you mentioned parts of the brain that were switched off or weren't, you know, activated while you were dreaming. When you imagine something, is that something that's happening all across your brain, or is there specific regions that are actually causing these, the imaginations to have? happen? It's most of the brain. When you're engaged in imagery, the parts of the kind of imagery you have will affect different parts of your brain. So, and this is pretty obvious, but if you're

engaging in vivid visual imagery, your visual areas will be more active. And if you're imagining like the sound of your mother's voice or, you know, a culture club song, then your auditory areas will be more activated. But generally uses a lot. I mean, memory uses most of your brain. So when you're engaging in memory retrieval and all imagination involves memory retrieval, we end up seeing a lot of your brain. I guess that's why, if I'm thinking of something from memory, the sort of sensory feedback is a lot greater than if I'm just imagining something that's not necessarily a memory. Oh, no, I don't really distinguish them because when you just imagine a generic smell of coffee, like if I ask you to imagine the smell of

coffee tomorrow morning, you're not recall, I mean, you have to rely on memories to generate anything. So you are using the memories of what coffee has smelled like in the past to come up with what it will smell like in the future. So I don't see a big difference between memory recall and imagination in that way, because every time you imagine you have to engage in memory recall, it just might not be a specific instance of it, right? Just out of curiosity, when you imagine the smell of coffee, do you get a vivid smell image of it? Is it sort of like smelling coffee when you imagine it?

Not hugely, but a lot more you know, part of my, part of my, me thinking about a cup of coffee, the smell is quite an integral part of it. Like it's not just a mug of hot liquid. There's a distinct characteristic smell that comes with coffee and so that feels like

that's being activated a lot more than if I were to think of maybe a glass of orange squash, which has got a lot less smell associated with it. Yeah, yeah, and that makes sense. But for me, when I imagine like a woman in front of me wearing a red dress, that is much more like seeing a woman in a red dress than imagining the smell of coffee is like smelling coffee. So what that means is that, and this is the common for most people, their olfactory imagery or their smell imagery is much less vivid. So I know what's a smell.

I know what cinnamon smells like, but I can't really imagine the smell of cinnamon so well that it's a smell. it's almost like I'm smelling it. But some people, they have very vivid olfactory imagery. So that's an interesting thing. And another weird thing is that even though most people have very weak olfactory imagery, that smell imagery, smell hallucinations are fairly common. So that's a strange unknown. So would a smell hallucination be you feel like you can smell something,

but there's nothing there's nothing there to give that smell? Yeah, there's nothing in the environment that's actually. actually making that sensation happen. I wonder why that would be happening. Well, there are like eight ways that hallucinations can happen. That's a whole other podcast. You can get olfactory hallucination or hallucinations of many kinds by just randomly activating certain parts of the brain and not others, you know, that kind of thing.

Are there some others, you know, is there a reason why would the subject of like, you know, a smell memory, as it were, or a smell imagination. Are there some senses that are easier to imagine things? You know, for instance, why is it so much easier to imagine something visually than it would be olfactorily? I don't, that's not a real word, but. Yeah, I think it might be a word, actually. Well, we're visual creatures, right?

So the dominant sense in human beings is vision. And then we have audition and touch and those kind of things. So when you get down to things like, taste and smell. I mean, that's not a great explanation, but it's the only one I think we have. That was Jim Davies, whose book, Imagination,

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