Signal 19 - The Apple in Your Head

Last night at the dinner table, my daughter asked me a strange question.

She studies psychology now, so she asks these things. She said, "When I say the word apple, what shows up in your head?"

I didn't have to reach for it. It was just there. A red apple, shiny, sitting on a wood table. A stem, and one leaf. And standing over it, a witch with a crooked finger, because she had just poisoned it. A whole scene. A little story with a bad guy in it. I didn't build that on purpose. It arrived the second she said the word.

So I told her all of it. The witch. The leaf. The shine.

Then I asked her what she gets.

She said, "Nothing. I get the word apple. That's it."

I thought she was messing with me. I asked again. No picture? No red, no table, no witch? She said no. When somebody says apple, she gets four letters and a meaning. No screen. No movie. Blank.

We share blood. We were raised at the same table. And we had been living in two different worlds this whole time, and neither of us ever knew.

Here's the part that kept me up that night.

Same word, two worlds

For my whole life I figured everybody's head worked like mine. Somebody says a word, a picture shows up. Somebody tells a story, a movie plays. That's just what a head does, right?

Wrong. That's just what my head does.

There's a fancy word for a super vivid mind's eye like mine. Hyperphantasia. It just means the pictures come loud and full and in color, sometimes with a mood stuck to them, sometimes with a witch you never asked for. Only about three people in a hundred have it that strong.

And there's a word for my daughter's blank screen. Aphantasia. It means no pictures at all. Say "beach" and there's no beach. Say "your mother's face" and there's nothing to look at. About one person in a hundred lives like that, full blank, and most of them go years before they find out the rest of us are watching movies in here.

Same word. Two worlds. One table.

It's not two kinds of people. It's a soundboard.

Here's where I went wrong at first, and maybe you will too.

I figured, okay, so there are two kinds of people. The ones with the rich inner world, and the ones with the blank one. Two camps. Easy.

That's not it either.

Turns out there isn't one dial in there. There are at least two, and they move on their own.

There's a picture dial. It runs from my witch-and-apple movie all the way down to my daughter's blank screen.

And there's a voice dial. Some people have a voice in their head that talks all day. Mine does. Mine cheers me on when I don't want to do a hard thing, and honestly it isn't always polite about it. Other people have no voice at all. Silence. They read this sentence right now and don't hear it in any voice. There's a word for that too, anendophasia, which just means no inner narrator.

So it's not two camps. It's a soundboard, with a bunch of sliders, and everybody's got theirs set a little different. Voice up, picture down. Picture up, voice off. Both up. Both off. And the both-off people aren't empty, by the way. They think in pure meaning, the whole thought there at once with no words and no picture wrapped around it. There's a name for that one too, unsymbolized thinking. You just know the thing.

Nobody ever compares soundboards, because you can't see into anybody else's booth. So you spend your whole life sure that yours is the normal one.

It isn't. There is no normal one.

The head that runs Pixar is blank

Now here's the question my daughter and I chased around the table, and probably the one you're asking right now. If one head gets the full movie and another gets a blank screen, isn't the movie the better deal? Isn't the vivid mind the winning ticket?

I was sure it was. Then I looked it up. It's not.

When researchers asked thousands of blank-screen people what they do for a living, the answer came back clean. They cluster into science, and math, and engineering. The abstract work. And here are three real people to chew on.

Craig Venter was the first man to decode the human genome, the whole instruction book for a human being. He has a blank mind's eye. And he says it helps him. His words: it's like having a computer that stores everything, with no screen attached. He keeps all of it. He just can't see it. And he read the book of life.

Blake Ross helped build the Firefox web browser, the one a hundred million people used. He can't picture his own father's face. He built the thing on pure logic, no mockups in his head.

And then there's the one that broke my brain. Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar. He ran the most imaginative movie studio on the planet, the place that gave the world Woody and Buzz and a hundred worlds you can see with your eyes closed. And Ed Catmull cannot see anything with his eyes closed. He found out in a meditation class, when they told him to picture a sphere, and he sat there a whole week with nothing on the screen.

