eli5: How is our brain able to “imagine” or visualize?

Question

eli5: How is our brain able to “imagine” or visualize?

In: 4

Answer 1

When you generate a mental image of something many of the same vision processing sections of your brain show activity as if you were actually looking at the object.

The exact electrical/chemical/mechanical workings of the brain are still a subject of significant study since it may be the most complex object in the known universe, but it does seem that your brain uses the same image rendering hardware for real images from the eyes and imagined images from memory.