🍎 Elephantasia (aphantasia) - can you see an apple in your mind?

This week we roll headfirst into the interestin' world of aphantasia.

It all started with conversations inside Find Your Creative Voice and The Picture Book Course - when Good Shippers were telling us, “I can’t see ANYTHING in my head.” Which sent us down a rabbit hole of aphantasia, imagination. And does everyone experience it the same way?

Nope.

In this episode, we chat about:

• What aphantasia is
• The “apple test” 🍎
• Emotional memory vs visual memory
• Why some creatives need reference and others work 100% from imagination
• Whether Google has made our “mind palace” lazy
• Not being able to picture things can be a creative advantage. We promise.
• Smells, textures, music and sensory imagination
• Synesthesia (colours for days of the week?)
• Why your wobbly memory-bike drawing might be better than a perfect diagram
• How imagination changes from childhood to adulthood
• Blind drawing experiments we neeeeed to try at Art Club

Timestamps for our timestamp fans

00:00 – Elephantasia? Aphantasia? However you say it…
02:00 – The apple spectrum and vivid vs blank imagery
03:00 – Reading fiction without mental pictures
05:00 – Emotional memory and creepy seaside steps
07:00 – Mental collage vs drawing from scratch
10:00 – Drawing bikes from memory
11:00 – Why aphantasia might make you a better designer
14:00 – Idioms, haystacks and giant bears
16:00 – Smells, lemons and sensory imagination
17:30 – Synesthesia and coloured weekdays
20:00 – Wolves, dreams and Google as reference
23:00 – Teenage bedrooms and peak memory moments
25:00 – Is creativity in your head or your hands?
28:00 – Blind Art Club challenge incoming 👀

What about you?

Can you see the shiny apple? Or is it more of a murky apple-shaped idea?

We’d genuinely love to know. Come over to Instagram and tell us how your brain works. We're nosy.

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Transcript

Dec 3 -Elepantasia (lol)
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​[00:00:00] 

Speaker: Hello. Welcome. We are excited to talk about, right? How do you say it properly? Elephant is, yeah, I say with all in 

Speaker 3: authority. 

Speaker: Yes. Aphantasia. That's the one all I can think of is Ectasia because I'm hate saying it.

Speaker 2: Helen's infected us with her version of the word. But yeah, we keep getting. Conversations about aphantasia on, well, particularly in the Facebook group, because in one of the, well, in the find your creative voice, there's an exercise in there that involves imagining things. And in picture book there's childhood memories and [00:01:00] recalling things and sort of drawing, drawing from your inner mind.

And it always provokes conversations about, I can't see anything. And a lot of people didn't know, and we didn't know what it was until some wise shipper said, oh, it's called Aphantasia, where there's nothing in your visual mind. Mm-hmm. And we just like, this is so fascinating. 

Speaker: There's a good diagram, isn't there, where it's like, a lot of apples and one of the apples on one side is bright red and shiny.

Then the spectrum goes from like, it goes gray, less visible to black. 

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker: And that's like the spectrum of how many elephants are in ectasia. How a fantastic you are. 

Speaker 2: But I think it's, everyone's on the spectrum of aphantasia. Some people just see a black screen in their mind and they, even if there's things they, they know really well, like their bedroom, they perhaps can't remember it and put that picture in their head.

Some people can roughly sketch out the shape of their bedroom and where the bed is, but they can't see the, the [00:02:00] color of the bedspread or where the window was. And then other people have really super vivid imagery like you would have when you were a child and you were scared of monsters under the bed and you really actually knew what the monster looked like.

It was so vivid that your feelings and terror. Provoked by the power of your own visualization. And I think obviously as adults you, you lose that intensity. But some people have really super powerful visual memories, which apparently is called eidetic memory. So my wise husband told me, 

Speaker: is that like photographic memory?

Speaker 2: I think it is. Or it's ultra vivid. You can do all the details. 

Speaker 4: Wow. 

Speaker: See, I can't do all the details, but I do see things in my brain, and we were talking about this before, like when you read a book, like a fiction book, it's like plugging your brain into a film. For me anyway, like, and I see the film, like I see the book in my mind.

But, and that's what really confused me about a Fantasia, like are they people? Are these people reading and just not seeing anything? 

