Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…If someone has aphantasia, is it somehow that the top-down processing is broken, and thus the image is not retained because some part of the digesting of the image doesn’t happen? No, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think what’s going on is that all of us, in our ordinary experience, when we’re doing something like making an image, are doing this cognitive work of generating a visual representation. The interesting, and I think contingent thing, is that some of us also have this feedback to our actual visual system, to our actual visual cortex. I think there’s some neuroscience evidence that supports that. What happens is, almost as a side effect, when we’re generating these ideas or generating these pictures, we actually activate the parts of our brain that are usually activated when we’re really, genuinely seeing something. It’s interesting that it doesn’t seem to have consequences for all these other abilities, like being able to generate a picture or being able to do a lot of cognitive capacities, like being an animator. Aphantasia — it is pretty strongly correlated with autism, right? So, it ought to have some micro foundations in common with autism.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.