From A People Perspective

Martin (00:02.572)
Alright.

Martin (00:06.19)
So as I mentioned today, we've got Dr. Adam Zeman with us, the person who is identified the term aphantasia and has done research on aphantasia for the last 10 years. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Adam Zeman (00:27.545)
Thanks for having me.

Martin (00:29.592)
So up up front, normally I ask guests a few music questions and I wanted to take this in a little bit of a different angle today. Typically the question is like if you could choose one album to listen to for the rest of time and you can't listen to any other music albums, what would that question, which album would that be, I guess. So I'd love to get your take on that and double click on it.

Adam Zeman (00:58.233)
Yeah, I'd probably take Bach's Preludes and Fugues.

Martin (01:02.286)
Okay, perfect. And to add a little visual imagery and aspect to that, I was doing a little bit of research and I think one of the podcast hosts had mentioned that you have hyperphantasia.

Adam Zeman (01:20.629)
I have very average imagery in fact. So the measure that we use to assess the vividness of imagery is a questionnaire, which gives you a score of between 80 over 80, if everything you visualize is as vivid as real seeing, to a score of 16 over 80 if you see nothing, you just know that you're thinking about the sun rising into a hazy sky or a mountain above a lake. An eye score pretty much...

Martin (01:23.63)
Okay, average.

Martin (01:37.484)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (01:49.655)
at the average value on that measure, which is about 60 over 80.

Martin (01:53.486)
Gotcha. Okay.

Okay, so not hyperfantasia, but you have the ability to visualize. Okay.

Adam Zeman (01:59.033)
Yeah. I have imagery, yeah, but it's not tremendously vivid.

Martin (02:04.974)
And so one of the things that I'm curious about myself being aphantasic is that do you have a... Is there anything you experienced like when you are listening to that album or that those pieces of music like visually, is there a consistent themes like a montage of similar things or I'm just curious.

Adam Zeman (02:13.913)
All right, okay, I have, yep.

Adam Zeman (02:34.657)
So...

I have occasionally had synesthetic experiences listening to music, so I've occasionally seen colours or scenes when listening to music. I don't think that particular music has that effect on me. I just find it very congenial. It's like being with a very old friend. And it's extremely varied, so you get bits of excitement and bits of tenderness. I don't think I'm generally synesthetic, so synesthesia is that phenomenon by which...

Martin (02:52.942)
Nice, nice.

Adam Zeman (03:08.249)
For some people, the letters of the alphabet appear in colour or it's possible to taste shapes. I'm not in that category generally, but there is... I remember listening to a piece of music on one occasion and feeling that I was flying over a blue sea. That was a very memorable occasion, but that was a rarity for me.

Martin (03:12.396)
Mm -hmm.

Martin (03:29.902)
Right, right. It's not commonplace. Okay. One of the other sort of stories that came up in one of the other conversations that you were having was sort of the person that illustrates for the little mermaid how they drew a squiggle and then it came from there. That was interesting to me because, you know, again, having...

having had this, that's how I found a lot of my sort of like illustrations sort of coming to life. I guess, are there other sort of anecdotal signs that or traits that aren't specific to, oh, you don't have a, you know, a mind's eye or like directly saying it, are there other sort of like patterns or traits that individuals show that jump into that or?

Adam Zeman (04:24.953)
Yeah, I mean, there are certainly, maybe we should come back to that artist, Glenn Keane, because he's very fascinating, but there are certainly a number of associations with aphantasia, but they're not probably not sufficiently specific to make me immediately to make one jump to the conclusion that someone is an aphantasic. So, for example, if you are aphantasic, you're likely to have a slightly thinner recollection for your personal past than most people do.

Martin (04:52.396)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Adam Zeman (04:53.337)
So autobiographical memory seems to be a little less rich in aphantasia. Some people with aphantasia have difficulty recognizing faces. I guess those are both negatives. A positive would be that many people with aphantasia seem to find it easier to be present than many of us do. So I think if you're aphantasic, you're a little less likely perhaps to be distracted by...

Martin (05:13.742)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (05:20.793)
longing for the place you've just left or anticipation of the place you're just about to move to or the person you're just about to spend time with. And so that prompts me to say that I don't think aphantasia is a disorder, I think it's an intriguing variation in human experience, I think it has pros and cons. I think it's quite difficult for an observer to recognise it, to detect it.

