What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
15 January, 2021
Photo by Andrew Spencer on Unsplash
Philosophers of the Islamic world enjoyed thought experiments.
<p>If the heavens vanished, they wondered, would time continue to pass? If existence were distinct from essence, would that mean that existence itself must exist? Can God turn your household servant into a horse, so that you come back home to find it has urinated all over your books?</p><p>But the most famous is the so-called 'flying man' thought experiment, devised by the most influential philosopher of the Islamic world, Avicenna (in Arabic, <em>Ibn Sīnā</em>, who lived from 980 to 1037 CE). Imagine, he says, that a person is created by God in mid-air, in good condition but with his sight veiled and his limbs outstretched so that he is touching nothing, not even his own body. This person has no memories, having only just been created. Will his mind be a blank, devoid as it is of past or present sensory experience? No, says Avicenna. He will be aware of his own existence.</p><p>Three questions immediately arise. First, when Douglas Adams, the author of <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em> (1978), imagined a whale popping into existence in mid-air above an alien planet, had he been reading Avicenna? I have no idea, but I like to think so.</p><p>Second, is Avicenna right that the 'flying man' would be self-aware? Well, it's important to realise that Avicenna does not attempt to <em>argue</em> that the flying man would know that he exists. Rather, he takes it as obvious. In one version, he even tells readers that we should imagine ourselves being so created. If we put ourselves in the flying man's dangling shoes, we should just see that we would be self-aware. Indeed, this turns out to be a fundamental idea in Avicenna's philosophy. He thinks that we are all always self-aware, even when we're asleep or focusing hard on something other than ourselves. Paradoxically, we're often not <em>aware</em> of being self-aware: it is the non-interruptive background music of human psychology, something we notice only when our attention is called to it, a pre-reflective awareness of self. The flying man thought experiment is itself one way to call attention to this self-awareness: Avicenna calls it a <em>tanbīh</em>, meaning a 'pointer' to something.</p>
<p>Our self-awareness is a foundation for our first-person perspective on things. It's a sign of this that when I see, imagine or think something, I can immediately apprehend that I am seeing, imagining or thinking about that thing. Any other form of cognition – any awareness of other things – presupposes awareness of oneself.</p><p>Incidentally, you might object that the flying man would have certain forms of bodily awareness despite his lack of vision, hearing and so on. Wouldn't he at least sense the location of his limbs by another form of sensation, namely proprioception? Imagine you are in total darkness and your arm is not resting on anything: proprioception is the sense that tells you where it is. This is indeed a problem for the thought experiment as Avicenna sets it up, but it isn't really philosophically decisive. One can just modify the scenario by adding that God blocks the man's ability to use proprioception, or that the flying man's proprioceptive faculty happens to be defective. Avicenna's claim will then be that, even under these circumstances, the flying man would be aware of himself.</p><p>Now for the third, and hardest, question: what does the flying man thought experiment prove? Avicenna draws a surprising conclusion: it shows that we are not identical with our bodies. Just consider. The flying man is aware of himself; he knows that he exists. But he is not aware of his body; he doesn't know that his body exists, nor indeed that any body exists. And if I am aware of one thing but not another, how can those two things be identical?</p>
<p>This sounds pretty persuasive, until you reflect that one can be conscious of a thing without being conscious of everything about it. You, for example, have been aware of reading this article for the past few minutes, but you haven't been aware of reading something written while Dixieland jazz was playing. It would be a mistake to conclude from this that the article is not something written with Dixieland jazz playing. In fact, that is exactly what it is. To put it another way, the flying man could be aware of his self without realising that his self is a body. Contemporary philosophers would say that Avicenna is mistakenly moving from a 'transparent' to an 'opaque' context, which is basically a fancy way of saying what I just said.</p><p><a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/MARAFM" target="_blank">Efforts</a> have been made to spare Avicenna from this mistake. One possible way to rescue the argument would go like this. Avicenna is trying to criticise another way of thinking about the soul, one that goes back to Aristotle. According to the theory he rejects, the soul is so closely associated with the body that it can only be understood as an aspect or organising principle of the body, which Aristotle called the body's 'form'. The thought experiment is designed to show that this is wrong. It does so by calling to our attention that we have a means of access to our souls apart from bodily sensation, namely self-awareness.