“We were reading this paper about the speckled hen, and they were saying: visualize a chicken with spots, then answer the question, how many spots did it have? And people were answering that question. They were saying six… I was like, what are you guys talking about? … They were just as shocked that I was not able to do this. They were like, do you enjoy reading? I was like, all I do is read.”

Giants Shoulder · September 2026

Context

Brown, a philosopher who works on higher-order theories of consciousness, describing the graduate epistemology seminar where he realized he has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery — and that everyone else meant it literally when they said they could picture something. He was in his late twenties and the condition did not yet have a name. He now argues his own case bears on which part of the brain's activity consciousness actually tracks.

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Transcript

Giants Shoulder Around 43:29 into the episode

Evan McGloughlin

…is that that is the higher order representation that is just not quite getting there. Whatever that higher order representation is that facilitates experience, it's just not integrating in the right way. It's not connecting up. You have all of the underlying lower level representations,

Speaker 2

but at that higher level, representation isn't working. That seems to me like a really interesting empirical line of evidence for higher order theories. Do you think I'm thinking about that in the right way? I'm curious in your thoughts.

Richard Brown

…But anyway, so we were in this epistemology class and someone, we were reading this paper. I forget by who, but they were talking about the speckled hen and they were talking about, you know, they were saying visualize a chicken with spots and then answer the question, how many spots did it have? And people were answering that question. They were saying six or people were like, I don't know. And I was like, what are you guys talking about? Like, I can specify how many spots or I can just say spots. Like, I don't know. Like, what do you mean? But yeah, so they were like saying, oh, I can see the chicken and count the spots. And I was like, the hell are you saying to me? And it became clear that they were like serious about this. And I was shocked. I was flabbergasted. And they were just as shocked that I was like not able to do…

Evan McGloughlin

sentence means. I don't really know how someone can deny either the presence of mental imagery or the lack of mental imagery. I'm not really sure how you have a, I understand that maybe claims of sort of vividness or ability to manipulate or rotate scenes in their mind, whatever, might be…

Richard Brown

that. It's a good point. I know, but that some people doubt it. Right. So this is, I mean, this is one of the harken back to the origins of psychology. This is one of the things that people used to worry about is like, well, when you introspect and say X and I introspect and say not that, then what…

Evan McGloughlin

very interested in this. That's very cool.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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