how is the brain able to give us images when we are imagining something?
In: Biology
u/hylian_harry A lot of answers here say there’s no answer or go off the deep end in psychology. I think there is a rather simple answer, I’ll give it a try.
Your brain runs on chemicals and electric signals. When your eyes see something, it’s just an electric signal to neurons in your brain. Some of them act sort of like a memory cell that holds voltage (above a certain number, value is one, below that number value is zero). Except neurons are more complex but that’s irrelevant.
Then, when you imagine something you either recall what you’ve seen or you combine things you’ve seen in unique ways. You can’t imagine a color that doesn’t exist or some concept so alien and abstract that you’ve never encountered it. Try imagining what a real alien would look like. Right.
It’s important to remember that what you’re seeing and what you’re imagining are very much related and use the same fundamental process – chemistry and electric signals. So when you “see” something or you imagine that same thing (in admittedly less detail and lower resolution), it’s quite a similar process.
Ever had a lucid dream? Those are freaky right? How could the brain simulate FEELING something? You can feel wind, smell things. It’s incredible, unbelievable. Well, it’s rather simple really. If you can recall visual information, why can’t you recall other sensory information? Just like brain cells store images they can store sensations, tastes, smells, etc. And when you lucid dream, you are recalling slightly less perfect representations of the real sensation you’d experience in nature if, say, the wind was blowing in your skin.
There’s not much difference between the wind actually blowing on your skin and your brain thinking it is. Except the latter is mediated by sensory memory recall. Just like you remember (some of) what you learned at school, your body also stores “memories” of what you felt, smelt, tasted, heard, and so on. It’s why you can replay a song in your head or hear a famous actors voice as if you were listening to them in that moment. As I write this, I’m imagining Brad Pitt’s voice saying this. These aren’t words he’s ever spoken for me to hear but I’ve seen enough of his movies where my brain has stored an impression of his voice and I can use electrochemical processes to recall it and synthesize it to read this as if he’s saying it to me.
Now, how exactly this happens, which neurons fire and in what sequence, and where exactly this information is stored exactly (and to what degree of detail) is not something I’m familiar with and to my knowledge it’s not fully understood in neuroscience yet, but progress is rapidly being made in this field.
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