</p><p>How would this refute Aristotle? Well, consider again just why it is that the flying man is not aware of his body. It is because he is not currently using his senses and has never done so (he only just started existing, remember), and sense perception is, Avicenna assumes, the <em>only</em> way to become aware of any body. If this is right, then anything that the flying man grasps without using sense perception is not a body, not material. Since he does grasp his soul without using sense perception, his soul is therefore not a body.</p><p>On this reading, Avicenna would be helping himself to a pretty big assumption, which is that bodies can be discovered only by the senses. You can see, hear, touch, taste or smell them, but otherwise you can never so much as know that they exist. Since for Aristotle the soul was a form of the body, if you couldn't experience the body, you would not, on his account, have access to the soul; and yet, Avicenna claims, the falling man <em>would</em> have access to his soul.</p><p>I suspect this is (at least in part) what he had in mind in creating this thought experiment. But that's not to say that I'm convinced. All Avicenna has really done is to throw down a challenge to his materialist opponents: show me how a body could be aware of itself without using sensation to do so.</p><p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-in-the-islamic-world-9780199577491?cc=au&lang=en&" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Philosophy in the Islamic World</em></a><em> by Peter Adamson is out now through Oxford University Press.</em><img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/99e82cab-61e0-4404-a510-3e190ab2802e.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Peter Adamson</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/what-can-avicenna-teach-us-about-the-mind-body-problem" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Can you step in the same river twice? Wittgenstein vs. Heraclitus
Imagine Heraclitus spending an afternoon down by the river...
12 January, 2021
Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
'I am not a religious man,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said to a friend, 'but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.'
<p>These problems that he claims to see from a religious point of view tend to be technical matters of logic and language. Wittgenstein trained as an engineer before he turned to philosophy, and he draws on mundane metaphors of gears, levers and machinery. Where you find the word 'transcendent' in Wittgenstein's writings, you'll likely find 'misunderstanding' or 'nonsense' nearby.</p><p>When he does respond to philosophers who set their sights on higher mysteries, Wittgenstein can be stubbornly dismissive. Consider: 'The man who said one cannot step into the same river twice was wrong; one <em>can</em> step into the same river twice.' With such blunt statements, Wittgenstein seems less a religious thinker and more a stodgy literalist. But a close examination of this remark can show us not only what Wittgenstein means by a 'religious point of view' but also reveal Wittgenstein as a religious thinker of striking originality.</p><p>'The man' who made the remark about rivers is Heraclitus, a philosopher at once pre-Socratic and postmodern, misquoted on New Age websites and quoted out of context by everyone, since all we have of his corpus are isolated fragments. What is it that Heraclitus thinks we can't do? Obviously I <em>can</em> do a little in-and-out-and-back-in-again shuffle with my foot at a riverbank. But is it <em>the same</em> river from moment to moment – the water flowing over my foot spills toward the ocean while new waters join the river at its source – and am I the same person?</p>
<p>One reading of Heraclitus has him conveying a mystical message. We use this one word, <em>river</em>, to talk about something that's in constant flux, and that might dispose us to think that things are more fixed than they are – indeed, to think that there are stable <em>things</em> at all. Our noun-bound language can't capture the ceaseless flow of existence. Heraclitus is saying that language is an inadequate tool for the purpose of limning reality.</p><p>What Wittgenstein finds intriguing about so many of our philosophical pronouncements is that while they seem profoundly important, it's unclear what difference they make to anything. Imagine Heraclitus spending an afternoon down by the river (or the constantly changing flux of river-like moments, if you prefer) with his friend Parmenides, who says that change is impossible. They might have a heated argument about whether the so-called river is many or one, but afterwards they can both go for a swim, get a cool drink to refresh themselves, or slip into some waders for a bit of fly fishing. None of these activities is in the least bit altered by the metaphysical commitments of the disputants.</p><p>Wittgenstein thinks that we can get clearer about such disputes by likening the things that people say to moves in a game. Just as every move in a game of chess alters the state of play, so does every conversational move alter the state of play in what he calls the language-game. The point of talking, like the point of moving a chess piece, is to <em>do</em> something. But a move only counts as <em>that</em> move in <em>that</em> game provided a certain amount of stage-setting. To make sense of a chess game, you need to be able to distinguish knights from bishops, know how the different pieces move, and so on. Placing pieces on the board at the start of the game isn't a sequence of moves. It's something we do to make the game possible in the first place.</p>