Speaker 2: My daughter says she doesn't [00:03:00] see anything when she, she loves fiction. And I said to her, can you see anything? And she said, no, but the story, I can feel the story, but I don't have pictures.

When a space or a person is being described, and she's a, she's an interior and spatial designer by trade, there are so many creative people with a Fantasia and they just work differently. 

Speaker 3: I think what's so amazing about it, what's really interesting is trying to, we've spent the morning, the three of us trying to describe how we remember things and it's so hard and you, you wanna get into somebody else's brain and have a poke about and go, it's like that.

What do you mean it's really hard to describe how you remember things? 'cause I think memory is part emotion and part visual. I think I remember. Things more if I've got a big emotional connection to it, like my childhood bedroom and things like that. But I don't think I remember every single thing in the bedroom and, and exactly how the books were piled up.

I think I have a good [00:04:00] visual memory, but not like, not like a photographic memory. 

Speaker: Yeah, and it's, and I guess 

Speaker 3: everybody's on a spectrum, aren't they? 

Speaker: And little things will trigger my brain. So like I went into my daughter's school and the carpet is the same from when I was there, and I must have looked at the carpet a lot.

'cause I looked at it, I was like, whoa, that's my whole childhood in the carpet. Or like I can remember the wallpaper at my granny's house 'cause it was beside the bed and you'd be looking at it in the morning and it had the little form you lumped and you could pick them off. Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 3: I remember bedspreads.

You remember Candlewick bedspreads where you could pluck the little bits of tufty fluff out of them. I remember the color of that and the feel of that. I remember going to my grandma's and it was always cold upstairs 'cause she had no heating. And the bedspreads, those candlewick bedspreads would feel heavy 'cause they were sort of damp from the cold.

Like I remember all of the feelings around it, which helps plant the visual memory. And I, I ju you know, I have a good friend Scott, Scott Robertson, who is a fine artist. And [00:05:00] um, he has a Fantasia and we've been talking about it a lot. And he says he has all the emotional memories, he has emotional memories of houses and rooms and places he's been, but no visual memory.

And there's one particular painting that he did, he, he usually paints from. So if he paints a figure, it's like a stick man. 'cause he doesn't try to make it real, but he tries to put the emotional impact of what he's trying to say into that figure. Anyway, there's one painting that he's done that's quite unusual 'cause it's a scene near where he lives.

And it's the beach with the Beachside Cafe, which is like a little white, 1920s building. But also, um, to get from the beach. There are those steps, you know, how you walk up, how. So how do you describe those steps? Concrete off the beach. They're sort of scary, 

Speaker: aren't they? Yeah, they're like a pebble, dashy, concrete.

And it's a bit like you go in, it's an enclosed space and you go up to the sidey stairs, 

Speaker 3: they're all damp and you know that the sea has been in them and dragged all of [00:06:00] the seaweed and the bits of sticks and stuff into there and seaweeds and stuff. Sometimes little weed. And they smell funny. They often smell of wee and they're sort of weird, creepy space.

Also, all of the sound of the sea and the wind stops when you get between the steps. 

Speaker 2: It's like a dead space. Yeah, it smells weird. Like a alleyway or 

Speaker 3: a weird, yeah. So in his painting, everything is like a diagram, you know, like you would just draw a strip of yellow sand, a strip of blue sky, the building, but he's drawn the steps and all there is is this like dark gray square that represents the bit you walk into to go the steps.

And that gray bit like seems to sink right back in the landscape. Like. Like beyond the building, beyond the horizon, like really deep. And it just gives you that weird, like, ooh, that feeling of being in those steps. So that painting is just about the feeling. The rest of it's like a diagram and he has a Fantasia and it, it's like it charges his painting with something [00:07:00] better than if it had been very realistic.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Rather 

Speaker 2: it's rather than externally representation. Yeah. Yeah. What's quite funny that when you're describing a painting painted by someone with a Fantasia and asking us to picture, 

Speaker 5: yeah. Yeah. 

Speaker 3: I wish I could get another people's brains and see what they say. Well, I, 

Speaker 2: I think that children's book illustrators.

Oh, you can say not many of them will have a Fantasia because they can, I always look at the imagination in children's books with the scenes and the characters and the invention and I think my brain doesn't have that richness. Yeah. People, yeah, 

Speaker 3: but people, them from lots of places, don't they? Like I couldn't make a whole background scene entirely from memory.

