SPEAKER_00 0:00

Eighth graders are more likely to do that. The sixth graders are just like, uh, this is whatever, what is this? This is crazy. And now the eighth graders are thinking, okay, there's a right and there's a wrong answer to this. I'm in school. I'm not supposed to put down wrong answers. And so they will see the red square when they open their eyes, and that's what they will put down as an answer. And then it's, you know, it takes me longer to then figure out, and sometimes I'll ask them about that. I just did that this marking period with a kid, and he's like, uh, yeah, I just I assume that's what you wanted us to write down.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

If you enjoy this podcast, show us some love and take a couple minutes to leave a five-star review. It helps us get found by more listeners, and we greatly appreciate it. Aphantasia is a condition characterized by an inability to visualize mental images in one's mind. If you have just discovered that you or someone you love has aphantasia, or if you're just fascinated by the subject in general and love learning more about it, you are in the right place. The Discovering Your Mind podcast delves into all aspects of the mind's eye, including aphantasia, hyperfantasia, and everything in between. Welcome to the Discovering Your Mind Podcast, brought to you by Shane'sBraindomain.com. I am your host, Shane Williams, also known as Shane's Brain. And today we're talking with the one and only Luap the Destroyer. Or Paul for short. How are you doing, Paul? I'm doing okay. Awesome. All right. Well, welcome to the show. We're happy to have you. I'm excited about this discussion we're gonna have. Uh, why don't we just start out with you tell me what you do for a living?

SPEAKER_00 1:47

I am a middle school teacher and I teach a very unique, I was a social studies teacher forever, um, yeah, decades and decades. And in the last uh nine years, I'm the class is called Capstone, but it's kind of since changed from uh, if any listener knows what a typical capstone class is, it's like a big culminating project. It's now more of a hands-on building class, which has still retained the original title somehow.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Okay. So, where do you do that? Where are you coming out of this from?

SPEAKER_00 2:17

From Wallingford, Connecticut.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Awesome, Connecticut, very cool. All right. Uh, what else? What else do you like to do for fun? You got hobbies and interests?

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah, I'm uh anything outdoors person. So the second I get home, I'm out in the woods with my dog. I have a small farm, um, and so taking care of the animals, and I have a one of a kind, well, not one of a kind, but I have a small business. And uh I've designed and produced and sell the world's greatest portable bidet. Uh, you name the trail on the mountain in the world, and it's been on it up and over it. And so it's the uh the choice of ultralight backpackers and travelers everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

That is so awesome.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Brilliant, I tell you, brilliant. And you know, it's holyhiker.com. Check it out. Not holy like, you know, the god, but holy like the whole.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

All right, awesome. Okay, very cool. And we will we'll put that link in the show notes as well. So people can find that. That's pretty awesome. All right. Well, let's just dive into this here. As someone without aphantasia, were you afraid to be on this podcast?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

I'm absolutely terrified. And the reason is obviously this podcast is going to be about my experience with you know, my students who have apantasia. And I am terrified of saying something in which someone with aphantasia will be, well, well, that's not true, or that's not what's happening, without the ability to go back and forth with that person. Because I know online and some of my in-person conversations initially people are like, Well, what you're saying isn't actually happening. And after a back and forth and parsing out the nuance of the language, they're like, Oh, I see what you're saying. So I'm afraid of using visual words that mean something to me that don't mean something to maybe a lot of the people in the audience. Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Just so you know, that is unavoidable. That is part of this whole thing. And even within the A Fantasia groups that I'm a part of, that happens all day, every day. Like everybody is experiencing this thing in their own unique way. And so everybody comes to it, even the people with apantasia come to it with their own uh unique assumptions and their own unique experiences. And so that's part of the process is one, trying to parse out the differences, and then two, just embracing the differences and realizing that they are there, they are valid, and now we have to try and communicate with this limited vocabulary that we have and actually get somewhere. But that's part of the fun of it for me, and so I wouldn't be worried about that at all because that's gonna that's gonna happen, and that always happens.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

So yeah. So like in my head, I'm playing out all the scenarios in which I could say something that you know maybe I've I've explored and I think is true in the moment, but maybe a month from now I'll be like, oh my gosh, that wasn't true, and I can't go back and correct it, and now my word is out there. And so I'm uh I'm afraid of, I mean, really and truly, this is this is stuff that mostly sits inside my, you know, my head and my dialogue. And this is probably the one of the first times where I'm gonna have it try to come out in words. And so I'm afraid of, you know, stumbling over those words. And uh as, you know, what when I think you invited me, or you know, I said yes, that's one of the things that kept going through my head is oh my gosh, I've never really like practiced getting the thoughts from my head into words that you know, for an audience that let's face it, you know, you know, you can't see, which is is hard to do. There's no reaction or anything happening in front of me.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Right. Yeah, that's always so interesting to hear for me to hear other people's experiences with that. Uh, someone once told me that they had played out the entire podcast conversation multiple times in their head. And I just I can't relate to to being able to do something like that. For me, it's very this is it, you know, it's very tempting. And other than preparing for it in the way that I can, there's no other real forethought about what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