<p>One way we get confused by language, Wittgenstein thinks, is that the rule-stating and place-setting activities happen in the same medium as the actual moves of the language-game – that is, in words. 'The river is overflowing its banks' and 'The word <em>river</em> is a noun' are both grammatically sound English sentences, but only the former is a move in a language-game. The latter states a rule for using language: it's like saying 'The bishop moves diagonally', and it's no more a move in a language-game than a demonstration of how the bishop moves is a move in chess.</p><p>What Heraclitus and Parmenides disagree about, Wittgenstein wants us to see, isn't a fact about the river but the rules for talking about the river. Heraclitus is recommending a new language-game: one in which the rule for using the word <em>river</em> prohibits us from saying that we stepped into the same one twice, just as the rules of our own language-game prohibit us from saying that the same <em>moment</em> occurred at two different times. There's nothing wrong with proposing alternative rules, provided you're clear that that's what you're doing. If you say: 'The king moves just like the queen,' you're either saying something false about our game of chess or you're proposing an alternative version of the game – which might or might not turn out to be any good. The trouble with Heraclitus is that he imagines he's talking about rivers and not rules – and, in that case, he's simply wrong. The mistake we so often make in philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we think we're doing one thing when in fact we're doing another.</p><p>But if we dismiss the remark about rivers as a naive blunder, we learn nothing from it. 'In a certain sense one cannot take too much care in handling philosophical mistakes, they contain so much truth,' Wittgenstein cautions. Heraclitus and Parmenides might not <em>do</em> anything different as a result of their metaphysical differences, but those differences bespeak profoundly different <em>attitudes</em> toward <em>everything</em> they do. That attitude might be deep or shallow, bold or timorous, grateful or crabbed, but it isn't true or false. Similarly, the rules of a game aren't right or wrong – they're the measure by which we determine whether moves <em>within</em> the game are right or wrong – but which games you think are worth playing, and how you relate to the rules as you play them, says a lot about you.</p>
<p>What, then, inclines us – and Heraclitus – to regard this expression of an attitude as a metaphysical fact? Recall that Heraclitus wants to reform our language-games because he thinks they misrepresent the way things really are. But consider what you'd need to do in order to assess whether our language-games are more or less adequate to some ultimate reality. You'd need to compare two things: our language-game and the reality that it's meant to represent. In other words, you'd need to compare reality as we represent it to ourselves with reality free of all representation. But that makes no sense: how can you represent to yourself how things look free of all representation?</p><p>The fact that we might even be tempted to suppose we can do that bespeaks a deeply human longing to step outside our own skins. We can feel trapped by our bodily, time-bound existence. There's a kind of religious impulse that seeks liberation from these limits: it seeks to transcend our finite selves and make contact with the infinite. Wittgenstein's religious impulse pushes us in the opposite direction: he doesn't try to satisfy our aspiration for transcendence but to wean us from that aspiration altogether. The liberation he offers isn't liberation <em>from</em> our bounded selves but <em>for</em> our bounded selves.</p><p>Wittgenstein's remark about Heraclitus comes from a typescript from the early 1930s, when Wittgenstein was just beginning to work out the mature philosophy that would be published posthumously as <em>Philosophical Investigations</em> (1953). Part of what makes that late work special is the way in which the Wittgenstein who sees every problem from a religious point of view merges with the practical-minded engineer. Metaphysical speculations, for Wittgenstein, are like gears that have slipped free from the mechanism of language and are spinning wildly out of control. Wittgenstein the engineer wants to get the mechanism running smoothly. And this is precisely where the spiritual insight resides: our aim, properly understood, isn't transcendence but a fully invested immanence. In this respect, he offers a peculiarly technical approach to an aspiration that finds expression in mystics from Meister Eckhart to the Zen patriarchs: not to ascend to a state of perfection but to recognise that where you are, already, in this moment, is all the perfection you need.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/d897983e-d290-4f89-9be9-9972029adbd0.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>David Egan</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/can-you-step-in-the-same-river-twice-wittgenstein-v-heraclitus" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Where does nihilism come from?
Nihilism is not a choice or intellectual commitment, but a feeling that simply arrives.
09 January, 2021
Photo by Boglárka Mázsi on Unsplash
Friedrich Nietzsche was most famously concerned with the problem of nihilism.