I think it's something that people discover for themselves usually. And when they discover it, often other features of their makeup seem to fall into place. So it helps to make sense of the way people are to some extent.

Martin (05:59.39)
Yeah.

Martin (06:04.824)
It's been an interesting word of mouth journey for for myself and friends and family around me like this elderly lady down the street. She's incredible. She watches my daughter from time to time and I was just randomly telling her about it and she's like, I have that too. And it's it's completely shifted her perspective on life and she it's it's she's given herself so much forgiveness for you know, all these traits that she used to think.

sort of negatively on herself for and she was like, oh, this explains everything. It's been really like, you know, fascinating for her and, and also just like healing for her, which was, which was really interesting. Um, the, the, sorry, go ahead.

Adam Zeman (06:34.829)
Yep. Yep. Yep.

Adam Zeman (06:50.745)
Well, I was just going to ask, had you recognized that you were a little bit different in that respect for a long time, or was it a recent discovery?

Martin (06:57.358)
No, no, I, I was literally just reading something on Reddit. It was just a popular post on Reddit. And then it, I was like, wait a second, there's something different. There's there's an alternative here. And I went down a bunch of different rabbit holes and having never thought about it to, you maybe from like three or four years ago, thinking about it at least every once a

Adam Zeman (07:13.369)
Yep. Yep.

Martin (07:25.646)
once or twice a day there's moments or once or twice a day where I'm just like cognizant of this difference so it's really been interesting in that sense I think as well. I was jumping into the book you wrote Consciousness, a user's guide, which doesn't necessarily touch on aphantasia entirely it's a larger thing.

But the thing that stood out to me was when you sort of wrote when the two descriptions of consciousness appear to offer rival versions of the same events. And that's sort of to a certain extent, that's a consciousness piece, but it was also made a lot of sense to me from, you know, I was talking to my wife about, you know, the podcast that you and I were going to do and was just asking her a bunch of questions and.

So it came down to this sort of, it wasn't an argument, but just this, like, I'm constantly just fascinated and curious by it. And so, um, she came back to me and she's like, well, how do I, like, if you've, if you're not able to see, for example, right. Um, how do I describe the sky is blue to you? Like translating that information, like, because it's her experience. And so everybody assumes that they're shared experience. I'm.

I'm curious how how have you gone about sort of like making it very simple for people to share their experiences so that you can kind of confirm that one has, you know, aphantasia or something to do with the mind.

Adam Zeman (08:57.081)
Yeah, sure. So I think the point of departure has to be people's self descriptions of their experience. So...

people recognize that they're aphantasic when they realize that they are not having the experience which other people seem to be having. So it quite often, that realization quite often comes for example when people are discussing shared memories. And some of the aphantasia will realize that while when their friend is thinking about last summer's camping holiday, they seem to be having an experience which is a little bit different to their own. It seems to have a genuinely visual quality whereas...

Martin (09:24.344)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (09:39.161)
the aphantasic person will just know what happened, they'll know a number of facts about what happened, but they won't be able to visualize it. And many people with aphantasia say they don't really have much in the way of sensory imagery generally, so they won't be able to remember what things sounded like or tasted like or smelled like, whereas others can. So for those who can, it's possible to kind of re -inhabit the past in a way that isn't possible for people with aphantasia.

But the question you're asking, I think, goes quite deep because it has to do with how we can be sure that descriptions other people are giving of their experience map onto the way we would describe our own experience. And of course, that's tricky. How do I know that the red UC is the same as the red IC? And there's no simple answer to that. The reason I'm persuaded that when people say they

Martin (10:22.23)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (10:35.929)
can't visualize they're saying something meaningful. There are several reasons. First reason is that there seems to be a kind of pattern of associations which one wouldn't otherwise have predicted. So for example, if somebody says their aphantasia gets likely that they'll have a thin autobiographical memory, they may be having trouble recognizing faces. There's a minority of folk who are on the autistic spectrum. So there's a kind of number of associations which imply that when someone

says that they have no imagery, they are identifying a kind of fact about their psychology which has other implications. It's part of a pattern, if you like. So which one wouldn't predict if it were just that they were describing their experience in a different way to others. And then there are some, there are now some more objective ways of confirming the self description, if you like. So I'll give you two or three examples.

Martin (11:12.534)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (11:32.281)
The first I really like, it's a very neat observation. So if you have imagery and you imagine that you're looking into the sun, your pupils constrict, just as they would if you were looking into the sun. If you have imagery and you imagine looking into a dark room, your pupils enlarge, just as they would if you were looking into a dark room. That doesn't seem to happen in people with aphantasia.