No, I was gonna say that like I've run through all of the different questions that you could potentially ask me. So I switched roles. I said, if I was sitting in your chair, what would the questions be? And I tried to go through, you know, all of them. And then I was like, all right, just let's just let's just do this.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

That is so crazy and so cool. I love hearing that stuff. All right. Uh just tell me about how and when you discovered that A Fantasia was a thing.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

So it was about three or four years ago at this point. My daughter was a COVID college kid. So they ended up having college, but pretty much, you know, locked in the dorms. And it was a very weird experience. And she emailed one one day and she said, you know, can we talk? You know, you and mom and I, can we talk at six o'clock tonight? So I actually have goosebumps, just like remembering it. There was all these like triggers were going off my mind. Like, you know, we knew college experience was not going very well during COVID and with online classes and the whole bit. And, you know, what was going on? Is this where she finally admits she's a drug-addicted bank robber? I mean, like all sorts of different things are going through my head. So, you know, the three of us are on the phone all at once. And she basically, the the story is basically she was having breakfast with some friends, and someone mentioned a dream they had that night. And she thought to herself, you know, I'm so tired about hearing about these things called dreams. Like, I don't understand why nobody else in the room ever like, you know, calls out people on this. And then she was in class and she sat down next to someone. And the person next to her said, Oh my gosh, you know, I can't wait to go on vacation. I can just picture my toes in the sand. And she thought, ugh, first the dreams and now this picturing thing. I've had to put up with this all my life. Like, why are people just like, who started this? And then she went to work later that night. And I forgot the third thing that happened, but it was, it was very similar. It was, you know, like, what do you picture yourself doing? And she finally said to the girl, She's like, you know, I'm X number of years old. I can't listen to this anymore. I have to call you out on it. Why do people say this? Like, I don't find it entertaining. Why do other people? And basically, she got that look, you know, that when you tell someone you can't see anything, and that's when she learned that she does not have any images in her head, and everybody else does. And so when she said this on the phone, you know, like in the movies, you know, you had the flashbacks before you die of like your entire life flashes before your eyes. When she told me this, my entire life with her flashed before my eyes. Like it explained everything from our deep conversations to our arguments, from things that happened on vacation to you know, helping her study for things in school, subjects that she rolled through, and subjects that I would thought to myself, I don't understand why she's struggling, that she suffered through. And it was just this like amazing epiphany. And of course, it went from her, and you know, my teacher brain can't turn off. So all of a sudden I applied it to my kids, and I was just like, oh, that explains that chunk of kids that I was never connecting with and you know, never making that big dent in. And it was just the most amazing feeling to finally have an answer. Um, but at the same time, I was at such a loss because I thought to myself, if I had only known this, you know, like you start beating yourself up, if I had only known this 35 years ago, the number of kids I could have scooped up, it would have been such a different experience for them in my classroom and school. So I'm kind of starting a little late with those kids. I'm starting at the end of my career instead of the beginning. Um, but that's that's the kind of the origin story.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Right. But what's awesome about you is once you found this out, I mean, you took the ball and ran with it. There's there's so many people that just kind of brush it off and never really implement it or do anything about it. It just, oh, whatever, you know, don't really understand the the value of it or the weight of it. And I think that you really did that, you know, from the moment you learned about it, it's like, oh my gosh, and this new world opened up to you. And the same thing happened to me. So I I very much relate to that where this thing, uh, you know, aphantasia and on the other end of the spectrum, just visualizing in general, on one level, it's like, oh yeah, big deal, but it is a big deal in a lot of other ways and a lot of other levels. And I love that you've kind of realized that. Try to solve how does this influence my life and the people around me, my students, my daughter, et cetera. I love that about that. So tell me a little more detail about well, well, first of all, for the listeners, Paul wrote a paper and he sent it to me, and I read through it, and it's very interesting and very well thought out and thorough. So we're gonna be discussing that quite a bit today. So, in that paper, you mentioned you know, that 6%, that data point of those kids you were missing. Just tell us a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Sure. So I had a social studies classroom that when I tell you you could not imagine what it was like to be in it, you can't well see I'm using I'm I'm using those words. We're adaptable, as anything. I'm so I'm overthinking everything coming out. It was an incredibly different experience than anything other than anything else that the kids had ever been a part of. We did things that literally nobody else, you know, in the country was doing. My kids gave workshops at conferences to other teachers on how to teach social studies. We were one of the more technologically advanced classes. You know, and it took me a while to get to that place, but I got to a point in my career where I was like, all right, I think I finally I'm rolling now. Like things are we're we're doing really cool things that other people are like, hey, you know, let me include you in my book, my research, whatever. And I would give the kids at the end of the year this really detailed uh survey, evaluation, quite detailed spots where you know kids can either check boxes, they can do some writing, you know, it clicked all, hit all the modalities. And every single year, they would leave at the end of the year, and I would take them all out because I told them I would not read them until they left the building. And I would spend my next two to three hours reading through these evaluations, absolutely ignoring the 94% that said all of these incredible, powerful things, and focusing on the 6% that I just missed. I didn't hit. They they they didn't like the class, they felt like they didn't learn anything, they struggled with the the work that I was giving. And it what just amazed me is you had this huge other chunk of the population that was like, Wow, this is great. And I don't know, and I couldn't understand how you had the total opposite with some kids. And so, you know, I couldn't recognize a pattern, you know, going into the throughout the year. I couldn't recognize, like, okay, in September, these are that's this is gonna be who the 6% is. It just kind of was what it was. And after my daughter told me that story, I was like, oh my, like, you know, I could still remember a lot of those kids because they really weighed on me for years afterwards. And I was like, wow. And again, I think in my paper, I I specifically say I can't go back and diagnose. And I'm not, I don't want to, you know, jump to that conclusion, but aphantasia and everything I see today currently absolutely fit those 6%, especially because of the assignments that we were doing. I thought I was doing the kids such an incredible service of doing these incredible projects that required visual imagination, you know, like imagine yourself as a soldier, imagine yourself in a colonial village, imagine, you know, like whatever, whatever, whatever. Speak as if you were one of the black, you know, whatever the assignment might be. All of a sudden I realized that was like one of the worst things I could be doing with those six percent. So that's where that number came from. And, you know, if I use the same numbers I'm finding today, there were more than 6% back then, just like there's more than 6% in my class right now, but there is that chunk of kids who are a little bit better at adapting for various reasons that you know didn't quite fall into that bottom group of class haters per se. Um so you know, that that's that number 6% is the kids that I just missed. You know, those are the kids that still I wish I can go back uh again. If I go, if I ever went back knowing what I know now, oh it would have been such a different experience for them.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Right. You talk about that dynamic of um, you know, just kind of what's normal in the teaching profession. I pulled this quote from your paper. It said, most of the ways we teach, support, and guide children assume that picturing something is something everyone can do. Right. You talked a little bit about how that influenced you personally, but how do you think that influences the educational system overall?