<p> All societies, in his view, rely on implicit value judgments. If the foundations of these are lost, he predicts terrible consequences: widespread apathy or violent, fanatical attempts to reclaim a sense of purpose, or perhaps both. We talk about values a lot, and we know they do <em>something</em>, but we have little idea how. Compounding this is uncertainty over their loss. Nihilism is not a choice or intellectual commitment, but a thing that comes upon you. As Nietzsche put it in 1885: 'Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?' </p><p>Part of the answer comes from understanding how values connect to knowledge and action. In <em>Seeing Like a State </em>(1998)<em>,</em> the political scientist James C Scott classifies knowledge in two ways: epistemic knowledge, which can be quantified, theorised and transmitted in abstract, and <em>metis</em> (from the classical Greek), which concerns knowledge gained from practical experience, such as personal relationships, traditions, habits and psychological states. <em>Metis</em> governs local experience: farming the family's land, for example, rather than agronomic study. We all recognise it; it's why we hire for experience. For instance, Jane and Martha have identical diplomas, but if Jane's first shift was on Tuesday and Martha's was in 1970, then Martha will have certain tricks and habits to expedite her work. Still, it's not easy to quantify just what that is: Martha has <em>metis</em>, and <em>metis</em> can't easily be reproduced. If it were trainable, it would have been in Jane's training.</p>
<p>Scott's genius is to compare <em>metis</em> to local traditions. Over a long enough time, habits and behaviours are selected for and passed down, just as evolution selects helpful traits. A successful group will institutionalise an irreducibly complex set of cultural tools that relate to its environment. Since these are <em>metis</em>, and not epistemic, they won't always be obvious or quantifiable. Scott recounts dozens of examples of customs that might appear backwards, confused, unscientific – yet when they're banned or discouraged, productivity collapses. He calls this the problem of 'legibility'.</p><p>Epistemic theories rely on isolated, abstracted environments capable of taxonomy, but these are far removed from the dynamic, interconnected systems of nature and human culture. <em>Metis</em>, by contrast, develops within complex, 'illegible' environments, and thus works with them. But that also means its application is limited to a specific act, rather than a broader theory. Outsiders want to know why something works, but locals will explain it in a language unintelligible to them.</p><p>These practices and traditions are, of course, more than work experience. They're used to efficiently solve political problems. In <em>The Righteous Mind</em> (2012), the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes Balinese rice farmers who needed to coordinate irrigation along a river. Since they were politically divided into small familial units – called <em>subaks</em> – they needed to rely on means older than governance to ensure cooperation:</p><blockquote>The ingenious religious solution to this problem of social engineering was to place a small temple at every fork in the irrigation system. The god in each such temple united all the <em>subaks</em> that were downstream from it into a community that worshipped that god, thereby helping the <em>subaks</em> to resolve their disputes more amicably. This arrangement minimised the cheating and deception that would otherwise flourish in a zero-sum division of water. The system made it possible for thousands of farmers, spread over hundreds of square kilometres, to cooperate without the need for central government, inspectors and courts.</blockquote><p>This still occurs. A 2017 <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2938751" target="_blank">paper</a> by the economists Nathan Nunn of Harvard University and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra of the University of California, Berkeley mentions <em>gri-gri</em>, a magical powder that witchdoctors manufacture. In 2012, following a period of widespread banditry and state insecurity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, <em>gri-gri</em> came to a village elder in a dream. Applying this powder made the user bulletproof, and it worked so well that neighbouring communities swiftly adopted it. The reason was simple: groups fight better than individuals, and more people will dare to fight if they believe they are bulletproof. Hence, a village using <em>gri-gri</em> was more likely to survive.</p>
<p><em>Gri-gri</em> and water temples are kinds of <em>metis</em>, but they require belief in larger structures: respectively, magic and gods. However these structures first developed, it's critical that they rest on more than mere faith or tradition. Shared values provide conviction for greater actions, but those values are certified by the success of those actions. <em>Gri-gri</em>'s success is an empirical testament to magic, and its utility inclines one towards trusting more activities by witchdoctors. Nunn and Sanchez de la Sierra point out that</p><blockquote>many of [the spells] appear to provide individuals with a greater sense of security and confidence, which could serve to … reduce their anxiety and thus improve their performance. For example, most of the spells provide protection, whether it be from drought, disease, attacks on the village or even to harm potential thieves – and thieves also believe in their efficacy, which acts as a deterrent.