I'll have a memory. I've been to a place and think, oh, I said at that place, 'cause that seems about right. And then all, um, decide it needs to be like a market square or something. And then I'll google it a bit. And then you do a mental 

Speaker 2: collage. 

Speaker 3: Do like a mental collage, get rid of the Google images and [00:08:00] then try sketching it, sketch it a few times till a version feels right, right.

You've 

Speaker 2: made it. But 

Speaker 3: it's definitely not entirely. Or I've been in a market square. Mm-hmm. I know exactly how that looks, but, but our Alice seems to have that, Alice seems to have a a really, really good memory for details. 

Speaker 2: She said she lies down at night. Sorry, Alice, giving away your sleep secrets. But she said she can create whole scenes in her mind when she falls asleep.

And I used to be able to, as a child, I'd create woodland animal scenes to calm myself down when I was 

Speaker 5: probably 

Speaker 2: five or six. But I think you, that dries up a bit as you get older or after 30 years in an illustration career where you had to visualize things that you didn't necessarily want to draw. But that would you could put a concept together and they needed certain elements in this concept, like, I dunno, a factory or something.

You wouldn't, wouldn't be an item that you would want to draw, but you have to learn to draw it. So you collage these things, as you said, from Googling and from other reference. And you create something from [00:09:00] all these different bits of mental collage, which means you're no longer building your. Your mental palace, what do they call it?

Your mind? Palace mental. Oh, mind palace. Yeah. Your mind. Palace of Imagination. Yeah. Is getting slack and lazy, when you look, do you think that's what happens? I think if you're not inventing scenes in your head or picturing things, you must be able to strengthen your imagination Muscle.

Yeah. By thinking 

Speaker 3: I think I have a good memory for places that meant a lot. Yeah. And I could draw things, places that really, really hit home. Like some of the accommodation I lived in when I was at art school, like I can remember it incredibly well. But then other places, um, like when we do art club and we do ten second animal and somebody tells us the name of an animal in the comments and we try and draw it in 10 seconds.

'cause most of those animals I've not met just glanced at them. I've seen photos of them on Google and they don't have a big impact. I cannot [00:10:00] remember what they looked like. I mean the, the drawing to a disaster. But you 

Speaker: must not have an emotional connection to STOs. 

Speaker 3: You're 

Speaker 2: right 

Speaker: that 

Speaker 2: the constrictions of 10 seconds really does it.

Imagine. Yeah, doesn. 

Speaker 3: But if I was, if I was to want to draw a stout, I would think, oh, they're like long and thin with a leg on each corner, but, and maybe brown, but I'd have to go and Google it and then, 'cause 

Speaker 2: that's data, isn't it? Like a lot of people with a Fantasia say they will draw things by talking themselves through the facts of a thing.

So they'll describe the room verbally and they'll draw from their own verbal prompts, which we do to a certain extent. If it's a stoked for 10 seconds. 

Speaker 3: What about a bike? Can you draw a bike from your memory? Can draw a bike? I can draw a funny bike from memory. Yeah. I can draw a wonky unrideable one, which is fine.

Then that's the other thing is maybe some amount of a Fantasia is actually really useful because it makes your drawing of a bike. Very much you, yeah. Rather than a diagram of [00:11:00] a perfectly rideable bike. People don't want a clip out a bike 

Speaker: picture. They want your wobbly human hand bike. 

Speaker 2: Your weird memory of a bike.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the other thing that popped up when I was talking to my daughter about a Fantasia, she was saying that an employer of hers who is in, in the sort of UX design world, he was saying a lot of digital designers and Yeah. User experience, kind of, people have a Fantasia, but they make for really good outcomes because they trial everything.

They can't see it in their head, so they actually have to do it over and over again. So there's lots of iterations of anything, and you could apply that to an illustrator easily. There's lots of different versions until you get it right. Whereas the person who sees it clearly in the head again, oh, it's that.

I'm not gonna do anymore. That's it. It's done. And he said they are really difficult to work with because they're very stubborn and have very set ideas that it was Right. 'cause they saw it. 

Speaker: So it's actually a benefit to have if Anesia, 'cause you're gonna try out, you're gonna [00:12:00] externalize more design ideas.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. 'cause you're prepared to look at lots of different ways of doing it and refine it over and over again. But for all of it, this kind of different imaginations or different ways of arriving at a creative outcome are so interesting, aren't they? Because some people might have only observational outcomes.

