52 Minutes Celebrating Inner Experience, Aphantasia & Neurodiversity 2025

I’ve distilled the most revealing moments from a year of Giant conversations on inner experience & neurodiversity into 52 minutes. This episode explores how radically different our minds really are, why most of us misunderstand our own thoughts, and what happens when you rigorously examine consciousness from the inside out using Descriptive Experience Sampling.Through deep discussion and lived examples, Russell Hurlburt reveals why inner speech is far rarer than people believe, how imagery, emotion, sensory awareness, and unsymbolized thinking shape everyday consciousness, and why questionnaires consistently fail to capture the true structure of the mind. The conversation moves from aphantasia and face blindness to meditation, dreaming, and the unsettling discovery that we may be conscious far more often than we think, even during sleep.Expect to learn why people routinely mislabel their own inner experience, how experience sampling exposes hidden forms of thought, why dreaming and imagination rely on different brain mechanisms, how consciousness can persist outside of dreams during sleep, and why the human brain may be best understood as a vast space for cognitive difference rather than a single shared mental template.Timestamps: 02:15 The Five Main Types Of Inner Experience. Which Do You Have? 16:18 Most People With Faceblindness Don’t Even Know They Have it! 23:52 Why Do Most People With Aphantasia Have Vivid Visual Dreams? 34:14 Are We Secretly Conscious When We Think We’re Sleeping? 45:32 Why Does Everybody Think They Inner Speak? Full Episodes 1) No. 1 Inner Experience Expert: Inner Monologue, Aphantasia and How Your Mind Lies to You - https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg2) Meet the Woman With Zero Mental Imagery, Face Recognition or See in 3D! - https://youtu.be/4NeY7OwwJzk3) The Blind Mind’s Eye: How Aphantasia Is Rewriting Consciousness ! Dr Adam Zeman https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok4) Inner Experience Expert: Inner Monologue, Aphantasia and Why You Can’t Trust Your Own Thoughts 5) No. 1 Inner Experience Expert: I Spent 90 Days Discovering If I Really Inner Speak (SHOCKING) https://youtu.be/N9tO1OLdJto❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/