</blockquote><p>In other words: these practices and institutions serve several different roles, all bound up in one another. This intermingling exacerbates the problem of legibility.</p><p>When we discuss changing values, we often think top-down: a new and persuasive ideology that took hold for intellectual reasons. What Scott and the adoption of <em>gri-gri</em> suggest is the opposite: the motive force of values requires a degree of certainty that is dependent on action. It was <em>gri-gri</em>'s empirical demonstration that allowed it spread it to neighbouring villages, not its poetry. The inverse to this is also important: we can improve on a specific task, but other roles need time to sediment and evolve. Trade the temples for a government, and you have zero-sum bickering. Explain the game theory behind <em>gri-gri</em>, and no one will fight with it. The utility of a cultural institution first allows adoption, but its maintenance allows <em>metis</em> ample time to tinker and perfect.</p><p>If we've lost faith in certain values, then I doubt this was because of academic debates. The 20th century profoundly changed labour, technology and social organisation in the Western world. It's hard to imagine that this didn't change <em>metis</em>, or render older forms of <em>metis</em> irrelevant. While the values of <em>metis</em> might still be desired – or even identified with – they lack the same certainty they once had. Nothing can prove them and thus justify the higher claims. 'Faith without works is dead,' as the Bible said, but faith without <em>metis</em> is unbelievable.</p><p>A top-down view of value implies that we can simply create new reasons for living, that the ideology itself is its own proof. But if values come bottom-up, then man's quest for meaning cannot be separated from his labour. They are the same.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/c3ebc7b8-c9df-445f-8385-c04cd6076a2c.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Lou Keep</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/whence-comes-nihilism-the-uncanniest-of-all-guests" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Aphantasia: the rare brain condition that darkens the mind’s eye
A new study provides validation for the recently identified phenomenon.
08 January, 2021
Credit: agsandrew/ Adobe Stock
- Aphantasia, a recently identified psychological phenomenon, describes when people can't conjure visualizations in their mind's eye.
- A new study published in Cortex compared the visual memories of aphantasic participants with a group of controls.
- Its results found experimental validation for the condition.
<p>Escapism is one of the imagination's great joys. Through fantastic literature, we can explore the vast stretches Arrakis's deserts or the forests of Middle Earth alongside Gandalf the Grey. We can embark on vacations weeks in advance and enjoy a sunny beach while at our desks. We can relive a cherished memory with a favorite relative in an instant, and, of course, always rely on our flock of trusty sheep to lull us to sleep.</p><p>We manage this through what is colloquially called "the mind's eye," our ability to generate psychological images without sensory input. However, such escapism is not possible for people with the rare, and only recently identified, condition aphantasia. People with aphantasia cannot conjure mental images—original or from memory. Instead, their minds' eyes produce dark, blank canvases that cannot be painted in. As Wilma Bainbridge, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/cant-draw-mental-picture-aphantasia-causes-blind-spots-minds-eye" target="_blank">told UChicago News</a>:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Some individuals with aphantasia have reported that they don't understand what it means to '<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">count sheep'</a> before going to bed. They thought it was merely an expression, and had never realized until adulthood that other people could actually visualize sheep without seeing them."</p><p>For such individuals, literature may produce facts but not visual representations. Arrakis isn't a planet of vast deserts but vast emptiness, Gandalf the Grey a colorless, featureless blob. Sunny beaches can't be visited in their imaginations but must remain on the office calendar until summer vacation. And while memories exist, they cannot be visually recalled except between scrapbook cellophane.</p><p>Scientists don't yet know what causes aphantasia, whether it's a distinct psychological condition, or, indeed, if we are simply jarring against language's limited ability to accurately describe our internal realities. But a burgeoning body of research—among it a new study led by Bainbridge and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945220304317?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">published in Cortex</a> last month—suggests the condition is more than misfiring expressions.</p>
Changing our understanding of the mind's eye
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTI2NjM0Mi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0ODM2ODE5NX0.SWkNBfgO1uLsAMsetcmmwOHvJqzK1UsPMxc6tL6Je9k/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C228%2C0%2C228&height=700" id="609a9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="121c211fd751fb11eba0e9aa4ec53ef0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="1245" data-height="700" />Francis Galton was the first to describe a condition that would today be recognized as aphantasia.
