how is the brain able to give us images when we are imagining something?
In: Biology
This is a fascinating topic, and I would love to be proven wrong about this, but I think the fact you’ve gone unanswered means that there isn’t a satisfactory ELI5 answer to your question.
I’ve taken a handful of psych classes that have only touched on neuropsychology, but I think the scientific consensus is pretty much that the brain does some pretty wild stuff that we don’t fully understand.
The fact that your brain is able to simulate reality, and present it back to itself in a visual representation really calls into question about the nature of human consciousness, how we interpret reality, and how we exist within it.
Sorry this isn’t the answer you’re looking for. If someone else can provide something better I would be happy to hear it.
Everything you see is your brain telling you that your eyes see stuff. When you imagine, your brain is still telling you that you see something, but it’s coming from another part of your brain instead of from your eyes.
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.
Y’all get images when you imagine? Did I just get an old model brain or what?
There’s a lot of good answers here that talk about the different parts of the brain.
What I feel might be missing here is that a brain cannot really simulate reality. Imagination only lets us relive our senses, like sight and hearing. Our eyes bring in light to create 2D pictures. We can never imagine a truly 3D picture. Yet our world is 3D.
So how does the brain let us imagine? Well it simply uses the same functions that it uses when you see or hear things for real. But instead of asking the eyes of ears for input, it uses past inputs that have been stored in memory.
Read “what kind of creatures are we?” By Chomsky. He illustrates how thinking depends on language. Without language, it’s hard to think. Images are part of the sensory experience that gets etched into your brain following Anne experience. What your eyes se gets bundled with many other inputs to form a memory of that moment. The moment typically stays in long term memory if it was “important enough” this is why you remember vividly impacting experiences and forget almost immediately the mundane.
Our minds also create the image of reality that we see outside of ourselves. We are not seeing reality for what it actually looks like. It is just our brain’s best representation of what it looks like as it suits our needs.
I don’t really know, but if I had to guess I would say it’s something like that, with certain regions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex (but probably also many other areas) communicating with the occipital lobe to form images. Again, just a guess.
The same way you see something through your eyes.
When you view something your brain creates the image using the visual cortex. If you were to activate the visual cortex in the exact same way your brain wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and actually seeing that same image.
But of course you can tell when you are imagining something versus seeing something. The difference is in two different aspects. The first is when you imagine you may simply only activate the brain to simulate seeing that single thing but when you are seeing something you are processing the entire scene along with that something. Its optional effort you dont have to put in when imagining.
Second your brain has circuits that activate that starts the process of imagining that also tell you that this is something you are doing rather than something that is coming from outside. If those circuits aren’t activated then you would not be able to as easily tell it was self created and it would be hallucinating.
So when I was in art school our professor told us to draw a picture of this woman’s face. He handed us all a photograph and had us draw, we had two minutes. Some of us did well, most of us (including me) did not. He then instructed us to turn the photo of the woman’s face upside-down and gave us one minute. The results were substantially better.
His reasoning behind the improvements were because we tricked the mind OUT of assuming everything we know about mouths eyes and noses. We have predetermined expectations of what features look like based on what we learned as children… An eye is round… Right? A nose is a triangle and a mouth is a line… We ignore the details until we allow our imagination to fill in the blanks.
When you think of a tree you see a tree until your imagination allows you to take in the specifics of the bark, the leaves… The snow around it shows a root above ground and the stream behind it is flowing as the air is silent.
My understanding based on this is that our imagination influences what we actually see and what we are looking through is nothing more than a camera for our brain to download information. How many times have you found someone attractive then as soon as they open their mouth their features become unattractive? No two people see the same thing and this is because of our imagination.
I don’t know the answer but I think I know a few basics.
The eyes are what sense light and the intricacies their. Alone, they are really nothing.
The brain handles the processing of those lights… And there memory of it.
And dreams are where the brain connects sighted experience with previous sighted experience…all experience really.
I can’t answer you’re question but I have a theory about how dreams exist… And why they are just random shit..
It’s because we constantly remember the past and compare it to the now…but in dreamspeak, the now is always a few hours behind. So dream imagery is actually just connecting yesterday with every year prior.
And the reason for symbology depends on the experience… It’s not universal like jung or freud said… It’s experiential.
So a dream about space people in frontier costumes could be because you read an article about Westworld while using your telescope the hours later.
Dream imagery is consolidation of experience (Dream imagery is consolidation of interpreted experience based on hormonal influences)… And I’m pretty sure I’m right.
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