Martin (11:37.292)
Mm -hmm.

Martin (11:57.326)
Okay.

Adam Zeman (11:57.345)
suggesting that they're not having the kind of visual experience that leads to that physiological response. Another example is if you read people with imagery really scary stories, they will sweat. Their galvanic skin response, the basis of the old lie detector, will change. That doesn't seem to happen in people with aphantasia. And again, the explanation is that what kind of drives that

Martin (12:12.47)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Adam Zeman (12:26.519)
gut response is seeing the shark approaching you. And if you don't have that sensory experience, then your gut doesn't get going. And that fits with what many people have said about reading, that they don't find descriptive passages really do very much for them. And it's not that people have an unemotional, because if you show them scary pictures, they do respond.

Martin (12:30.476)
Mm -hmm.

Martin (12:54.71)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (12:56.441)
So, evidence like that and some more recent evidence from brain imaging, persuades me that again, that when people report the lack of imagery, they are reporting something true and informative about their experience. That's not to say that self -description is always accurate or that it's unambiguous. I it can be quite hard sometimes to be sure that quite what someone means.

Martin (13:13.42)
interest.

Adam Zeman (13:25.689)
when they describe their experience. But I think, actually, although psychology has been quite suspicious of introspection over the last century, I think actually people are quite good at recognising and describing their own experience.

Martin (13:41.166)
Yeah, it's it's it's gotten. It's gotten easier to a certain extent, just with the openness of it. At least for myself in the sense that, you know, by nature of understanding that I have this, then you almost get the opportunity to explore all the other senses and find language and ways to kind of test ad hoc with, you know, friends and family members and whatnot.

By nature of the podcast and the audience, I wanted to kind of pivot towards sort of like the workplace environment. And so by nature of being a person in HR and recruitment, we're often tasked with being sort of the champions of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging in the workplace. And so when I discovered this about myself and I started sharing it with other people,

It was very, it was, it, it, it's not commonplace necessarily. Like not a lot of people know about it. And so the example that I, I give, um, in, in comparison to something that is invisible versus something that is visible, you know, for example, if we worked at the same workplace and you walked in one day and you had a cast on your arm, uh, you know,

There would be certain considerations, you know, I'd open the door for you or just without even you saying anything It's just this like oh, I see that there's there's this aspect so you can see where I'm going so with with things like it doesn't necessarily have to be a Fantasia could be anything really to do that is invisible with with the mind What you know, maybe for folks, you know for HR practitioners looking to create more

inclusive environments, whether it's through the interview process or whether it's like accommodating employees, is there is there anything that you've come across in in your years of research in this that sort of stands out as some good rules of thumb to sort of create a more inclusive workplace for for people, maybe not necessarily specifically, but just like high level things that have you've come across.

Adam Zeman (16:02.841)
Yeah. Well, as you say, I think Aphantasia is a nice example of an invisible difference. Something that really makes quite a large difference to people's experience, to their inner lives, without necessarily having very much visible impact of the surface. And that's one interesting thing about Aphantasia, that people with Aphantasia get along just fine. But by and large, it's not a disability.

Martin (16:24.972)
Yeah.

Adam Zeman (16:30.265)
But I think, but it kind of makes the point that we, each of us tends to take his or her own experiences as the norm and we're very liable to assume that everyone else is like us. I think this is one of many reminders that that's not the case actually, the experience of others can be very different to us. I think that's an important thing to bear in mind generally. I think it...

Martin (16:41.848)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (17:00.781)
There are some situations in which people with Aphantasia do feel uncomfortable, for example if they're invited to engage in an imagery exercise of some sort in a meditation class, or by a therapist, or by a teacher at school. I think it's quite helpful for practitioners of those kinds to know about Aphantasia because they may want to adapt their practice a little.

They certainly will be doing a favour to focus on Aphantasia if they are open to that, aware of this possibility. While thinking of occupation, I just have it in the back of my mind, this may be interesting for your colleagues, that it does seem that Aphantasia has some mild occupational effect in the sense that...

Martin (17:38.54)
Yeah.

Martin (17:46.7)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (17:58.073)
people with aphantasia are a little more likely to be working in sciences, IT, maths. So it seems to kind of nudge you towards slightly more abstract ways of thinking, whereas people with a very vivid imagery are little more likely to be working in what have traditionally been called creative industries, to be artists, for example. So.