So those creative illustrators, lets say, for example, to keep it relevant, can only work if they can draw it from life or from a picture. 

Perhaps they can't collage things together in a false space. 

So it, they can only work observationally. Some people can only draw entirely from imagination and don't want the problem of a photographic reference to interfere.

Speaker 4: Mm. Yeah. 

Speaker 2: And then other people draw things that don't even exist, like Leon, Nora Carrington, and her weird creatures that no one's ever seen. Like where do they come from? That level of imagination that isn't based on a visual memory of something you've seen. I 

Speaker 3: find that really hard just to make something up.

Yeah. Completely. Make something up. I [00:13:00] really rely, I love drawing from life and I love somewhere in between, which is like draw it, put the, draw it from life, put the drawing aside, and then draw it from my memory of the drawing from life. Or look at a Google image quickly get rid of it, and then draw it while the memory is in my mind, not draw from the photo.

So I'm somewhere in the middle and I definitely. Do not like trying to make something up. Can you, trying to make something up from scratch on a piece of paper is just, yeah. Impossible. Those Leonard Nora Carrington images. But I really like the, I, I really like it if I know a place well and I remember it to do the exercise that you set in the freak flag course of changing the angle.

So imagine you're up above. I can do that. So I must be able to hold something in my brain. My brain holds something. Something going on. Yeah. There's something going on in there. 'cause I can look at a room and then imagine being at a different angle Yeah. And drawing it. I love doing that. [00:14:00] 

Speaker 2: Yeah. Or even like a, a basic exercise if you're listening to this and thinking, what are they on about This is really, have I got a Fantasia or not?

The, the usual one is picture an apple and then change the color of the apple. Look at the apple from underneath. Hanging in a tree. Look at it. Can you see it in a fruit bowl? 

Speaker 3: But there's some people imagine a line drawing. Some people like a line round an apple. Some people remem, imagine a colored apple.

Just like a cartoon apple. Yeah. I don't imagine. I imagine a real apple. Yeah, like a real one on a fruit bowl or something. 

Speaker: Mine's a real one in a fruit bowl. Is it? Yeah. Yeah. I 

Speaker 2: don't imagine a representation of an apple. No, me neither. See the reality of the thing. 

Speaker: What? Unless you say to me, imagine an A level drawing of an apple and then I would see like a shaded graphite apple.

Yeah. But what about the thing, you know, when people, there's funny idioms and things people say like, like finding a needle in a haystack. I have the thing where I will see a haystack and someone finding a needle and I'm like, ah, that's funny. It means looking for something that's tricky to find. But recently somebody was saying [00:15:00] it's not normal to do that.

Like to, it is not normal to actually literally see the thing. Ah, I see it. Maybe 'cause we're visual people. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Maybe a vi maybe it's a visual thinker problem. 'cause I'm, I have to like see the funny visual and I'd be like, oh yeah, but that means that, yeah. It doesn't 

Speaker 2: literally mean my favorite one is they say they Japanese people when they hear.

Western speakers say, bear with me from, you know, a receptionist at a company. Imagine a giant bear with, oh goodness, this arm round the receptionist. That's why it's taking a long time. Because there's a bear Yeah. With their headphones on at the same time. And I think I'm probably, I'm sure lots of people must think of it that way.

Speaker: Like, let's not beat around the bush. Like somebody's whacking a bush. I know. 

Speaker 3: I heard somebody there that day say that for most of their life they thought a handbag was a, a ham bagg. 

Speaker 2: Amazing. I think it really relates to music as well in that thing that I could play a few instruments when I was younger, but I could [00:16:00] only play from the sheet music.

I could never set myself free and play by ear or compose. Maybe I could compose a bit, but I didn't really bother to try. And I think composing is creating something from your imagination, isn't it? Mm-hmm. So if that was drawing, that's the comparable version. The other midway version is, you know, maybe.

A teenager with a guitar and knowledge of three chords and a favorite song that they try to replicate. So they're playing by ear. And a lot of those people, like my husband said, I could never read music. I can now, but for 20 years I played guitar and piano with no knowledge of sheet music or the ability to read music.

I was like, but you used to play all these amazing things. And that was just by ear. It really relates so closely to drawing, doesn't it? Whether you can be set free with no, uh, reference to draw from, and you're just drawing from the memory in your head. Mm. But a Fanta is sensory, isn't it? There's taste hearing.

