Maybe our imagination is limited by what we know
Quick question: can you picture a color that doesn't exist? Not purple or teal or some weird mix—like, an actual brand-new color your brain has never seen?
I've been obsessed with this stupid thought experiment for years and honestly it's breaking my brain a little.
Because here's the thing that keeps me up at night: our imagination feels infinite, right? I can picture flying cars, dragons, entire cities floating in space. But when I really think about it, all of that is just... remixed stuff. Car + wings = flying car. Lizard + wings + fire = dragon. It's all LEGO blocks we already had.
The Bat Thing That Haunts Me
So there's this thing about bats that genuinely messes with my head. They fly around in pitch-black caves using sound waves. Not like "oh I heard a noise over there"—they literally see the world through echolocation.
I've read about it a thousand times. I get it intellectually. But I cannot for the life of me actually imagine what that feels like. My brain just... doesn't have the hardware for it. It's like trying to run a video game on a calculator.
And that's when it hit me: if I can't even imagine how a bat sees, what else am I missing? What other ways of experiencing reality are completely locked off from me?
My Weird Obsession With Brain Differences
This rabbit hole led me to discover that some people literally cannot form mental images. It's called aphantasia, and when I first read about it, I thought it was fake.
Like, you can't picture your mom's face? You can't see an apple when someone says "apple"? These people just... think in abstract concepts and logic. No mental movies at all.
Meanwhile, other people have hyperphantasia—their mental images are so vivid they're basically watching Netflix in their heads. Sometimes they can't tell if a memory is real or imagined because it's that clear.
Both of these sound like living on different planets to me.
That Time I Tried Mushrooms (And Everything Got Weird)
Look, I'm not saying you should do drugs. But that one time I tried psychedelics? For like six hours, the walls in my brain just... disappeared.
I remember "tasting" music. Not metaphorically—I could literally taste the bass line. Colors had feelings. Time moved sideways. For a few hours, I experienced reality in ways my normal brain would never allow.
It was terrifying and amazing and it made me realize: those invisible walls I was talking about? They can crumble. There are ways of experiencing the world that are completely outside our normal mental prison.
The AI Thing That Keeps Me Awake
And now we're building machines that don't have our limitations. No human sensory baggage. No cultural blind spots. No "that's just not how things work" programming.
What if AI starts imagining things that are so far beyond human understanding that we can't even begin to grasp them? What if they dream up solutions, art, entire ways of being that our brains literally cannot process?
I keep imagining (there's that word again) a future where AI is painting masterpieces in colors we can't see, composing music in frequencies we can't hear, solving problems with logic we can't follow.
And we're just... standing there. Watching. Like ants trying to understand architecture.
The Question That Won't Leave Me Alone
If imagination is what makes us human—if our ability to dream up new possibilities is our superpower—what happens when something else imagines better than us?
Do we become irrelevant? Do their dreams become our reality whether we understand them or not?
Or maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe I should just be grateful I can imagine dragons and flying cars and leave it at that.
But I can't stop wondering about that new color. And I have a feeling I never will.
Anyone else lose sleep over weird philosophical stuff like this? Please tell me I'm not the only one slowly going insane thinking about bat vision at 2 AM.