Martin (18:14.958)
Interesting.

Adam Zeman (18:23.609)
As I've said, Aphantasia isn't a disability, so I don't think that people in HR or elsewhere need to be making big accommodations, but I think it's certainly a reminder that we are very, human beings are very diverse. In a way, that's our calling card, isn't it? We have these incredibly malleable brains with the result that each of us kind of in...

Martin (18:27.03)
No, no.

Adam Zeman (18:52.057)
lives in a world of experience which is quite special, quite unique.

Martin (18:56.494)
No, it's it's it's been a using the the exercise or just even bringing it up in, you know, small teams to say like, fun fact, you know, there's, there's this thing that exists that can quickly highlight the fact that we're all different, even though we might just very quickly assume that we're the same on the inside. And it's just something for most of the time, it's it's it's a new thing. So that I've always found the result of that to be something that's just a quick way to

bring teams together and have them understand each other on a deeper level in a way that sort of sets the stage to your point, right? It's not necessarily a disability or anything like that. It's a, and in fact, like thinking back on all the challenges I've kind of gone through in my life, like it's, there's more superpower necessarily from it. You know, I see the advantage of it.

of it versus the disadvantages to a certain extent. Before we started recording, you mentioned that there's recently sort of this, a new paper that has come out or some essentially sort of like 10 years of aphantasia research. I'd love to hear just a little bit more about that and what's come out of it.

Adam Zeman (20:20.537)
Yeah, sure. So it's a curious thing that actually it's been known for over a hundred years that there are people who lack the ability to visualize. So there was a 19th century psychologist in the UK called Francis Galton, who was the first person to try to measure the vividness of imagery. And he recognized that there were some people whose power of visualization was zero, as he put it. But that observation kind of got lost.

And no one really paid much attention to that, even though there was a huge amount of research on imagery generally, how we use it, what happens in the brain when we visualize disorders of imagery, great deal of research, but no attention to these extremes. And one reason for that was they didn't have a name. So words are quite powerful things. And the story...

of my research was that I encountered a patient who'd lost the ability to visualize, did some work with him, his story got picked up by a science journalist, and then people began getting in touch saying, I'm just like this guy, but I always have been. So after a while, when plenty or so people have got in touch, we realized that this was something that deserved a name. And we called it aphantasia. So that term comes from the classical Greek,

Martin (21:38.668)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (21:48.729)
term for the mind's eye which is fantasia with an a tagged on at the end meaning absence of so it's just absence of mind's eye and then when people began getting in touch saying I'm the opposite I've got imagery as vivid as real seeing we then coined the term hyperphantasia so I think just having those those terms has been very helpful in in um catalyzing research because there was

Martin (21:54.188)
Hmm.

Adam Zeman (22:15.993)
was not only a phenomenon but a name to describe it with. And so since we published our very short paper describing these folk with lifelong absence of the mind's eye using the tabanphantasia, about 70 or so scientific studies have come through. And we've already discussed a number of their findings, so the link with

Martin (22:21.814)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Zeman (22:45.305)
having a thin autobiographical memory if you're aphantasic, difficulty with face recognition in some folk, autistic spectrum disorder in some. I think we've mentioned that aphantasia often doesn't just affect the visual sense, it affects other kinds of imagery. So like imagery for sounds, imagining music, most people with aphantasia seem to have trouble with sensory imagery of all kinds, so they have difficulty in...

imagining sounds, difficulty in imagining smells. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for the majority. And then another peculiar fact that's emerged is that even though people of Aphantasia like imagery in the day, they often dream visually. I don't know whether that's true for you, but many people in Aphantasia have rather vivid visual dreams, which is a...

Martin (23:30.67)
Yeah.

Martin (23:34.862)
Yeah, I could for myself. It's been interesting because there's always been this gap for me. Not a gap, but almost like a truth that I've been seeking my entire life, that there has to be something more, that there's something missing. And I never had, from what I can recall, any sort of ability to visualize. But what I did find really interesting was,

lucid dreams. Once I did some research on lucid dreams and saw that I could kind of control dreams and whatnot, I became obsessed with that. And part of me feels like it's sort of like this longing for something that, you know, instinctively, I might, you know, that's sort of my maybe my explanation for it. But I always noticed that I've been far more interested and fascinated by anything to do with being able to create or

Um, just, and you know, even, even with psychedelics, no, not to, not to go too deep into that. And I haven't experimented with it more just out of, um, just like concerns around, you know, what that might do to, to my own mental health and everything like that. But like, that's always been so fascinating that so much of your consciousness can be just completely shifted into a different space. And so dreams and, um, yeah, very much are.