SPEAKER_00 16:33

I can tell you that I know that there's a school, and I I will sometimes today might be talking a little bit of code just to mask students' names, you know, who the student is or teacher school or that sort of thing. And this is one of those situations. But there's a local school, and there's six goals for their language arts classes. And one of the six goals is picture what you're reading or visualize what you're reading, you know, like some variation of that. And so automatically, one sixth of all of their official tests, the kids get wrong. You know, they're already ending up at a deficit. The tests that the kids take, um, there's one here called IReady. This is a perfect way where it impacts them. There was a student who came to me just, you know, randomly and said, Oh, Mr. Bogish, I'm finally reading at grade level. I know that she has apantasia and she knows that I know. We've gone back and forth with it. And I said, Listen, you're not finally reading at grade level. What's occurred is the type of passages that you are being tested on to see if you are at grade level have changed since the beginning of the year. The testing program starts off, starts off with more fiction, and then it moves more into like nonfiction things. And so it wasn't a matter of the teacher doing something, you know, miraculous with their teaching. It wasn't a matter of the student working extra hard. It was just finally the student receiving information that could truly tell what their reading level was. And so, and that gets, you know, replayed over and over. There was uh there was an assignment I found on the copy machine, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is like I need to include this in something. But it was, you know, you had to go back and think about scenes from the movie they had just watched and then connect it to something in your past life. And I was like, that's that's two things there that are already, you know, picturing the scene. And then for a lot of the kids with aphantasia, if if you have severe deficient autobiography memory, you know, if you have that, you're you're not going back and you're not getting the scene from the movie. And so what happens, and I've you know had conversations with kids like this. I said, so the teacher says you weren't paying attention, right? And the kids like, yeah, but I was paying attention. And the teacher said you weren't focused, right? Yeah, but I was focused. I could literally sit down with a kid and rattle off 20 things a teacher would say to them, and they just are like, How do you know this? You know, like how do you and I was like, that's you know, that's that's that's how it looks like. So, you know, the kids believe that they can't read, kids believe that they're bad writers. All the essays, it is amazing. It is absolutely amazing. I will say to a kid, you don't get past the second paragraph of an essay, right? And the kid's like, No, how do you know that? Or I'll go to a teacher and I'll say, I, you know, this kid has aphantasia. I noticed in their grades that their essay is a 50. And the teacher will be, yeah, they only hand it in two paragraphs. It's like all the time, it's like a magic number for some reason. Right. And so, you know, then all of a sudden the kid isn't not a good writer. And the kid then internalizes that. If you're being told that year after year, that you can't read, you can't write, your confidence doesn't exactly shoot up with things like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Right, right. Yeah, and I can relate to a lot of that from my own childhood and schooling. And those are beautiful examples. Thank you for that. In your paper, you talk about the tell. What is the tell? Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 20:10