Yeah. They talk about smells as well. Yeah. That it covers all of those. I can't [00:17:00] remember what things smell like. 

Speaker 3: Oh, I can, can you? Oh 

Speaker: yeah, yeah. Bread, freshly baked bread, coffee. Even when it's, you know, when it's just rained where it's that little Petco. Oh yeah. It's a good 

Speaker 2: smell. 

Speaker: Yeah. Am I supposed 

Speaker 2: to smell it or just remember it?

Do you not? No, not, I can't smell it, but I can think of how it is. 

Speaker: Well, like barbecue smell, you know, when you've got smoke in your hair and all. 

Speaker 3: See, that's when I wanna get in your brain, because maybe I'm just thinking of what the smell is, but I can, I just wanna get in there and see what you mean. What do you mean?

I feel like 

Speaker: I can definitely conjure up smells. 

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think I can, but I mean, I can't literally smell coffee when I think of it, but I know. Yeah. Maybe I can smell it when I think of it.

Speaker: Yeah. Oh, there's that thing, like if you think of a lemon and think about biting a lemon and your mouth starts watering.

Speaker 2: I'm gonna go later. I try and conduct that, that experiment. And then it, it is getting close to synthe synesthesia as well, isn't it? 

Speaker 3: I think I had that when I was a child. Yeah. What? How everybody I knew had a color. Yeah. Or I knew what day of [00:18:00] the week they were. Yeah, that's a thing, isn't it? Yeah. I had that as a child 

Speaker 2: and words had color.

Yeah, and sounds had type of lines and patterns and textures and 

Speaker: numbers. Thursday isy, 

Speaker 2: what you think? Is that because that's a good party night as a student? 

Speaker: No, it's just a good 

Speaker 3: sounding 

Speaker 2: word. 

Speaker 3: Friday 

Speaker 2: is navy blue. Friday is 

Speaker 3: navy blue. My granddad was mustard. 

Speaker 2: Amazing. I remember really feeling all those rational adult life I think washes a lot of that away.

Again, like having the, the memory of the monster under the bed and the ability to have synesthesia thinking. Marian Dhar always tells me she has synesthesia. She still has it quite strongly. Oh, does she? Yeah. I think, will you tell us somehow whether, I dunno, make, 

Speaker: make an Instagram post about it. 'cause everybody will be interested, but tag us so we can read it If you've got anesthesia or ectasia or a, 

Speaker 2: it's just, you know, the creativity that comes out of [00:19:00] all the neurodiversity of our brains.

And I think initially if you have an aphantasia you think, oh, that's it. How can I be a visual creative person? But there are so many. Mm-hmm. There's an entire community of a Fantasia creatives if you look online and the work is really interesting and it isn't a closed door to creativity at all. It's actually a different way of bringing things about a really interesting way.

Where do you think you are on the spectrum of ectasia? On a naught to 10 is 10 ten's shiny, red apple eidetic memory, and oh, well, maybe 

Speaker 3: seven. I don't know. 'cause I can't get in the brain of a zero or a 10, but I don't think I'm a 10. Maybe because I do need some visual reference for stuff. So maybe a seven.

Dunno 

Speaker 2: you know your childhood memories? Mm-hmm. The floating dog ghost in the Glasgow block of flats. You'd have to go on [00:20:00] Helen's childhood memories. 

Speaker 3: Oh yeah. That, that was, that's actually not, the floating wolves were a dream, recurring dream, but the brief, that was actually a brief for somebody else's text and it was a block of flats.

So I set it in those red road flats in Glasgow that I'd visited loads of times when I was at art school. 'cause I had friends who lived in there. But I did have to go Google searches of the interiors of the red road flats. 

Speaker 2: Yeah. 

Speaker 3: And I also did some drawings of wolves from memory. 'cause I'd drawn wolves in real life in the past.

And then, oh, then I had to look at that really brilliant drawing. By the famous woman, patient of Freud who saw wolves in a tree. Do you remember that? No. There's all these white wolves floating in a tree. She's a very famous patient of Freud and you, which is really weird 'cause my dream was white wolves as well.

So I, I kind of kept looking at that and remembering wolves and [00:21:00] Googled wolves. So it was a mixture of a dream, emotions, memory, Google research. 

