Imaginal Neglect, Aphantasia & The Imagery Debate With Paolo Bartolomeo

Have you ever overlooked half of your imagination? Dr. Paolo Bartolomeo from the Paris Brain Institute shares insights on the rare phenomenon of imaginal neglect and some recent breakthroughs in understanding aphantasia in the brain.
Play Video

Imaginal Neglect, Aphantasia And the Imagery Debate

Have you ever overlooked half of your imagination?

Imagine trying to describe your favorite place, but you can only visually imagine half of the picture in your mind. Dr. Paolo Bartolomeo from the Paris Brain Institute shares insights on the rare phenomenon of imaginal neglect, a rare condition where people ignore stimuli on one side of their imagination.

Bartolomeo with his extensive background in cognitive research and brain imaging, has contributed over 190 papers to the scientific community. His work includes discoveries in attention disorders and visual mental imagery, making him an authoritative voice in this field. During this interview, Bartolomeo shares perspectives on the centuries-old imagery debate and some of the recent scientific breakthroughs in understanding aphantasia in the brain.

Hosted by Tom Ebeyer of the Aphantasia Network this interview challenges our understanding of how our minds perceive and imagine the world differently.

Timestamps

  • 1:00 – Paolo’s background studying Imaginal Neglect.
  • 5:15 – How did you go from studying in Rome to your work now at the Paris Brain Institute studying visual mental imagery?
  • 8:35 – What is the mental imagery debate?
  • 12:35 – Questions like: “What’s darker, the strawberry or the cherry” are interesting. Aphantasics can still answer these questions. How are these questions answered? For the visualizer, they might imagine and make a comparison. But for aphantasics, there’s no image only inherent knowledge. How do we square this?
  • 15:06 – In acquired aphantasia, where there is some damage to the brain, would we see cases like this as something that needs to be cured or fixed? And is this because there’s brain damage, or because maybe they haven’t learned the strategies that a congenital case of aphantasia would have learned? Why are there such differences in these two cases?
  • 18:30 – Is acquired aphantasia a very different case from Imaginal Neglect cases? Or analogous?
  • 19:30 – Is it always on one particular side of the brain in cases of Imaginal Neglect?
  • 20:41 – Have you ever come across congenital cases of Imaginal Neglect?
  • 22:42 – Based on everything we know so far about aphantaisa and how it’s represented in the brain, do you believe it’s theoretically possible for aphantasics to experience imagery? We know that the same regions are active but not coordinating in the same way. Is it possible to change how those brain pathways coordinate?
  • 24:55 – There’s quite a large spectrum of experience when it comes to visual mental imagery. Some people experience very vivid mental images, for others, it’s more vague. Why such variation?
  • 26:02 – Do we think something similar spectrum would apply across all the senses such as auditory or gustatory imagery?
  • 27:16 – Would this imply that there could be domain-specific variances in sensory imagination? For example, some people can’t experience visual mental imagery but can still experience auditory imagery.
  • 29:12 – Even for those who can visualize, there can be individual differences in sub-categories of visual mental imagery (i.e. faces, colors, shapes, letters and special relationships)?
  • 29:53 – Where do you see the field evolving? What are some of the big questions in visual mental imagery? How does aphantasia assist in our understanding of how visual mental imagery works?
  • 31:22 – We see similar outcomes in aphantasics performance on tasks one might assume requires visual imagery. But we do see a difference in the confidence of answers. Can you explain what some of the recent aphantasia brain research found?
Liu, J., & Bartolomeo, P. (2023). Probing the unimaginable: The impact of aphantasia on distinct domains of visual mental imagery and visual perception. Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, 166, 338–347. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2023.06.003