How our brain distinguishes imagination and reality

A post by Nadine Dijkstra

Did you really just see something appear in the corner of your eye or was it just your imagination? For most of us, the difference between what we imagine and what we see seems very clear. However, the more we learn about the neuroscience of imagination, the more puzzling it is that we don’t confuse our internally generated experiences with reality more often.

Over the last decades, the development of neuroimaging methods suitable for use in humans - such as functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) and magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) – have made it possible to actually look into people’s heads while they are imagining. This research has revealed that when we imagine something, many of the same brain areas get activated as when we perceive that same thing.

For example, when we imagine the face of a loved one, the same parts of the high-level fusiform gyrus – a brain area located in the lower lobe of the cortex, sitting close to ear level in the skull – become activated as when we would actually see that person in real life (Ishai, 2002; Ishai et al., 2000). Similarly, when we imagine alternating black and white lines of a certain orientation (i.e. ‘a grating stimulus’, the classical image used in visual neuroscience research), the low-level primary visual cortex (V1) – the neural entry point for signals coming from the eyes, located all the way at the back of the brain – becomes activated in a similar way as when we would actually see those same lines (Albers et al., 2013; Harrison & Tong, 2009; Rademaker et al., 2019). Dozens of neuroimaging studies have shown neural overlap between imagined and perceived stimuli of all kinds, from simple shapes and lines to objects to full scenes (for reviews, see Dijkstra et al., 2019; Pearson, 2019). This poses a fundamental question: given that the brain signals of imagery and perception are similar, how are we able to keep apart imagination and reality?

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Imagination from the First-Person Perspective, Possibility, and the Self

A post by Clas Weber

Imagine that not just the words you are reading right now on your screen are generated by a computer, but that everything you see, hear, smell, and feel is part of a hyper-detailed simulation created by a giant supercomputer. More shockingly, imagine that the stream of consciousness you are experiencing right now is itself generated by that computer. You yourself are part of the simulation.

Next, imagine that you wake up one morning and find yourself lying on an armour-like back. When you lift your head, you can see your brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. Your many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of you, wave about helplessly, as you think: I have been transformed into a giant Kafkaesque beetle.

Finally, imagine that you are Napoleon riding a horse, looking out on the battlefield at Austerlitz, surveying your troops. You feel confident that you will win the imminent battle. In the next moment, you find yourself standing over Donald Trump, and next to Theresa May, Shinzo Abe, Emmanuel Macron, and other heads of states. You are no longer Napoleon. Now you are Angela Merkel, negotiating with other world leaders during a G7 meeting.

These prompts elicit a special form of imagination where we picture a scenario from the first-person perspective or from the inside. We simulate what it would feel like to be the subject at the centre of the scenario. They also show how flexible this form of imagination is: we can, it seems, imagine being avatars in a computer simulation, being members of a different species, or even being two different people successively.   

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It's nice and wise to fantasize

A post by Mathilde Cappelli

It is a striking fact that, while much work has been devoted to the nature, norms, and value of imagination, fantasy has received scarce attention. This may partly be because fantasy is often conceived of as a mere subcategory of imagination, from which not much can be learned (Cherry, 1985; Kershnar, 2005; Smuts, 2016). But inquiring into the nature, norms, and value of fantasy can shed light on many interrelated issues, from the nature of desire to that of pleasure and imagination. In this post, I will present some thoughts on the nature and value of fantasy.

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Children’s imagining about facts

A post by Anežka Kuzmičová

This is a research story, or the beginning of one, from a field other than most of the Junkyard. The field is literacy research – if we define literacy broadly enough. In the centre of this field is children’s imagining with varied texts and other stimuli (videos, spoken words, material objects), but studied differently from how it is studied in experimental research. My cross-disciplinary research group and I invite children to introspect, in the first person and their own words, rather than perform controlled tasks. The children’s introspection is supported with specially designed tangible props – picture cards, toys, colour-coded cutouts but also books. The idea behind such work is to deepen general understanding of children’s everyday experiences. We point out preexisting differences and groupings among children who otherwise tend to be treated as an experientially homogeneous population. We also revisit biases in the discourse and practice that affect children’s lives. One such bias is the general neglect of nonfiction as a springboard for imaginative activity, and the perception of young nonfiction readers as unimaginative individuals (Mar et al., 2006) or even non-readers (Mackey, 2020).

