\n
What is clear is that the brain must be able to accurately regulate how strong a mental image is to avoid confusion between fantasy and reality. \u201cThe brain has this really careful balancing act that it has to perform,\u201d Naselaris said. \u201cIn some sense it is going to interpret mental imagery as literally as it does visual imagery.\u201d<\/p>\n
They found that the strength of the signal might be read or regulated in the frontal cortex, which analyzes emotions and memories (among its other duties). But it\u2019s not yet clear what determines the vividness of a mental image or the difference between the strength of the imagery signal and the reality threshold. It could be a neurotransmitter, changes to neuronal connections or something totally different, Naselaris said.<\/p>\n
It could even be a different, unidentified subset of neurons that sets the reality threshold and dictates whether a signal should be diverted into a pathway for imagined images or a pathway for genuinely perceived ones\u2014a finding that would tie the first and third hypotheses together neatly, Muckli said.<\/p>\n
Even though the findings are different from his own results, which support the first hypothesis, Muckli likes their line of reasoning. It\u2019s an \u201cexciting paper,\u201d he said. It\u2019s an \u201cintriguing conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n
But imagination is a process that involves much more than just looking at a few lines on a noisy background, said Peter Tse, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College. Imagination, he said, is the capacity to look at what\u2019s in your cupboard and decide what to make for dinner, or (if you\u2019re the Wright brothers) to take a propeller, stick it on a wing and imagine it flying.<\/p>\n
The differences between Perky\u2019s findings and Dijkstra\u2019s could be entirely due to differences in their procedures. But they also hint at another possibility: that we could be perceiving the world differently than our ancestors did.<\/p>\n
Her study didn\u2019t focus on belief in an image\u2019s reality but was more about the \u201cfeeling\u201d of reality, Dijkstra said. The authors speculate that because projected images, video, and other representations of reality are commonplace in the 21st century, our brains may have learned to evaluate reality slightly differently than people did just a century ago.<\/p>\n
Even though participants in this experiment \u201cwere not expecting to see something, it\u2019s still more expected than if you\u2019re in 1910 and you\u2019ve never seen a projector in your life,\u201d Dijkstra said. The reality threshold today is therefore likely much lower than in the past, so it may take an imagined image that\u2019s much more vivid to pass the threshold and confuse the brain.<\/p>\n
A Basis for Hallucinations<\/p>\n
The findings open up questions about whether the mechanism could be relevant to a wide range of conditions in which the distinction between imagination and perception dissolves. Dijkstra speculates, for example, that when people start to drift off to sleep and reality begins blending with the dream world, their reality threshold might be dipping. In conditions like schizophrenia, where there is a \u201cgeneral breakdown of reality,\u201d there could be a calibration issue, Dijkstra said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn psychosis, it could be either that their imagery is so good that it just hits that threshold, or it could be that their threshold is off,\u201d said Karolina Lempert, an assistant professor of psychology at Adelphi University who was not involved in the study. Some studies have found that in people who hallucinate, there\u2019s a sort of sensory hyperactivity, which suggests that the image signal is increased. But more research is needed to establish the mechanism by which hallucinations emerge, she added. \u201cAfter all, most people who experience vivid imagery do not hallucinate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is clear is that the brain must be able to accurately regulate how strong a mental image is to avoid confusion between fantasy and reality. \u201cThe brain has this really careful balancing act that it has to perform,\u201d Naselaris said. \u201cIn some sense it is going to interpret mental imagery as literally as it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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