Speaker 2: What did, and what did we do without Google? Before I just, yeah. 

Speaker 3: Oh, I had kept loads of books. Did you used to buy? I used to buy loads of brilliant by 1940s and 1950s books of black and white photos.

Yes. And I used to just store them all on my shelves as reference in case I needed to draw a child. Or I used to look specifically for pictures of children. Photographs of children, yeah. In books. Yeah. I remember 

Speaker 2: photocopying loads and loads of stuff. I'd have those big box files with tons of random pictures.

Yeah. I couldn't organize it. It could be fireworks or a stripper or a, you know, or a dog or just a weird photo of a room or a space that had a strange atmosphere. And then, yeah, the books are time life books. 

Speaker 6: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: Which had all those very kind of, yeah. Concrete images of what? Countryside or, 

Speaker: so you had to make your own Google images?

Yeah, in, you had to have a 

Speaker 3: stash or try and draw from memory [00:22:00] more. 

Speaker: Would you get a commission? But, sorry, I can't draw that. I haven't got a book. No. Really, really? 

Speaker 3: Yeah. There's loads of books I turned down because like, well, I dunno how to draw that and I can't imagine how to get into it. But some drum, some of my memory drawings are literal memories though.

So the one in the 1980s, red and white heart bedroom is entirely from memory. No reference. 'cause I just, that, that room was my favorite bedroom and I loved it and I remember every inch of it. So that was entirely memory. 

Speaker 2: There must be certain ages where your kind of tabular of a child is cleared away.

No more monsters under the bed. You're about 12 and you think you are on the cusp of adulthood. But actually I'm no longer a child, this is my bedroom. 'cause I remember really similar thing being in a bedroom watching those holy you know, when the, the clouds have sunlight coming through it, Jesus is coming down, Jesus is coming down.

Religion might be, well, you just have a religious feeling about the whole thing. And then I [00:23:00] remember ha playing reggae on my stereo and I still play reggae all the time. I was like, this is it. Jesus is coming. I've got the reggae and my own bedroom. I'm here living the dream. And it's super vivid. I think that's the adolescence memory, which is a different kind of memory where things are embedded in you once again, even more strongly like a child.

Mm. 

Speaker: But 

Speaker 2: the next version. 

Speaker: I think my version of that is getting my first big girl bedroom where I got to choose. I chose lime green walls, like bright lime green and I had a dark blue stencil to do blue flowers around it. It was amazing. And I had my PlayStation and butter scotch flavor polos, which I don't know wow.

Exist anymore. And I was playing tome raid and I had um, big boy friends that had twins and I used to get their clothes hand me down. So I was wearing one of their t-shirts playing Laura Croft. Oh, amazing. Can you picture it in your head now? Yeah. Really clearly. And, and I was allowed a computer in my bedroom as well.

I didn't have the internet on it, [00:24:00] but it had a program called Sound Blaster 16, where it was so high tech you could type into it and it would speak. So I like wrote my own radio program. It says hours are fun hours. Could you draw it? Probably. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. It was 

Speaker 2: a weird shaped room. It was cool.

But this is like techie Katy Mark one. Yeah. Now I see where you came from. Yeah. Even techie at what? What age? 13. That would be 12 

Speaker: maybe. I don't even, yeah, 11 or 12. Wow. It's good times. But it's, it's funny when you think of like the taste of the sweetie, the smell of the new paint. Mm-hmm. The glow of the lime green walls.

It must 

Speaker 3: work for touch as well, wasn't it? Yeah. This touch part of the The fanis. Yeah. I think 

Speaker 2: they said, yeah, like stroking a really soft cat or a memory of a border terriers bristly hair. Yeah. It's so interesting and I think that connection between. What is in our head? 'cause we talk a lot about how you take what's [00:25:00] in your head or your mind, or you want to, what you want to draw.

And we talk about the technical implementation. Do you paint it, you're a digital artist, how do you visualize it? Is your technical skill where you want it to be, to create the kind of images that you have in your mind? And that seems to be the larger part of teaching cre creatively or visually.

But the bit that's in your head is really interesting when we rarely talk about that. Mm-hmm. Like where is it coming from? Is it coming from an intellectual decision or a mind picture? 

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's funny 'cause I think you just, you just assume everybody else sees the world like you and that's, Hmm, yeah.

