#117 Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!
From The Giants Shoulder by Evan McGloughlin
May 4, 2026 · 1h 29m · Season 2 · Episode 117
About this episode
Dr. Alfredo Spagna discusses his groundbreaking research on imagination and aphantasia, challenging long-held beliefs about mental imagery and consciousness.
Dr. Alfredo Spagna is a Cognitive Neuroscientist at Columbia University who discovered the Fusiform Imagery Node — the brain region that activates every time you imagine anything. But when he scanned people with aphantasia using an ultra-high-field 7T brain scanner, the node was firing perfectly — it just wasn't connected to the frontal lobe, suggesting that consciousness itself might depend not on what your brain computes, but on what it connects. Expect to learn how imagination hijacks the brain's perceptual system, why aphantasia shattered 40 years of assumptions about mental imagery, what the "visualizer fallacy" is and why it affects everything from therapy to education, how a painter with aphantasia creates art without ever seeing it in his mind, why your brain imagining a lemon makes you salivate even though there's no lemon, what the 7T brain scanner revealed about the architecture of imagination, how aphantasia may support the Global Neuronal Workspace theory of consciousness, why Olympic athletes spend hours visualizing routines they never physically perform, and much more… Timestamps 00:08 What Happens in the Brain When You Imagine 01:02 Where Imagination and…
People in this episode
Host: Evan McGloughlin
Guest: Dr. Alfredo Spagna
Topics covered
- neuroscience
- imagination
- aphantasia
- mental imagery
- consciousness
- visualization
Keywords
- neuroscience
- aphantasia
- imagination
- mental imagery
- visualization
- consciousness
- Fusiform Imagery Node
- 7T brain scanner
- visualizer fallacy
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Columbia University
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