IMAGINING AND SEEING ARE THE SAME IN BRAIN

Imagining something or actually seeing it are functionally equivalent to the brain, according to some research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to observe the response of the brain in various mental activities.

In the report of their work published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the researchers concentrated on the two areas of the brain, one that responded specifically to faces and the other to scenes of places. They asked volunteers to look at photographs of places or faces and then to later create, with their eyes, a mental image of the same faces or scenes. Whether it was a face or a place, the brain showed an identical response to imagery as it did to actual visual perception.