TED Talks Daily - Can you picture things in your mind? I can't | Alex Rosenthal

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Picture this: a rocket ship crash-lands on a planet, and an alien approaches the spacecraft. What do you see in your mind when you visualize this scene? For Alex Rosenthal (and many others), the answer is: absolutely nothing. Exploring the fascinating science of aphantasia, or the inability to generate mental images, he shows why our minds are much more different than we think. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. What does the mind's eye mean to you? For many of us, when you close your eyes, you might see things or paint pictures. You can visualize. But for some, that inner picture is completely different. In this fascinating talk, Puzzle wizard Alex Rosenthal, who's also the editorial director of TEDEd, shares how our ability to kind of conjure mental imagery actually varies wildly person to person. And that when we build teams across

those differences, the benefits for creativity and problem solving will follow. So in 2015, a bride to be uploaded a picture of a dress to the internet. And we all lost our minds. If you see this as blue and black, say team blue. If you see this as white and gold, how? How do you see that is white and gold. Why does this break our brain so much? It's because it puts us into confrontation with the fact that two minds can perceive the same reality entirely differently.

I'd like to talk to you about two things. One, our minds are much more different than we think, and two, you should seek out minds that are different than your own because that's where the magic happens. I get to work with a lot of diverse minds by virtue of what I do. I write and produce scripts

for animation on a wide variety of topics, and I create puzzles and games. And a few years ago, I had my own dress moment, where I realized that my brain works differently than almost everyone I know, and I'd like to show you how. So if you'll indulge me for a second, please visualize the following.

You can do it with your eyes open or closed, whichever gives you the most vivid mental imagery. A rocket ship crash lands on an alien planet, A creature comes up to the hatch and knocks, and someone opens it from within. So now I'm going to ask you some questions about what you just saw. What color was the planet? What kind of creature was it?

And who opened the hatch? I'll show you what I see. Nothing! That's because I have a condition called Afantasia, which is where I don't have access to my mind's eye. It turns out that the mind's eye is a spectrum, on one end are about two to four percent of us with Afantasia. And at the other extreme is hyperfantasia.

That's where you can visualize an exquisite detail, sometimes even able to superimpose what you're imagining on reality. That's about three to six percent of people. Everyone else is somewhere in between, but there's a huge range of experience here. Everyone I do this with not only describes something different, but describes the experience of experiencing it differently. So I went through most of my life,

assuming that most people were, or everyone was like me, that visualization exercised like this is a figure of speech that no one could actually do. So imagine my surprise and fascination and apprehension when I learned about A Fantasia, the last because it raised some scary questions like, have I been working in entirely the wrong careers my entire life? So Aphantia changes the way that those of us who have it

perceive information and consume and process information. So, for example, most people I speak to who have a mind's eye describe the experience of reading a novel as seeing scenes play out in their mind and casting characters. I can't do either of those things. It's a much more conceptual experience for me. And when something is out of sight, it's very much out of mind. I have a five-year-old daughter.

I can't in this moment imagine her face. That has a big effect on my memory, and it's also not just my mind's eye, it's also my mind's ear. I think I have a little bit of a mind's ear, but I don't have a mind's nose or a mind's mouth. I can't, for example, imagine the taste of peanut butter. And what's it like to think in the absence of a mind's eye?

That's a really tough question. That's not that far off from asking, what's it like to be a dolphin or a spider? And in the absence of being able to inhabit each other's consciousnesses, we can communicate about them. So for me, I'm generally much more aware of something skeleton than its skin. I'm very attuned to structure. When I'm creating a game or a puzzle,

I'm first dreaming up the mechanics and figuring out how they relate to each other, how they map to a story structure, and the details come later, often in collaboration with other artists. I realize there's a leap of faith here in this idea that our minds can be so alien to each other, and I struggle with that, too.

I can't understand what it's like to visualize any more than I can see the dress as white and gold. But what's become increasingly apparent is that the mind's eye is just one of many constellations we're starting to draw in a night sky full of neurological diversity. That includes having or not having an interior monologue. It includes the autism spectrum, ADHD, dyslexia, and a lot more,

probably a lot of things we have yet to even give a name to because we're just figuring all this out. The norm is to pathologize these experiences into a list of conditions that depart from a so-called normal functioning of the mind. I think we're thinking about this completely wrong. There is no true normal out there, and difference is not deviance. Rather, these are all clues towards a vast and profound starfield we're each individually blinded to because we only have our one cozy, inescapable mind as a single reference point. It's no secret that different people think differently.

Many people on the autism spectrum excel at pattern recognition and logical deduction. Multiple studies have shown students with ADHD outperforming on average their peers at creative problem-solving and divergent thinking tasks, and they're very similar findings for dyslexia, especially when it comes to advanced spatial reasoning. So if difference is in fact the norm, what do we do with that? I say seek out minds that are different than your own and make something incredible together.

There's a wealth of research that shows that teams of people from diverse backgrounds produce superior outcomes. I'd like to propose a corollary to this. Diverse minds working together can produce wonders. This comes with challenges and opportunities. So in the last decade or so, companies such as SAP, Hewlett-Packard, and J.P. Morgan have started programs designed to recruit neurodivergent talent,

and in the time since, they've reported corresponding gains in productivity, morale, innovation and quality. I see this in my own work as well. Again, by the serendipity of working in visual fields without being able to visualize, I wind up working with a lot of minds who are very different than mine, and that results in some weird and wonderful work,

such as a film noir animation about fractals that I co-authored that was brought to life by a brilliant, hyper-fantasic animator named Jeremiah Dickey. or this is one of my pride enjoys. It's a game that's a hybrid jigsaw puzzle and escape room in a box. And the way it works, yeah. The way it works is you first assemble a jigsaw, but you're missing big sections.

So you have to unlock them by solving puzzles that are embedded in the illustration and artifacts that you unlock along the way. This was made in collaboration with two incredible artists, Rita Orlov and Senna Tripp, and our minds can be found in very different corners of the galaxy of neurological diversity. So am I working in the wrong fields?

No, I don't think so. I think I'm exactly where I should be. In fact, some of the greatest joy and fulfillment in my life has been from coming to terms with the initially jarring realization that my mind works differently than the people around me and recognizing that for what it is. Dazzling. Thank you.

That was Alex Rosenthal speaking at TED Next 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazo.

I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for. for your feet. Thanks for listening.