<p>Though no long-term studies have focused on aphantasia, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/" target="_blank">its history</a> stretches back more than a century. Francis Galton first described people with "no power of visualising" in 1880, an observation made during his breakfast-table survey. At that time, however, the science of psychology was still in its infancy, and Galton's observation was shelved like so many other early-day curios—brought down and dusted off by the occasional psychologist but given little attention before being shelved again.</p><p>That changed in 2003 when neurologist Adam Zeman was contacted by a 65-year-old man who claimed his mind's eye went blind. During a coronary angioplasty, the man suffered a small stroke that damaged his brain. Afterward, he lost his ability to render psychological imagery.</p><p>"He had vivid imagery previously," Zeman told <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/aphantasia-life-with-no-minds-eye/" target="_blank">Science Focus</a>. "He used to get himself to sleep by imagining friends and family. Following the cardiac procedure, he couldn't visualise anything, his dreams became avisual, [and] he said that reading was different because previously he used to enter a visual world and that no longer happened. We were intrigued."</p><p>Zeman and his colleagues began a case study into the man's condition. Tests found he could describe objects and their color but could not visualize them. (He claimed he simply knew the answer.) He could rotate three-dimensional images in his mind, but it took him longer to manage than controls. And brain imaging showed brain regions associated with visualization to be dark when he tried to imagine images.</p><p>Zeman published his case study, and it was subsequently <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-brain-look-deep-into-the-minds-eye" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">featured in Discover magazine</a>. After the story's publication, more people reached out to Zeman. They too claimed their minds' eyes were blind, but unlike Zeman's original subject, many of these people had lived with the condition their entire lives. They only became aware of their condition later in life when, as Bainbridge mentions above, they realized that the mental worlds described by friends and family were based on more than fanciful expressions. </p><p>While some managed to live normal, even thriving, lives without visual memory, others found the condition distressing. <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150826101648.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">As one subject told Zeman</a> and his coauthors: "After the passing of my mother, I was extremely distraught in that I could not reminisce on the memories we had together. I can remember factually the things we did together, but never an image. After seven years, I hardly remember her."</p><p>Zeman published another case study focusing on <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/17613/Lives%20without%20imagery%20Letter%20version%20FINAL%2017.5.15%20.pdf?sequence=7&isAllowed=y" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">21 of these individuals in 2015</a>. It was here that he coined the phrase* "aphantasia," from the Greek <em>phantasia</em> meaning "imagination." Since then, <a href="http://sites.exeter.ac.uk/eyesmind/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Zemen has connected with thousands of people</a> claiming to have the condition, and his studies have raised intriguing questions for researchers interested in memory and the mind. </p>Visualizing the difference
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTI2NjMzNS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMjAyMDk3M30.EYfZH3v5DRhu4ImOjpuuXdHiXbPkgTUCOxJsTQmDYA8/img.png?width=980" id="fed74" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="eb2d7c7f78e780fe09bc6d1635cdaad5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="598" data-height="245" />On the left, an aphantastic participant's recreation of a photo from memory. On the right, the participant's recreation when the photo was available for reference.
<p>Bainbridge is one such researcher. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07830-6#Sec10" target="_blank">Her previous work</a> has focused on perception and memory, both their underlying mechanics and how this content is stored. In her latest study, she and her co-authors aimed to not only tease out the distinctions between object and spatial memory but also deepen our understanding of aphantasia.</p><p>To do this, they invited 61 people with aphantasia and a group of controls to participate in their experiment. They showed each participant a photo of a room and then asked them to draw it in as much detail as possible. For one test, the participants were allowed to keep the photo for reference. For the next test, however, they had to draw the room from memory. Bainbridge and her coauthors then put the drawings online to be quantified by nearly 3,000 online assessors, who were asked to score both sets of test images for object and spatial details.</p><p>The results showed the aphantastic participants had difficulty with the memory experiment. They produced reproductions with fewer objects, less color, and fewer details than their control peers. Many leaned on verbal scaffolding in lieu of visual details—for example, one participant drew a rudimentary box with the word "window" rather than a window with a frame and panes of glass.</p><p>Although the aphantastic patients drew rooms with fewer objects, they were very accurate in their placement of those objects. They also made fewer errors than the controls and avoided incorporating features and furniture absent in the original images. The researchers write that this suggests high spatial accuracy despite a lack of visualization.</p><p>"One possible explanation could be that because aphantasics have trouble with this task, they rely on other strategies like verbal-coding of the space," Bainbridge told UChicago News. "Their verbal representations and other compensatory strategies might actually make them better at avoiding false memories."</p><p>The online assessors found no significant differences between the aphantastic participants and the controls when the original photo was available for reference. In fact, some of the aphantastic participants produced stunningly accurate and artistic recreations during this test.</p><p>Bainbridge and her coauthors suggest that these results not only support the idea that object and spatial information is store in separate neural networks. They also provide "experimental validation" for aphantasia as a valid psychological phenomenon.</p>Discovering a new reality in aphantasia?