Read that again. The man who ran Pixar can't picture an apple.

So the blank-screen people aren't missing the imagination. Here's what they're actually doing. They can't run the movie inside their skull, so they run it out here, in the real world. On the page. On the whiteboard. In the prototype. In the actual film. They can't hold the picture in their head, so they build it where the rest of us can see it too.

Maybe Pixar got built out here, on screens we could all watch, exactly because the man in charge couldn't watch it any other way.

There is no winning setting

So which one wins? Neither. That's the whole thing.

Every setting is a trade, and every trade has a bill you don't see at first.

My vivid head is a gift. It hands me scenes, moods, stories, ideas I didn't go looking for. That's fuel. But there's a bill. There's a study where people read scary stories while machines measured their bodies. The vivid folks lit right up, hearts going, skin sweating, because their heads made the scary thing real. The blank-screen folks stayed calm. Same words came in. No picture came up. No fear.

Sit with that next to my apple. My own head handed me a witch and a poisoning that nobody asked for. That's the gift and the bill in one picture. I get the richness. I also get haunted. My daughter reads the same scary page and stays cool as a stone, because there's no theater in there to show it in. She pays her own bill somewhere else. Her memories of her own life are probably thinner, more like facts she knows than movies she can play back.

Nobody got the upgrade. Everybody got a trade.

Nobody picked their own board

Here's the question that got me next, sitting there after the plates were cleared. If everybody's board is set different, who set it? Did I pick mine? Did my daughter pick hers?

No. That's the strange part. Nobody sets their own board.

Take the picture dial first. A blank mind's eye runs in families. If you can't picture the apple, there's a good chance your mom or your brother can't either. It came down to you the same way your eye color did. But it's not only genes, and there's a wild piece of proof. Researchers found identical twins, same exact DNA, and one of them sees the full movie and the other one is blank. Same code, different screen. So something got set in the wiring before either of them could remember, and even matching genes didn't settle it.

And the picture dial can move on you later, which is the part that ties back to the hard stuff. A stroke or a head injury to the seeing part of the brain can wipe out the pictures in a person who had them their whole life. There's even a thread connecting the blank screen to deep trauma, and one idea researchers are turning over is that going blank can be a kind of armor. If the mind can't make pictures, it can't force you to watch the worst day of your life on repeat. A mind that stops seeing might be a mind guarding itself. That last part is still a hunch, so hold it loose. But it's real, and they're pulling on it.

Now the voice dial, and this one flips the other way. Your inner voice is not something you were born with. It's something you were handed. A researcher named Vygotsky watched little kids and noticed they talk out loud to themselves while they play. "Put the block here. No, the red one." That out-loud talk peaks around five or six. Then it goes quiet. It doesn't leave. It ducks inside and becomes the voice in your head. Which means the voice narrating your life right now got built out of the voices that talked to you before you could talk back. You can even see it in kids born deaf and raised in sign. They grow an inner voice too, but theirs signs. You think in whatever language filled the room when you were small.

So put it together. One dial mostly came down through your blood. The other got built into you by the people who raised you. You walked out of childhood with both already set, and you've been running that exact board ever since.

You never chose the board. You inherited one half and got handed the other.

The thing to take with you

Here's what I actually walked away with, sitting at that table with my kid.

For my whole life I've been standing right next to people I love, people I'd swear I know all the way down, and we've been living in different worlds the entire time. My wife. My kids. My closest friends. Some of them are watching a movie in there. Some of them are sitting in a quiet, blank room. Some have a voice going all day and some have silence. And we never talk about it, because we all just assume everybody is built like us.

You don't get to climb inside another person's head. That door is locked, for everyone, forever. But you can knock. You can just ask. And the answer will surprise you, because it is almost never the one you assumed.

So do the thing my daughter did to me.

Say the word apple out loud tonight, and ask the person across from you what they see.