After I found out about this from my own kid, I probably I spent one year, like, you know, kind of dabbling with reading about it. I started giving uh the red square test. And I'm gonna make an argument for why you should not give the red apple test to some of your guests, Shane, if you want to go there. Um but the I my mind's wide open, man. Yeah, yeah. The the red I gave them the red square test. So I started identifying kids. So now I knew who the kids were in the class. I didn't, I still didn't exactly know what to do, but I knew who they were. And all of a sudden, I could start seeing, I started picking up a pattern of when they just kind of like stopped. And then again, like all of a sudden, it went back to all of the other kids. And I was like, oh my God, they all stopped at the same moment as well. And that is when there was a component of my directions, which was forcing them to visualize something. And as soon as they hit that moment, originally I would go over there, I would try to help them or whatever, you know, because a lot of times in school, we unfortunately, you know, it's, you know, I just absorb it in my brain that if a kid just works harder, they'll do better. And this is something that I've really learned that if a kid has aphantasia, they could work harder. And when the results still aren't there, that's the tell for me. So it's not working harder, it's not giving more effort. When more effort produces the same thing, then I'm like, all right, now I get it. There's there's another layer behind there that I am not dealing with that I've forgotten to deal with. I've skipped, I haven't given the right directions. And it's it's actually it's really playing out in the last four weeks of my class because I have a big monitor on my wall and with a lot. Of the building stuff that we do, they've never done anything like this before in their life. Pretty much everything we do in my class is brand new for them. So I do a lot of visuals, a lot of examples. And I have so many more of those kids with aphantasia that are stopping at that moment because there's not the thing to like glance up at, or I haven't been able to show the video to give them something to connect what we're talking about to. Or when they have a question, I can't pop up, you know, that the appropriate picture that would help them get to the next step. And so that's really that that big tell. And it sounds simple and silly, but it's it's really it's really not. And I think if all teachers kind of said, you know, if if a kid is trying harder and nothing is happening, you you got to dig deeper. Every kid, nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, I want to fail. Nobody does that. And so when a kid is not doing well, it's probably not because they're not trying hard enough. You got to dig in and see what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Right. What do you think are some inaccurate assumptions that parents or teachers make about a student with a fantasy?

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Being lazy, not working to their potential, not focusing, not doing their homework, being stubborn, being stubborn. Did I mention being stubborn? Being stubborn. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Um that was oh man, that one resonates with me and what what me and my dad went through in junior high.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Yeah. I thought I had the most stubborn kid in the entire world. And I uh we always tried to portray it in my family as this is gonna be your strength. And uh now I realize there's, you know, while there still might be just some classic stubbornness, I think there's there's there's those things behind it driving it. The uh the other thing is when a teacher says, um, you know, what questions do you have? And then when a kid doesn't have questions, it's like, well, why don't you have any questions? And again, if you were relying on something visual to that the kid has to form their questions around, then it looks like the kid is just confused and again, not focused, not paying attention, not working up to their to their potential. So those are the the few that pop into my head right away.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

So talk about a little bit what you do on day one to kind of get this started with uh each student you come across.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