I've always been fascinating to me because it's just, you know, this extra layer of consciousness to a certain extent.

Adam Zeman (25:07.481)
Yeah. So another interesting fact that's come clear from our own work and others is that although aphantasia prevents people from visualizing and sometimes from having any kind of sensory imagery, it certainly doesn't prevent people from being imaginative. So you can be, you can be aphantasic and highly creative. So I think creativity is a, an imagination in that broader sense is a, it's a much more...

a much richer, more complex capacity than simply being able to visualize or to evoke sensory imagery. So we've been in touch with a wide range of highly successful and very productive people. So for example, Craig Venter, the first person to decode the human genome, is a fantastic and says that he thought part of his success in science had to do with it.

the fact that his mind was relatively clear, it wasn't sort cluttered by imagery. Or there's a guy called Ed Catmull who was the president of Pixar and who recently won the Turing Prize which is a big prize for discoveries in computation. And again he'd known for a long time that he couldn't visualise it, but he hasn't got in his way. And Glenn Keen, who we mentioned earlier, the artist who worked for Pixar who did many of the drawings for The Little Mermaid,

Martin (26:05.39)
Hmm.

Adam Zeman (26:32.377)
He had known for a long time that he was aphantasic. His colleagues had said, you can't be, you must be able to visualize because otherwise how can you work? But he can. So, yeah, it's a fascinating difference which seems to make a big difference to the inner life, but much less difference to performance. And it certainly doesn't block creativity.

Martin (26:59.534)
Hmm. If I'm sorry.

Adam Zeman (27:01.113)
I think, yep. I know, you go.

Martin (27:05.55)
If you weren't doing doing research and teaching and kind of exploring the world, you know, a fah fantasia, because it, you know, even just going deeper into psychology and neurobiology and everything like that, you know, is just curious, like, if you look back, and would there be another thing for you? Or has this always sort of clearly been the thing for you to

to investigate and look into.

Adam Zeman (27:36.889)
No, I mean this has been something for me to look into for the last 20 years. So, I mean actually the book about consciousness which you mentioned, which I published about 20 years ago, that sort of predates Saffanthasia. I hadn't actually met the patient at that stage.

Adam Zeman (27:55.289)
There have been a few things for me. I'm a doctor and I've always enjoyed medicine. And in a way I've been quite happy plugging away at that. I love writing. I enjoy the process of writing, so I'm happy to try to write about just about anything. I've never done much truly creative writing, but I like the process. And then returning to consciousness.

what really got me going in this direction, sort of as a student more or less, was through studying psychology, discovering the brain, discovering that we have brains, and that in some mysterious way, the brains give rise to what we experience. And that just seems, that's a huge mystery. How does...

Martin (28:38.604)
Hehehehe

Martin (28:42.83)
Right.

Adam Zeman (28:48.473)
I'm not the first person to discover that mystery by any means, but for centuries people have been wondering how it is that the brain gives rise to what we experience. That's a puzzle that could occupy me, happily.

Martin (29:05.902)
The the the the aphantasia piece has been around for quite some time to your point about, you know, hundreds of years, over 100 years. But, you know, putting a name to it, that's, you know, only very recent in the larger scheme of things. But in terms of the puzzle that you're talking about, like the puzzle of life, the greatest question, like how do we get here? What is consciousness? What is our human experience?

I guess what's the most sort of exciting or interesting sort of area of that puzzle or question for you right now?

Adam Zeman (29:46.361)
that larger question.

Martin (29:48.204)
Yeah.

Adam Zeman (29:54.233)
So I'm going to give a slightly evasive answer, which is to say that I've somewhat moved on from that question because I actually decided that it was too difficult and possibly unanswerable actually. So people have drawn a distinction between the easy and the hard questions of consciousness. The easy question, it's not easy, but it's at least answerable, is what...

Martin (30:19.244)
I was gonna say.

Adam Zeman (30:23.065)
What are the details of the brain processes that give rise to particular experiences? That's an answerable question. That's always fascinated me. In fact, part of the reason that I was attracted to this topic, the topic of aphantasia, was that it kind of offered a possibility of linking brain studies to studies of experience. Here is a peculiar...

feature of experience, can we link it convincingly to differences in brain activity? And I think we probably can. So that's the easy question, or those are the easy questions of consciousness. The hard question is why goings on in the brain give rise to experience at all.