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="cc502388d1b548118d6e587ad785fe34"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zNHDTvqbUm4?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>And Bainbridge's study has joined an ever-growing panoply. A <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945217303581" target="_blank">2018 study, also published in Cortex</a>, measured the binocular rivalry—the visual phenomenon in which awareness fluctuates when different images are presented to each eye—of participants with and without aphantasia. When primed beforehand, control participants choose the primed stimuli more often than not. Meanwhile, aphantastic participants showed no such favoritism, whether primed or not. Like Bainbridge's study, these results suggest a physiological underpinning for aphantasia.</p><p>Another critical factor is growing awareness. As more studies and stories are published, more and more people are realizing they aren't alone. Such a realization can empower others to come forward and share their experiences, which in turn spurs researchers with new questions and experiences to study and hypothesize over.</p><p>Yet, there's still much work to be done. Because this psychological phenomenon has only recently been identified—Galton's observation notwithstanding—there has been sparingly little research on the condition and what research has been done has relied on participants who self-report as having aphantasia. While researchers have used the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire" target="_blank">Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz</a> to test for aphantasia, there is currently no universal method for diagnosing the condition. And, of course, there is the ever-vexing question of how one can assess one mind's experiences from another.</p><p>"Skeptics could claim that aphantasia is itself a mere fantasy: describing our inner lives is difficult and undoubtedly liable to error," Zeman and his co-authors wrote in <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/17613/Lives%20without%20imagery%20Letter%20version%20FINAL%2017.5.15%20.pdf?sequence=7&isAllowed=y" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">their 2015 case study</a>. "We suspect, however, that aphantasia will prove to be a variant of neuropsychological functioning akin to synesthesia [a neurological condition in which one sense is experienced as another] and to congenital prosopagnosia [the inability to recognize faces or learn new ones]."</p><p>Time and further research will tell. But scientists need phenomenon to test and questions to experiment on. Thanks to researchers like Zeman and Bainbridge, alongside the many people who came forward to discuss their experiences, they now have both when it comes to aphantasia.</p><p>* Zeman also coined the term "<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945220301404" target="_blank">hyperphantasia</a>" to describe the condition in which people's psychological imagery is incredibly vivid and well-defined.</p>
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Study shatters the myth that BDSM is linked to early-life trauma
No, being interested in BDSM does not mean you had a traumatic childhood.
05 January, 2021
Credit: LIGHTFIELD STUDIOS / Adobe Stock
- BDSM is a kind of sexual expression and/or practice that refers to three main subcategories: Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/submission, and Sadism/Masochism.
- It has been widely speculated that many BDSM practitioners or people who enjoy the BDSM lifestyle are drawn to it because of sexual trauma they experienced in the past.
- This 2020 study claims that BDSM practitioners deserve perception as normal sexual practice free from stigmatization rather than deviant behavior.