So on day one, I give them a quick little survey. It's uh the red square test. So it's the you know, six squares. The first one is the black box, the last one is the, for lack of better words, the perfect red square. The wording, in case anyone does this, the wording that I use is that I'm gonna ask you a question, I'm gonna put something on the board, and I need you to write down your first answer. And the example I give is just simple like if I say to you, think of something that is blue and you think blueberry, when you look at the screen, if blueberry is number four, you immediately write down number four. If you look at number three and it's the ocean, and you're like, oh, the ocean is a better answer. Don't do that. You need to stick with your original answer. And uh I say to them, you can take in no visual information while I'm asking you the question. So either close your eyes or put your hand down on your desk or your head down on your desk, uh, whichever makes you feel safer. And so I use those specific words. I'll ask the question in three different ways. And it's basically picture a red square in your head, uh, imagine a red square, uh, using your imagination, place a red square in your head, that sort of thing. Now look up, write down the number. Usually a kid looks up, they see the number, they write it down. Almost 90%, any kid who pauses is not telling the truth about what they say. I have found that to be true almost every single time. Because they look up, they can identify a red square. And the older the kids are, so especially like the eighth graders, I have six, seven, and eight. Eighth graders are more likely to do that. The sixth graders are just like, uh, this is whatever, what is this? This is crazy. And now the eighth graders are thinking, okay, there's a right and there's a wrong answer to this. I'm in school, I'm not supposed to put down wrong answers. And so they will see the red square when they open their eyes, and that's what they will put down as an answer. And then it's, you know, it takes me longer to then figure out. And sometimes I'll ask them about that. You know, I just did that this marking period with a kid, and he's like, No, yeah, I just I assume that's what you wanted us to write down. And then I basically have a little system where I keep track of, you know, which kids I only keep track of the ones, twos, and threes. So the one is the black box, the two is just a faint outline, three is a solid outline. So four, five, and six, there's a little bit of color. You know, four is a little bit pink, five is a little bit more red, and six is the solid red square. Sometimes there's a class like this marking period where I don't have anybody uh that is one, two, or three. So I don't really have to think that much about what my language is going to be. Um, but for the classes that do, I'm gonna watch my language, I'm gonna watch my directions. And especially while we're working, I'm going to keep an extra eye on those kids. And when I help them along, my words are so different. And if I can give you an example from today, this happened in my last period class before this interview. And I thought to myself, like, somehow you must have channeled some energy into this kid because it's like a brilliant example for this. We're doing something, and again, I mentioned my screen is broken. So I haven't been able to show the videos and the pictures and the things I normally do. And they're doing this assignment where they have to build a tower and they have to, and I'm kind of cutting it down a little bit, but they have to build a tower and they have to make it fall perfectly like a tree, and you know, figure out how to do that and the whole thing. And so one of the kids in that room who has it, she scored a two. She literally sat down. I can see her struggling, but I give it a moment. I'm not gonna, I don't jump in, I don't give answers ahead of time. I'll I'll wait until the right moment. She literally puts her hands up like this and says out loud, okay, I need to visualize this. And she closes her eyes. When she opened them, I said, that didn't work, did it? And she goes, No, it didn't. I was like, that's not one of your strengths, is it? She's like, No, it's definitely not one of my strengths. And she's like, I don't know what else to do. And I said, Well, how about this? Can you name something that rocks? And she's like, a seesaw. All right. And I said, Okay, so list the words that you would normally associate with seesaw. I did a better job than this in class, but she didn't say fulcrum, but she mentioned the thing that it pivots on. She didn't mention, you know, she used different words, but she explained, she gave the words that describes a seesaw. And then all of a sudden she was like, Oh, we're building a seesaw, but it's a big tower. And like she just lit up, and all of a sudden, every kid in the class starts copying what she was doing, you know, and so like I would have never ever have caught that. I would have never worked it through with her like that. And she would have struggled the entire time. And I would have thought it's because she just couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

You would assign something else to it and a different conclusion, a different word. Yeah. Not only could she do it, but she like she nailed it. It was like perfect to the point where every kid recognized that it was the best example going in class, and they should also do it.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Right. And I resonate with that too. Um, you know, that's how I was in school. I would struggle and struggle and struggle and struggle and struggle until it clicked. And once it clicked, I was good. I was straight A's. It was just that process of understanding what is this? How do I solve it? What you know, yeah. And the ways I was being taught that just it took me longer for it to click. There had to be something else come into play, and that's why it's so beautiful that you as a teacher were able to recognize it and then okay, let's try and get there a different way. Yeah, perfect. A dork parade, a dork parade, the people point and gawk. It's not a dork parade, you guys. It's just our family walk. The sun is on fire. A ragtag mob of hilarious poems is available on Shane'sBraindomain.com and Amazon. All right, you've talked about some of these already, but uh, what are some specific ways that this has changed the way you teach?

SPEAKER_00 30:43

I have stripped out a lot of the extra words that I would put into directions. I always thought that if I came up with like crazy directions, they would be more interesting. And I'm now realizing that they just became a lot more distracting to certain kids. And so my steps are a lot more concrete. And it's it's made me realize that some of the things I was including just aren't necessary. It's really need made me uh zero in on exactly what the point of the lesson is or made makes the goals more specific. I've given a lot more aids in class, like even a simple example. We have like, you know, erasable markers, and we were doing something building with uh dominoes. We were we were doing something with them. Well, I couldn't figure out how to get a kid to understand something. So I literally took the marker and I just drew the path on the desk. And all of a sudden, it was like shining light came out of the desk, and the kid was able to suddenly see the entire thing in front of them. And I didn't really catch that at when I first found out about this. How like some kids will like they'll walk up to their desk and they see everything they're going to build. And so those kids with aphantasia, whether it's taking a marker and drawing it on their desk, or we do another thing where they're building this like roller coaster sort of thing. And I have these little squares with arrows, and they put them on the desk to represent like the path of the roller coaster. And as soon as they do that, it's like magic. And it sounds like it's such a simple little thing that I've never been able to figure out like how to get them to see more than the thing in front of them that they're building. And I realize that that is also a strength of people with aphantasia, where they're they're kind of building in the moment. Before I started making changes, the number one comment I would get, and now I realize it was the kids with aphantasia, I would walk up to them, I would be like, So what are you building next? Like, you know, what's your strategy? And they would always give some version of, I don't know, I'm building as I'm going. And so I've come up with little aids in class that has kind of allowed them to kind of see the future, that kind of allow them to see where they're going because, you know, without having to play the video or have the image in their head because it's right in front of them on the desk.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the way I design, you know, it's very much that way for me. Like I gotta see it on the screen, I gotta get things up in front of me so I can actually see it with my eyes, right? So that I can bring this vague nothingness that's in my head into reality.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

It's made me realize that it's okay to start in the middle. You know, like in my head, you start at the beginning, and then you have the second step and the third step and the fourth step. And these kids like to start in the middle of something and work out. And now that I hear myself say that, it reminds me of an artist. Um, I don't remember her name, but she was talking about she draws fantasy things. And when she goes to paint a dragon, she draws one of the scales on the body, and then she draws out from that scale. The dragon takes form. And so I have to look at their strategy differently and not judge it based on how I would strategize something, because it ends up in the same place in the end. It's just so foreign to how I would normally think about something.