Martin (31:17.678)
Right.

Adam Zeman (31:19.129)
And how does matter give rise to mind? And that...

That may be unanswerable. It may be that we think about the questions in the wrong way somehow. So I've somewhat moved on from that. As a teenager, I loved philosophy. I've become more frustrated with philosophy as time goes by.

Martin (31:44.558)
Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. And in just a few more questions here, I guess, really, in terms of, you know, specific to the aphantasia side of things, where, you know, I imagine that sort of a tunnel, you're continuing to dig through, you know, to get more and more on. And so,

in terms of are there any, you know, where are you at currently? Like what is the sort of like the edge that, you know, the most recent sort of discovery or piece that is standing out as interesting?

Adam Zeman (32:29.497)
So I'll tell you one discovery and then a set of questions. So the discovery is in a brain imaging study which we published a couple of years ago, which suggests that if you are somebody with very vivid imagery, when your brain is just idling, there are stronger connections between regions at the front of the brain which are broadly to do with thinking, and the visual system, which is at the back of the brain.

than in the brains of people with aphantasia who have relatively weak connections of that kind. So that would help to explain how if a thought comes into your mind, if you're someone with vivid imagery, it kind of, it literally travels to the back of the brain, it translates itself into imagery very naturally. Whereas if you're aphantasic, thoughts remain thoughts. They don't get clothed in sensation as they will do rather naturally in a hyperphantasic brain. So that...

That finding needs to be repeated, but I thought that was a neat observation which kind of helps to explain, goes some way towards explaining what the difference between an aphantasic and a hyperphantasic brain might be. It's to do with differences in the strengths of connections. There are lots of questions. So first question is, what are the kind of subtypes of aphantasia? So I don't think aphantasia is one thing. I think it's a...

It's a feature of experience that can occur in several different contexts. So in some people it's linked to really poor autobiographical memories. Some people have really bad face recognition trouble. Others have neither of those things. So I think there must be a number of flavors, a number of subtypes, and I'd like to try and tease those out. Something we haven't mentioned yet is that it quite often runs in families. I don't know whether that's true for you, but if you like imagery, you're...

brother, brother sister is about 10 times as likely to lack imagery by comparison with the person in the street. So maybe there are some genes involved and it would be neat to track those down. So that's something I'm trying to do with geneticist colleagues, something that it's feasible to do sort of now for the first time in history, given all the discoveries that have been in genetics over the last few decades. I'd like to...

Adam Zeman (34:57.667)
learn more about the mental health aspects. So does aphantasia allow people to be more present? Does it maybe protect you from some of the problems which having very vivid imagery might lead to, for example PTSD if something unpleasant happens to you? Perhaps people with aphantasia are less likely to develop that kind of emotional reaction to a trauma. Yeah, so those are a few of the questions that I'm keen to...

Martin (35:29.038)
No, that's, um, there's, you mentioned, you know, there's, there's the easy questions and the hard questions. And I, my thought was that they're all, they're all very challenging questions. Um, some just more than others. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Um, no, I guess, um, really just, uh, thank you so much for spending a bit of time with me and talking a bit about it. Um,

Adam Zeman (35:30.009)
Get over it.

Adam Zeman (35:42.041)
Yeah, it's the hard and the impossible really, isn't it? Yeah.

Martin (35:58.742)
BioMeans would love to, you know, what's the best place for people who, you know, find this fascinating. What would your recommendations be? You know, either get in touch with your team or resources or, you know, things that they can read about yourself. Yeah.

Adam Zeman (36:15.897)
Yeah, so we've got a website called the EyesMind website. So if you Google EyesMind study, that should take you to our website. The paper that we mentioned recently, this review article, if somebody was willing to give an hour or two to learning more, that's just a paper that's just been published in Trans and Cognitive Neurosciences and it's free online.

open access so you could you could plug in my name and trends in cognitive neuroscience's ticks that would take you to that paper.

Martin (36:55.886)
Perfect. No, no. Amazing. Thank you again, Dr. Zeman. Appreciate the time. Yeah, amazing. Thank you. Take care.

Adam Zeman (37:01.081)
Okay, thanks very much for an enjoyable conversation. Thank you for inviting me. Okay, bye for now.