Shocking Insights
What electrical stimulation tells us about how and why we visualize
Originally published for the Aphantasia Network.
Stingrays and Caesars
Your internal experience is uniquely yours. Arguably, it is the thing that is most yours. Only you know precisely what you see in your mind’s eye, and only you are privy to your inner thoughts. So how would you react if you found out your mind’s eye can be manipulated? And stranger yet, what if I told you our story starts with a peculiar headache remedy from the reign of the Roman Empire?
In the first century AD, Scribonius Largus (Roman emperor Claudius’s royal physician) found a treatment for headaches in a most unexpected source: an electric ray. By placing this strange, shocking fish on his patients’ scalps, Scribonius became the first known person to apply electricity to the brain. Although Scribonius was only looking to make a headache go away, he unwittingly became an early pioneer of a technology that would lead to many insights — including a recent insight into how we visualize and why vividness of visual imagery is different for different people.
Over the centuries, electrical stimulation to the brain has moved from Scribonius’s electric fish to 17th-century hand-crank generators and finally to modern and…
