how is the brain able to give us images when we are imagining something?
In: Biology
My stab at your Q: The brain resolves familiarity from past input (via eyes/other senses) to be used again in the present. Every time you experience something your brain determines if it’s already familiar or exposed to something new. Then intricately resolves/banks info for future use.
For example, if you’ve consumed an ice-cream cone dessert in the past, your brain assigns it all the descriptors (maybe upward of 100’s) is knows to it for future experience with it. That means you can still recall the memory if a few descriptors change because it recalls enough of the others. Saying you can see it is focusing enough on all the descriptors to confidently prepare yourself to experience it again (even though your not going to). When that memory recall is focused enough, and focusing on the sense you want to recall it from, will usually result in imagining. If you haven’t consumed one though but heard enough descriptors, your brain will assimilate that approximation in the same fashion. Use same scenario but decide the flavor of ice-cream is tooth-paste flavored. You know that flavor from other experiences and understand shapes/cone/visual (if you’ve seen ice-cream cones before) and imagine something it could be like. The brain is just a recollection system, utilizing and storing vast amounts of sensory inputs and motor controls. Through voodoo, aliens, and the ten commandments allows them to coexist and operate it’s vessel.
When you see, you aren’t actually seeing what your eyes see. Your brain is taking the information from your eyes, checking to match everything against things you have seen before, comparing it to other things your eyes have seen recently, and then your brain hallucinates a steady, clear image for you.
Right now, you aren’t aware of the holes in your vision, that you can see your nose, or the fact that everything that isn’t in the center of your vision is less in focus and less colorful. What you see isn’t actually what your eyes see, but an image built from what your eyes see.
The same way your brain can hallucinate an image while you see, it can hallucinate as you imagine or remember. And if something is wrong, it might hallucinate the wrong thing or tell you that your imagined hallucination is the reality hallucination.
[scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/](https://scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/)
There are lots of people can’t do this.
Not exactly an answer, but not all brains can, which is fascinating.
The inability to imagine visuals (and/or other senses) is called Aphantasia. Around 2% of people have it. Most cases they’re born with it, but some, like me, have it cause of a brain or head injury.
There hasn’t been much study on it unfortunately.
It doesnt give you images, it just fires similar neurons in the visual part of the brain as when you see things. Its like how a speaker can sound like a band only because its making similar vibrations as the band did… but it doesnt have any instruments inside. Its just reproducing the vibration that hits your ear. And like how a speaker wouldn’t know how to vibrate to sound like a trumpet without having recorded a trumpet playing, a person cannot really see what it hasn’t already seen… or some combination of sights stored in your memory.
Probably how it can sense pain from an amputated limb. What actually matters for us to feel something is the representation of various experiences like pain, excitement, in our cortex. And stimulating those very areas tends to do the same job of excitement or pain. Similarly, areas related to memory and learning when excited, emulate a visual experience. For imagining new things, probably all the experience in the memory is used to form a certain scenario. There’s a limitation, for example, you can’t imagine being in the deep sea. If you do, it won’t be accurate and would be something you just fed yourself as reality. So our brain uses whatever it has learned and experienced, and emulates scenarios.
A couple of years ago, I learned that people can literally “picture this” when asked to do so, and it blew my mind. I’ve never been able to overlay my imagination onto reality. At best when I hear “picture this” I get some really abstract back of my mind concept of whatever I’m being asked to imagine.
Since I learned about that, I still question whether or not I understand what you all are talking about, I liken it to being color blind but in the imagination. I’ve wondered if it is the explanation behind so many of my learning troubles when I was in school and all sorts of other things? I’d like to know how the brain gives us images just so I can have mine fixed to be able to do so.
Each time you experience something it’s saved in the labyrinth of memories in your mind.
When you try to recall a memory you travel that labyrinth, each correct thing you think that helps you remember is a turn in the right direction and each wrong is a wrong turn. At every dead end is a memory
Now when you are imagining something it’s similar, but you travel multiple paths at the same time and at every dead end you take a piece of that memory. You then take those pieces and mash them together into something new.
You have imagined something.
My post wont be super eli5 but i hope it is interesting for at least someone. I recently took a class on mathematical models of neural systems and can add my two cents from what we learned there. There exist mathematical models where a set of neurons are respresented as a vector of 1s (firing) and 0s (not firing). We can create a system with connections between the neurons such that certain states of the system (represented by different vectors) cause the system to reliably go to other specific states. In laymans terms we can mathematically represent how one memory (say something you are thinking about or a smell) can lead to another (an image).
As an aside the model is somewhat rough and makes a lot of assumptions but the fact that we can create this kind of property mathematically is promising to understanding what actually happens in the brain.
For anyone who wants to read more, here is an article:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4681782/#:~:text=We%20present%20a%20model%20for,their%20long-term%20memory%20representations.&text=The%20network%20dynamics%20qualitatively%20predicts,memory%20items%20observed%20in%20experiments.
don’t even know about how that works but everytime you imagine something, you imagine some parts of it and the next time you imagine it you only imagine the parts that you imagined before. So, as you grow, you’ll forgot what happened and you only imagine small parts of it.
Latest Answers