That's so it's not true. So wrong. True. Yeah. True. But I wonder that 

Speaker: about even having an artistic eye and looking at things. 'cause sometimes, like, like a website design or something, you'll see and you'll be like, why haven't they fixed that? Or like, that looks terrible. How can't they see that?

But some people, part of it's, you just don't know. Some people just don't have the eye to see that something looks terrible or maybe it looks good to them. Yeah. This is so confusing. Are we seeing colors the same as well?

Speaker 2: [00:26:00] Totally. Oh, we could go on forever, couldn't we? Yeah. 

Speaker 3: But do 

Speaker: Dick, 

Speaker 3: tell us how you see things.

Please. Thank you. Yeah, I'd really like to hear, if you'd like allow me access to your brain. That would be great. Yeah. Just step in through the ear hole. Mm. 

Speaker 2: Have a little look and maybe at night try visualizing some things. I'm gonna start doing nightly visualization to do like a mind gym. Exercise. 

Speaker: What were those books?

Was it Tony Busan, the Memory Exercises? Oh yeah. The mum used to get them and it was like how to memorize 150 things and you would like link the things the good, it was fascinating. Yeah. 

Speaker 3: So if you'd needed to remember a shopping list, it would be like the, you'd imagine like a packet of onions, but they have to be on your head in a funny place so you'd remember so onions and say, the next thing on the list was milk.

Then you might imagine somebody just pouring the milk over the onions. So it led to a story. So you'd have a story, you put the onions on your head, pour the milk over them, tip the sugar down your jumper. Wow. I dunno. [00:27:00] And that helped, that helped. You remember a big, long list of things because you used the storytelling bit of your brain rather than a really emotionless list.

Speaker: I wonder if that is not good for aphantasia. 

Speaker 3: All. It was so visual. Oh yes. In the 

Speaker: mind. It was like you just go into your brain and be like, okay, what? What's this thing I made? 

Speaker 3: But maybe you can hold a story in him. Oh 

Speaker: God. 

Speaker 3: I dunno. 

Speaker 2: I'm like, why not? Didn't they write a flipping list? 

Speaker 3: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: You just tell that 

Speaker 6: story 

Speaker: nowadays, you just do a voice note and be like, turn that into a list, please.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It was for, people wanted to win competitions. We had to remember everything. Oh, okay. You know, like people would compete over who could remember whole pack of cards In what? In that order. Did they? Yeah, but that was a thing. Yeah, I think so. 

Speaker: Oh, in the Generation Game Quiver and Bloke 

Speaker 2: Bridge. Helen Cow, my famous art teacher Benny Matthews, she used to, I say famous 'cause I, she taught me lots over two years.

There were so many weird things I look back on now that really had an impact. And when we were in six form painting, [00:28:00] she used to do that tray thing where you have a tray full of things. Oh yeah. And put the VE over top. It would be useful for that. And you have to feel it. And then even if you dunno what the object was and you probably didn't know what the object was, you'd have to go and draw it purely from the physical sensation.

Speaker: Wow. This could be 

Speaker 3: art club. Ooh, let's do that at art club. Let's do 

Speaker: SIA Art Club. But you're not allowed to look at it or you, is 

Speaker 3: that, is that 

Speaker: art 

Speaker 6: discrimination against 

Speaker: aia? But yeah, it's 

Speaker 2: touching things under a, 

Speaker 3: I like that idea. 

Speaker 2: You'd have to get someone else to prepare the objects. Yeah. Otherwise you'd be cheating.

You don't need to know. So 

Speaker 3: what we usually do is Blind Art Club is you put the. Drawing under a box. But you can see the object. But this is gonna be the other way around. Yes. Yeah. You can't see the object. You can touch it, but you can't see it. But you can see your drawing. Yeah, I really want, that would be 

Speaker 2: good.

Try that. Get your significant, what do they call them? Your significant other in your life, to create a tray of strange things for you to draw. That would be so good. [00:29:00] And then at the end, you post the drawings and the reveal. The 

Speaker 3: big reveal. Yeah. What have I been drawing? I think we should deliver a tray of things to each other with a towel over.

Speaker 6: Yeah. It would be so much fun. Yes. Thanks. We've do that art club for us. Okay. I'll see you at art club. Yeah. Okay. 

Speaker 2: Bye for 

Speaker 3: now. Bye bye.