SPEAKER_01 34:18

I think that same thing is what plays a role in so many people being skeptical that this is even real. Um, because the the knee-jerk reaction that I get a lot of times is, well, how in the world do you do it then? If you don't do it the way I do it, right, how do you do it? Right. And so just because of that understanding right there, there's this huge disconnect that, well, if you don't do it the way I do it, then you must not be able to do it. You must be making this up or or not understanding it right, or you know, some other things in in play rather than hey, we're different. You know, it's just it's as simple as that.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

And I find it amazing how two kids with it could solve things so differently. So I've had there's a couple of students that are just in my head right now that they scored, you know, one or two on that red square test, but they were just like nailing stuff in class, like doing things other kids didn't even couldn't even see. It just puzzled me. Like I was like, well, maybe that's wrong. Maybe it wasn't a one or two, maybe they reversed the numbers. Right. But then I was able to pick up the subtle differences as they were building. And those two kids started me on a path of trying to find the pattern between kids who have apantasia and struggle, and kids who have aptasia and don't struggle. Like they might struggle, but they're like, they're just fine. Their grades are high and stuff. And it almost comes down to uh there's three things. I hope I can remember them off the top of my head. One, they come from a family who has supported them emotionally. Maybe not the best words there. I'll work on something better, maybe even an acronym, but you know, like they've they've been supported. They haven't been called dumb, they haven't been called you're not trying hard enough, they haven't been called whatever. When they were growing up, the parents were there helping them out along the way, constantly giving them more and more, whatever they needed. The second thing is that with schoolwork, and I just had a conversation about this with a parent last week. When the kid gets schoolwork, the parent really helps translate it for the student. So that the student is literally, this is how I kind of picture it in my head. The student is sitting at a table with the parent. The student sees the teacher's language, listens to the parent trying to translate the words into what the kid could understand. And so then the next time when the kid reads that, they could now translate that in the same way. You know, they're basically becoming bilingual at an earlier age and being able to interpret things at just another level. And the third big one, and I think this is a big one, it just came up with a conversation with a kid this morning, is the kids who have a lot of experiences beyond a computer and sitting at home, for lack of better examples. The kids who might have traveled, the kids who were able to try a, you know, they were able to try an instrument, they might have quit it, but they tried an instrument. They tried ballet, they might have quit it, but they tried ballet, they might have gone to archery class, they might have quit it, but they tried, so that they have a larger collection, you know, their filing cabinet is bigger with more information in it. So that when they are exposed to something new, there's something that they can try to find to connect it to. Versus the kids that don't have those things, it's you know, it's a it's a big struggle. Even this morning, uh, there's a student who, whenever I try to figure out something new, she's always game to me asking her questions. And so I came in today and I tried to pick something that she had never heard of before. And I said, Where do you think the oil pan is on the car? And like immediately she was like, Oh, it's on the bottom. I was like, Well, how did you like how did you do that? And she's like, Well, the oil flows, it's got to get drained. So therefore, gravity's got to be working in there somehow. So it's got to be at the bottom. And every time I see my uncle change it, that's where it is. And I was like, Oh, so like she so she had that experience. So, like in a conversation, you would never know that she has aphantasia because she had that background experience. She had the conversations with her uncle, she helped him work on cars, and so she had all of that to like fit into it. She had all those concepts to be able to, you know, connect together. So that's that's so key. And I think it's it's one of the reasons why I know that at some point in my career, when I started the unit with a movie, everything was better after that. And now I realize that the kids saw the movie, saw all the things. They created their folders and their filing cabinets. So when we were learning something new or reading something new, they were able to connect it to something they've previously seen.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

So yeah, very good. Yeah. So since you mentioned it, let's uh talk more about that. Your photo album versus your filing cabinet. Go into more of your uh discoveries and theories on that.

