How is it registered by the brain as seeing when it is so different than actual seeing with your eyes?
In: Biology
We don’t know! Yes…It is a fact… How brain creates this subjective experience of recreating something objective is beyond science for now, except for a few speculations and theories. Because science cannot test the subjective. All we know is that there are centres in brain that help in visualizing, thought processing and recording memories, but we do not know how these work together to pan out to be a continous flow of imaginative thoughts called consiousness.
So people around give their own interpretations like we are inside a simulation, or consiousness is something metaphysical or not belonging to the physical world, or like science, which simply accepts the lack of evidence to say anything about it for sure. So for subjective concepts with no sure explainations, its interpretations can also be subjective…. It is just like asking… Is apple the same “Red” for everyone?
Basicly its seeing without using your eyes.
It uses the same area your brain uses to process information from your eyes, but instead of info from your eyes, it uses info from other parts of your brain and memory to form images.
So imagine an apple. Your brain is using info you know and think about apples, it’s using memories of what they look like, and it’s using the visual center of your brain to put these things together and form an image without using your eyes.
So let’s imagine something that doesn’t exist: a pink unicorn.
Your brain takes information you know about unicorns: it knows its basicly a horse with a horn, and info it knows about the color pink, and puts them together.
Even though you’ve never seen a horned horse before, your brain can put the image of a horn together with a horse and boom, unicorn. Now it adds the color pink and boom, pink unicorn.
The less you know about something, the harder it is for your brain to make a picture. It’s why you can’t imagine an unknown color, because what would that look like? It’s so fundamentally different you have no basis on which to create the thought.
Furthermore, some people are better able to imagine things than others simply due to their brain being better wired for it. Some people are so extremely bad at imagination that they essentially can’t. This is called aphantasia. These people don’t have a “minds eye”. It’s not fully understood and it being a very subjective sense makes it difficult to study, but it’s thought to be a spectrum in which some people are great at imagining, some people struggle, and some people can’t at all.
The visual cortex doesn’t do much interpretation, it mostly does pattern detection on the “camera” signals from the eyes… edge detection, color blob detection, range mapping… really low level stuff.
It’s the frontal cortex (and a bunch of other areas, namely the hippocampus) make sense of that information, assign it labels, and create the internal experience of interpretable vision.
“Your mind’s eye” more-or-less reverses this process.
It’s not like looking at a photo and I don’t have to close my eyes. I do have to actively think of what I want to see. So I have the thought in my head of, say, a blue sky over green glass with big, heaping white clouds and I will be able to, ‘see,’ that. It’s like it’s behind my eyes and also no where. Do you, ‘hear, things as you think them or as you’re reading? It’s like that. Some nebulous place in your noggin that’s real but also not.
Well, in actuality it’s not that much different at all. We live in a simulation, a mental construct generated by our mind. It takes input from your senses to form this reality so we can navigate it, but it builds the entire concept and fills in the gaps all over the place. Your brain is incredibly good at this, and it doesn’t actually need any outside stimuli to generate this mental construct. When you visualize something all you’re doing is taking over some aspects of direct control and simulating what could happen
Your brain uses your eyes to see the world around you. Your eyes send a stream of visual data to your brain. That’s the point when you’re actually ‘seeing’ live. Then, your brain decides what visual stuff to keep and creates snapshots, which get stored for later.
When you picture something in your mind’s eye, you’re brain retrieves any/all stored snapshots of whatever you’re attempting to picture. The same part of your brain that makes allows you to see in real time must be involved. Explains why we often close our eyes to picture stuff in our head.
There is active research into this. [The New York Times just published a piece](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/minds-eye-mental-pictures-psychology.html) on aphantasia and hyperphantasia – not being able to see things in your minds eye and the opposite, seeing unusually vividly (probably behind a paywall).
“Researchers are also starting to use brain scans to find the circuitry that gives rise to aphantasia and hyperphantasia. So far, that work suggests that mental imagery emerges from a network of brain regions that talk to each other.”
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