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Mental imagery and choreographic practices: a new avenue for the intention-motor interface

A post by Silvana Pani

“First thing to do is in your mind create a very simple, literal freehand sketch or drawing. [...] Choose a beginning on that sketch and then describe it physically or draw it – the whole thing rather than just an element of the whole thing.”
-- Wayne McGregor, choreographer

Choreography is one of the best examples of the hurdles and miracles of trying to put a plan into action. Over and above being a usually cooperative practice, choreography requires skilled coordination of verbal instructions with sensorimotor information. Verbal instructions are one main vehicle of the choreographer’s intentions and one way for dancers to think about movements. Sensorimotor information, on the other hand, is what verbal instructions are translated into and constrained by before and during movement performance.

From deliberation to actual enactment, the nature of thought processes underlying both skilled and ordinary bodily movements (like picking up a cup) is far from clear. Philosophers have often conceived of intentions as building blocks of plans. Our planning activity is thus responsible for deliberation and practical reasoning as well as for the preliminary rehearsal of actions (not all rehearsal of action happens at the planning level, though).

The idea that intentions are propositional states figuring in practical reasoning is a traditional platitude (e.g. Bratman 1987). The idea that motor representations, qua immediate antecedents of actions, are non-propositional in nature is a more recent view and quite widely accepted (e.g. Jeannerod 2006). The question of how differently formatted contents, that is, contents that are propositionally and motorically formatted come together towards the realization of some action goal or set of goals, such as a new choreographic work, has been dubbed the “Interface challenge” by Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014).

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The thirst for imagination

A post by Margherita Arcangeli

Sometimes it is a good time to take stock: at the end of the year, when some anniversary is coming up, but also after a long summer break.

I have been recently prompted to reflect on what has been done on imagination over the last few years: an impressive amount of work! Trying to summarise what scholars have recently written about the imagination may seem like trying to empty the sea with a spoon: an impossible and vain task. So I started to look for a useful compass to navigate the growing literature, and a powerful analogy advanced by Anna Abraham in the concluding note to The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination gave me a hint. She points out that imagination bears striking similarities with water:

“Imagination can manifest in wildly different forms from the tangible to the intangible. Its workings range from calm and predictable to volatile and unpredictable. It is a fundamental part of our physiological make-up, permeating our very being, and it is essential to our mental life. It is nourishing and constructive yet can also be overwhelming and destructive. It is quiet. It is dogged. It shapes. It wields. It fits. It flows. It pushes against fault lines. It breaks away. It lacks definition, yet it is formidable.” (Abraham 2020: 814)

I realized that comparing imagination to water can help us see different attitudes scholars have taken, and may take, towards it. At least three categories can be recognised: 1) imagination chemists, 2) imagination engineers, and 3) “imaginographers”.

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Conference Report “How Does It Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy”

A Conference Report by Christiana Werner

The conference “Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy” in Liverpool, held June 26-28 2023, was the final conference of the DFG/AHRC-project with the same title as the conference.  The German part of the project was located at the University of Duisburg-Essen with Neil Roughley, Katharina Sodoma, and Christiana Werner. On the English side of the project were Thomas Schramme and Elizabeth Ventham at the University of Liverpool. At the conference, the four members of the project presented their recent work related to the project. There were also presentations by four invited guests: Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College), Yujia Song (Salisbury University), Antti Kaupinnen (University of Helsinki), and Monika Betzler (LMU Munich).

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Summer Hiatus

Your favorite imagination blog will be taking its usual summer hiatus for the next couple of months. We wish all of our friends of imagination a restful and fruitful summer break, and we look forward to bringing you more excellent content in late August.

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Misery Enough, No Poetry

A post by Nicholas Whittaker

There is something important in the oxymoronism implicit in the phrase “the black avant-garde.” A well-meaning reader (or one clutching tightly to their purported “antiracism”) will chafe at the suggestion that “blackness” and “avant-garde” become paradoxical when conjoined. The easiest way to resist it is to generate examples. Take, say, Julius Eastman, or Adrian Piper; M. Nourbese Phillip, Amiri Baraka; Alice Coltrane, Bill Gunn; Ben Patterson, Nathaniel Mackey; Cecil Taylor, Julie Dash. Such luminaries seem to uncontroversially occupy the place in art history generally reserved for the likes of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, David Lynch and Gertrude Stein. If the black avant-garde is an incoherent concept, why can we list so many examples with such ease?

