{"id":623153,"date":"2026-04-22T08:38:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T08:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/623153\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T08:38:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T08:38:09","slug":"how-does-imagination-really-work-in-the-brain-new-theory-upends-what-we-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/623153\/","title":{"rendered":"How does imagination really work in the brain? New theory upends what we knew"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your brain is currently expending about a fifth of your body\u2019s energy<\/a>, and almost none of that is being used for what you\u2019re doing right now. Reading these words, feeling the weight of your body in a chair \u2013 all of this together barely changes the rate at which your brain consumes energy, perhaps by as little as 1%.<\/p>\n

The other 99% is used on the activity the brain generates on its own<\/a>: neurons (nerve cells) firing and signalling to each other regardless of whether you\u2019re thinking hard, watching television, dreaming, or simply closing your eyes.<\/p>\n

Even in the brain areas dedicated to vision, the visuals coming in through your eyes<\/a> shape the activity of your neurons less than this internal ongoing action.<\/p>\n

In a paper just published in Psychological Review<\/a>, we argue that our imagination sculpts the images we see in our mind\u2019s eye by carving into this background brain activity. In fact, imagination may have more to do with the brain activity it silences than with the activity it creates.<\/p>\n

Imagining as seeing in reverse<\/p>\n

Consider how \u201cseeing\u201d is understood to work. Light enters the eyes and sparks neural signals. These travel through a sequence of brain regions dedicated to vision, each building on the work of the last.<\/p>\n

The earliest regions pick out simple features such as edges and lines. The next combine those into shapes. The ones after that recognise objects, and those at the top of the sequence assemble whole faces and scenes.<\/p>\n

Neuroscientists call this \u201cfeedforward activity<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the gradual transformation of raw light into something you can name, whether it\u2019s a dog, a friend, or both.<\/p>\n

In brain science, the standard view is that visual imagination is this original seeing process run in reverse<\/a>, from within your mind rather than from light entering your eyes.<\/p>\n

So, when you hold the face of a friend in mind, you start with an abstract idea of them \u2013 a memory or a name, pulled from the filing cabinet of regions that sit beyond the visual system itself.<\/p>\n

That idea travels back down through the visual sequence into the early visual areas, which serve as your brain\u2019s workshop where a face would normally be reconstructed from its parts \u2013 the curve of a jawline, the specific shade of an eye. These downward signals are called \u201cfeedback activity<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

A signal through the static<\/p>\n

However, prior research shows this feedback activity doesn\u2019t drive visual neurons to fire<\/a> in the same way as when you actually see something.<\/p>\n

At least in the brain regions early in the vision process, feedback instead modulates brain activity. This means it increases or decreases the activity of the brain cells<\/a>, reshaping what those neurons are already doing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even behind closed eyes, early visual brain areas keep producing shifting patterns<\/a> of neural activity resembling those the brain uses to process real vision.<\/p>\n

Imagination doesn\u2019t need to build a face from scratch. The raw material is already there. In the internal rumblings of your visual areas, fragments of every face you know are drifting through at low volume. Your friend\u2019s face, even now, is passing through in pieces, scattered and unrecognised. What imagining does is hold still the currents that would otherwise carry those pieces away.<\/p>\n

All that\u2019s needed is a small, targeted suppression of neurons that are pulled by brain activity in a different direction, and your friend\u2019s face settles out of the noise, like a signal carving its way through static.<\/p>\n

Steering the brain<\/p>\n

In mice, artificially switching on as few as 14 neurons in a sensory brain region<\/a> is enough for the animal to notice it and lick a sugar-water spout in response. This shows how small an intervention in the brain can be while still steering behaviour. <\/p>\n

While we don\u2019t know how many neurons are needed to steer internal activity into a conscious experience of imagination in humans, growing evidence shows the importance of dampening neural activity.<\/p>\n

In our earlier experiments<\/a>, when people imagined something, the fingerprint it left on their behaviour matched suppression of neuronal activity \u2013 not firing. Other researchers have since found the same pattern<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Other lines of evidence strengthen our theory, too. About one in 100 people<\/a> have aphantasia, which means they can\u2019t form mental images at all. One in 30 form these images so vividly they approach the intensity of images we actually see, known as hyperphantasia.<\/p>\n

Research has found that people with weaker mental imagery have more excitable early visual areas<\/a>, where neurons fire more readily on their own. This is consistent with a visual system whose spontaneous patterns are harder to hold in shape.<\/p>\n

Taking all this together, the spontaneous activity reshaping hypothesis<\/a> \u2013 our new theory that imagination carves images out of the steady stream of ongoing brain activity \u2013 explains why imagination usually feels weaker than sight. It also explains why we rarely lose track of which is which.<\/p>\n

Visual perception arrives with a strength and regularity the brain\u2019s own internal patterns don\u2019t match. Imagination works with those patterns rather than against them, reshaping what is already there into something we can almost see.\"The<\/p>\n

Thomas Pace<\/a>, Researcher and Lecturer at the Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast<\/a> and Roger Koenig-Robert<\/a>, Senior Research Fellow, Graduate School of Health, University of Technology Sydney<\/a>; UNSW Sydney<\/a><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your brain is currently expending about a fifth of your body\u2019s energy, and almost none of that is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,1721,337,128,88733],"class_list":["post-623153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-opinion","tag-research","tag-science","tag-science-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}