<p>BDSM is a kind of sexual expression or practice that refers to three main subcategories: </p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Bondage and Discipline (BD)</li><li>Dominance and submission (DS)</li><li>Sadism and Masochism (SM) </li></ul><p>It has been widely speculated that many BDSM practitioners or people who enjoy the BDSM lifestyle are more drawn to the kinky lifestyle because of sexual trauma they have experienced in the past. </p><p>A <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-020-00438-w" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2020 study</a> smashed this myth by surveying 771 BDSM practitioners and 518 non-practitioners from the general population. These participants all completed a survey assessing BDSM interests as well as the Brief Trauma Questionnaire that is used to gauge traumatic events, and the Relationships Questionnaire that is used to assess a person's attachment style. </p><p><strong>What is the Brief Trauma Questionnaire? </strong></p><p>The BTQ, as it's referred to by the <a href="https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/assessment/documents/BTQ.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">National Center for PTSD</a>, is a self-report questionnaire derived from the <a href="https://health.oregonstate.edu/sites/health.oregonstate.edu/files/char/military-life-course/publications/schnurr_spiro_vielhauer_findler_hamblen_2002_trauma_in_the_lives_of_older_men-_findings_from_the_normaitve_aging_study.pdf" target="_blank">Brief Trauma Interview</a>. This questionnaire is used to assess whether an individual has had an event that meets the criteria for traumatic events.</p><p><strong>What is the Relationships Questionnaire? </strong></p><p>The RQ, as it's referred to by <a href="http://fetzer.org/sites/default/files/images/stories/pdf/selfmeasures/Attachment-RelationshipsQuestionnaire.pdf" target="_blank">the Fetzer Institute</a>, is a four-item survey designed to measure adult attachment styles. There are four main attachment styles: secure, dismissive-avoidant, anxious-preoccupied, and fearful-avoidant. <a href="https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/relationships/dating/your-attachment-style?utm_source=sciam&utm_campaign=sciam" target="_blank">This article</a> does a wonderful job summarizing the various attachment styles by comparing them to relationships on the television show "How I Met Your Mother."</p>
No, being interested in BDSM doesn’t mean you had a traumatic childhood
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="20118e9474ed94bd8e4d50bc166b1bee"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZfSyq8gRsyM?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>While many may assume being interested in BDSM may mean you've experienced unhealthy or violent relationships/situations in your formative years, this study explains why that myth should be put to rest.</p><p>BDSM practitioners across the study scored higher levels of physical abuse in adulthood. However, no significant differences emerged for other traumatic experiences (including childhood physical abuse or unwanted sexual trauma).<br></p><p>There have been many accounts (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYG0pajxLuY" target="_blank">such as this</a>) from BDSM practitioners that have claimed there is a certain "healing process" involved in finding a trustworthy BDSM relationship after escaping from a toxic relationship. This could account for why people who have experienced physically abusive relationships as adults then turn to the BDSM community and BDSM-related sexual interests. </p><p>When it came to the Relationship Questionnaire, people who engaged in the BDSM lifestyle more often scored in the "secure" attachment style than people who were not BDSM practitioners. While many BDSM practitioners had secure attachment styles, there was also a significant spike in anxious-preoccupied attachment styles when it came to people who practiced BDSM. In particular, the "secure" attachment style was associated with BDSM practitioners who identified as "Dominant" and the "anxious-preoccupied" attachment style was associated with people who identified as "submissive."</p><p><strong>There are no findings to support the hypothesis of BDSM being a coping mechanism for early life dynamics or trauma.</strong> </p><p>This authors of the study claim that BDSM practitioners deserve perception as normal sexual practice free from stigmatization rather than deviant behavior—and the final results of the study support this idea. </p>Are people involved in BDSM practices more aware of their attachment styles?
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTIwMDc2OS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2OTYwMjA1OX0.2cQbq1Nka_9dWd6GvzyoWjc68JU3Oor-1d6PKnUWBmY/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C292%2C0%2C292&height=700" id="c0877" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6eb72a2ee78fb73264254d33e4411364" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="man and woman holding paper heart" data-width="1245" data-height="700" />Could people who engage in BDSM be more mindful in their relationships?
Photo by Tiko on Adobe Stock
<p>While many people insist engaging in BDSM practices means you've had significant traumatic experienced that led you to do so, there are some experts that argue BDSM practitioners are actually more in tune with their own psychopathology than people who do not engage in BDSM activities.</p><p>BDSM involves a diverse range of practices which can involve role-playing games in which one person assumes a dominant role and the other assumes a submissive role. These activities are often intense and can involve activities such as physical restraint, power plays, humiliation, and sometimes (but not always) pain. </p><p><a href="https://www.nhs.uk/news/mental-health/fans-of-bondage-and-sm-report-better-mental-health/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">According to a study</a> published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, people involved in BDSM may actually be more mentally healthy. The study suggests people who engage in BDSM activities often show more extroverted qualities and tend to be more open to experiences and more conscientious. They also tend to be less neurotic and less sensitive to rejection. The study also showed BDSM practitioners had a more secure attachment style, which is supported in the more recent study listed above. </p><p>Additionally, <a href="https://www.bustle.com/articles/186777-bdsm-may-be-the-most-mindful-type-of-sex-study-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">it's been hypothesized</a> that people involved in BDSM are more mindful during sex than those who do not engage in BDSM practices. </p>
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