SPEAKER_00 39:13

This is the one thing that I think anyone I've ever met with A Fantasia has not knocked me down yet or questioned. And they said, Yeah, that's pretty close. So I'm hoping maybe some listeners also appreciate this analogy. I think it was at some point talking with my daughter, and I was like, Whoa, it's like I have a photo album and you have a filing cabinet. Like my daughter and I went uh on a trip out west a bunch of years ago. And so if we're gonna recall the prairie dog experience on at the national park, I'm spending time flipping through my photo album, looking for that picture of the prairie dog that we saw. And then when I get there, I have to, okay, now I'm at the park. Now I got to play the movie that, okay, we're getting through the park, getting through the park. And like, okay, there's the prairie dog. All right, now here's what happened. My daughter, she walks over to her to her filing cabinet. She has a drawer that's, you know, trips with the family. She opened that up, trip to uh South Dakota. She has a file in there that says prairie dogs. She opened it up, and there's the list of things that happened on that day. And what's interesting is that there's research out there that shows that visualizers will be able to recall more information, but it's not always accurate. Versus someone someone with aphantasia will recall less information, but it's rock solid. And so she went through, we were we were talking about that trip, and she mentioned um, you know, one of the places we stopped at. And I was like, we didn't stop there. And she's like, Yeah, we did. I could tell you we did this. And I was like, Holy, like, how did you even? I I have no, there's nothing in my memory about that experience. And she had it like nailed right to a T. Yeah. So I think it's really like as we teach, we have to really build their files. We have to make sure there's files in there for many different things so that when you experience something new, you've got that to open. And that's something like we inadvertently did with my kids. So we traveled to a lot of cities. My kids were able to kind of go off by themselves. We weren't necessarily like, you know, for what's called today helicopter parents. They were able to walk, get on public transport, go to places by themselves, and they had that experience so that, you know, when they do it now, it kind of they've got something to connect to.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

And a lot of the conversations I've had with people, one thing I've noticed that I didn't realize in the beginning, for a visualizer, it seems like the the knowing and the image are connected. They are like inseparably connected. And so that's why I've had people ask me, well, if you can't see it, then how do you know it? Right. Because for them, that is very connected. Those two things are the same thing. But with me, and I don't know if filing cabinets the right description or not, but it's knowing without an image. And I don't know how I know or where it's filed or what's going on behind the scenes, but it's just there's certain things that I just know, certain things I remember, and it's just more just like solid. There doesn't need to be an image attached to it.

SPEAKER_00 42:11

I just learned last week. I thought that everyone that can visualize visualizes like me. And I just learned last week that's not true.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

That is not true. I thought all the people with A Fantasia were like me. It is not true. We are so different. And in the podcast, if you listen to the podcast, that's what it's about. Everybody's different, nobody's visualizing the same way at all. It's completely different.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

If I've learned anything, it's that nobody has any idea of what the other person is talking about. We're so lucky that we're even like where we are in the you know civilization, I think.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Right. I always say the same thing. There's absolutely no way I can have any idea of what it's like to be you.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

No way.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Yeah. But that's what makes the world interesting. There's a quote out there, I'm pretty sure this is not mine, but it's that if everybody was singing the same note, there'd be no harmony, you know? And so I think one of the great dangers that people, or one of the destructive things people do when building a team is they tend to build a team with people that they like and that are like them. And so what you end up getting is you get that single note of thought. You don't get harmony. And so mixing it up is important.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Anything I say about visualizers, I know there's going to be exceptions to that. Anything we say about people with aphantasia, there's going to be exceptions to that. I know built in in my head that none of this is absolute, that we are just grasping at straws here. So that's kind of a basis of where I come at from everything in life, really, is I don't know anything. Right. I asked this question, I think I know what the person's going to say. And then they don't say that. They say something I've never heard before. And that happens over and over and over.

unknown 44:00

Again.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Right. I mean, I have, you know, a quote somewhere in that thing that for teachers, that essentially, you know, one out of every five kids in your class is not interpreting things the way they you think they are. That's a lot of kids, 20%. That's a lot of kids. And that's just that's an amazing number. Just it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

My dad was a school teacher as well. And he was retired when I found out about a fantasy and told him about it. But he's like, oh, that would have changed how I taught. You know, it's like I just assumed everybody was doing it the way I was doing it. Yep. All right. Okay. You mentioned this one too, briefly, but I want you to talk a little bit more about it. Talk about masking and the difference between assessing younger children versus older children and talking to adults about this.

SPEAKER_00 44:49

What are the differences you've so you know, I was reading a research study uh over the weekend and it involved like 11 people. And I thought to myself, all right, at this point, I have talked to 300 kids that I know are somewhere on the scale. And I don't even know how many adults. I don't know, maybe only like 30 or 40. There's definitely patterns that have appeared. And one of the patterns is the younger the kid, now again, I only go down to sixth grade, the younger the kid is, the easier it is to determine what they visualize and where they are on the scale. They're very open, they don't have a wall up yet. They just you ask them a question, they're gonna answer it, and they're excited just to be talking about themselves. And then as soon as you jump up to those eighth graders, again, you know, the wall comes up, they don't want to admit it because you don't want to be different, and you don't want help because you're different. And so they will really like, you know, ignore it, ignore it, give the answer that they know is the correct answer. And I'm also in a position where I can't, I'm not diagnosing, I'm not telling them that they have it. I'm trying to find out for myself. I can't have 20% of the kids in the school go home to their parents and say this. So it's almost like my secret research project. And so I can only go back and forth so much, and I can't really like help them label it. So sometimes they just, you know, they leave me without ever knowing what they need or what changes they could do to make things easier. The adults, though, have been amazing, amazing conversations. There is someone who has known about this story from the day after my daughter told me. They have known about all of the research, everything I've been doing in class. Like it's that person in my life where I've gone like back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth with. And then about three months ago, I was like, you know, I was talking about how, you know, I have a new quarter. Every, every I teach a class where I have new kids every quarter. So I get to do the test four times per year. And I had just given the test, and I had one class with 25% of the kids. It was just, it was the highest number of kids I've ever had in any quarter. And all of a sudden I was like, boy, I've never given you the red square test before, have I? And he's like, No. It's like, well, let me show you what I'm talking about so you have some idea. And I gave it to him, and I was like, I know, let's let's do it for real. Let's you get the experience the kids have. Close your eyes. And then, you know, he opens his eyes, he paused, and he said, Oh, the answer is six. And I'm telling you, the pause. Everybody that pauses, it's like this magic little thing. I was like, So you saw a red square? And then he didn't say he then adults do this all the time. That they'll say, No, they won't say that they saw a red square, they'll say number six is a red square. And I'll be like, Oh, you saw that in your head? And they're like, Well, that's what it is. It's number six. And I mean, uh, he's like, I was like, all right, you know, whatever. And I pretended I kind of like, you know, moved on, but then I asked them some other questions in the part of the conversation. I'll tell you one of the questions. Can I ask you one of the questions? I want to test. Can I ask you a question? Of course. Um, if you were gonna open up a restaurant, what would the theme be? Right? All right, now you at least came up with food. Every single kid and every single adult that I've asked that question to either goes, I don't know, or they'll use a word like, um, it'll be fun or it'll be exciting. They they won't dig into what would be considered, you know, like, oh, I would be Italian food with, you know, homemade pasta or whatever, whatever. So I asked him that question. He was like, uh I don't know, you know, kind of like went around the question. And, you know, I on and on and on. But basically, it took 20 minutes of a conversation where finally he was like, Oh, maybe I do have it. And I went through all these things that I know about his life, and he's like, No, that's just stuff I do. I'm like, no, that's stuff you do that you've developed, you know, because you have aphantasia. And so, you know, there's another adult in my life too. They are still adamant that they do not have this. And even though, like, every single, you know, the square test was a one, the all the questions were off the chart, um, and they're still like, no, like that's just what how people think. So with adults, they have really developed this whole system to kind of make them harder to convince that what they see and what other people see is not the same. And so it's just been it's so interesting. And another thing that's interesting is uh a lot of times with the adults, I can ask the same questions I asked to the kids, but I'll get different answers. So the kids almost 100% don't like to read, all the kids of the aphantasia. Uh, they don't like math, they don't like art. They like I can just go right through the list. Some adults will say they like to read, so therefore they don't have it. I'll say something like, but you like the sexy novels, don't you? And they're like, How do you know? So it's always romance novels.

SPEAKER_01 50:28

It's really interesting too because yeah, there are these kind of common threads that can run through. There's no absolutes, like that's why it's called discovering your mind, right? Like, like if everyone was the same, all I would have to do is interview, you know, six people, one from each category, and we'd be good. Everybody would know everything. Yeah, but we're we're so much more complex than that. You know, aphantasia is not this like blanket that just covers everything, there's all these other things going into play as well, beyond the apantasia. All right, just out of curiosity, uh, where do you fall on the square test?

SPEAKER_00 51:09

Um, it's the six, it's a solid red square. But something I learned two weeks ago, if I think of a red square, okay, so ready? Bam! There's the red square, and there it goes, going, going, gone. I assumed that's how everybody visualized the red square. So I started asking people, I'm like, I want you to picture whatever, like, picture your husband, but hold on to the picture. And I'm I'm expecting them to be like, because when that happened to me, I was like, oh my God, I can't. I'm like, I'm trying to like, I can't, it's it's I can't hold on to it. I expected everybody to have that experience. And everyone's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, you still see your husband? They're like, yeah, I still have the same picture in my head. I'm like, it's not fading. Like, no, it's just sitting there. I'm like, whoa. And so, like, like that, I know that sounds like like blew me away. It blew me away that I cannot hold on to something. If I I could run a video, like I could literally right now go from walking out my door down the stairs, like all the way to my house and driving home. But if I had to stop and freeze frame it, it disappears. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 52:21

Yeah, that's that's one of the questions I ask. Can you hold the images as long as you want, or are they fleeting? Yeah, it's it's yeah, everybody's different. That's why I ask all these different questions to all these different people because yeah, yeah, nobody's the same. And I don't know what it is about humans, but we just assume the opposite. Right. Whatever's happening with me must be happening with everybody. Yep. I don't know why we do that. Tune in next week for part two of the experiences, insights, and methods of a middle school teacher who discovered that apantasia was a thing with Paul Bogic. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, follow, and engage with us, and share it with your friends and family as we continue to explore this fascinating subject. For additional information about this episode or Shane's brain, check out the show notes. Thanks for listening to the Discovering Your Mind podcast. You are beautifully unique.