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Ignorance as Imaginative Resistance

A post by K. Bailey Thomas

In this post I provide a brief account of imaginative resistance that is rooted in ignorance. To be clear: here, and throughout the piece, I am referring to ignorance as ideology unless otherwise specified. This means I am considering facets and manifestations of ignorance that are not accidental or blameless but are manufactured specifically to harm others. This thought piece is inspired by my current manuscript-in-progress wherein I am exploring how ignorance is an essential building block in the construction of oppressive resistant imaginations. I am particularly interested in examining how our current understanding of ignorance relies too heavily on presumptions of innocence on behalf of epistemic agents, which allows an immediate association of ignorance with one being not at fault or responsible for their actions. By the end of this piece, I hope to provide a generative account of how what I call “Insidious Ignorance” remains a core component in both the construction and maintenance of resistant imaginations, resulting in various social, ethical, and epistemic harms.

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Conference Report: Stanford Imagination Workshop

A conference report by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz

In recent years, imagination has become a renewed topic of interest for political philosophers. While political and philosophical concern with the imagination has a long history within Western thought, it has tended to be a marginal or ignored topic in contemporary political theory, in part due to the dominance of analytic moral philosophy and Kantian-inspired models of deliberation and public reasoning over the past few decades.

However, various developments in the early twenty-first century – such as the rise of new digital communication technologies, democratic backsliding, and new voices and strategies in political activism – have placed imagination back on the agenda of political philosophers. So far, many of these new explorations of the politics of imagination (and the imagination of politics) have occurred in isolation from each other. 

The Stanford Imagination Workshop, organized by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz with the generous support of the Stanford Humanities Center, The Zephyr Institute, and the Transformation of Democracy Workshop, was envisioned as an attempt to provide scholars a formal and institutional opportunity to converse and exchange ideas.

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Looking for a Non-Representational Enactivist Imagining in the Junkyard of the Imagination: (it may not be there)

A post by Janine Jones

There seems to be a general consensus that imagining — sometimes thought of as seeing with the mind’s eye — is inherently representational. How could re-presenting to ‘the mind’s eye’ what is not present fail to involve a representation of that which is presently absent. Isn’t such a form of representation at the heart of what it is to imagine?

In this post, I take advantage of the bounteous nature of junkyards. I participate in a form of engagement that both philosophy and junkyards invite:  wondering and wandering. I wonder as I wander through the junkyard trying to imagine how what I am trying to imagine could be in the junkyard. I am trying to discover a type of imagining, in the junkyard, that bears representational constituents (perhaps even necessarily so), but which is, itself, non-representational, at least at the non-sub-personal level.

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What Is Mental Imagery Good For? Mental Rotation in Aphantasia as A Case Study

A post by Jorge Morales

“I just learned something about you and it is blowing my [expletive] mind. This is not a joke. [...] It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh. Here it is: You can visualize things in your mind.” 

Blake Ross, Mozilla Firefox Co-Founder, April 2016

Late one night, Blake Ross discovered something incredible (as in almost impossible to believe): other people had visual imagery! Like Ross, a surprisingly large number of people (about 3-5% of the population) have aphantasia, which is characterized as the lack of mental imagery.

Seeing things in the mind’s eye is an important faculty during development, in art and science, and it has a tight relation to cognitive skills such as mental simulation, short-term memory and mental rotation, among many others (Pearson et al., 2015). Despite this, aphantasics do not seem to suffer from any noticeable deficit. Blake Ross founded Mozilla without even realizing he was aphantasic (or those close to him noticing anything was amiss). Millions more live oblivious of how different their mental imagery skills are (Lupyan et al., 2023).

But how can this be? One possible implication is that imagination—and perhaps even consciousness in general—is not as useful as we might think: people do not even notice when this entire faculty is absent! This, of course, goes against common sense and millennia of research. Philosophers have discussed the importance of imagination at least since Plato (Bundy, 1922; Schwartz, 2020) and Aristotle (1993), scientists have studied it and its effects for more than a hundred years (e.g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1996; Perky, 1910; Shepard & Cooper, 1982), and most of us seem to use it all the time. Could mental imagery be more epiphenomenal than we thought?

To address this question, I will focus on mental rotation and aphantasia as a case study. I will pose more questions than answers, but in the end, we may see that whatever the function of mental imagery during mental rotation is, it must be an incredibly subtle one.

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Salzburg Workshop on Imagistic Cognition: Some Intersecting Themes

A conference report by Amy Kind

How do we distinguish imagination and reality?  How do visual content and social context influence pictorial meaning?  What role does mental imagery play in belief?  And how do you make room in your refrigerator when you need to fit in a bunch of leftovers after a large social gathering?  These are just a few of the many questions addressed at the Second Salzburg Workshop on Imagistic Cognition, held last week.  Organized by Christopher Gauker (University of Salzburg) and Bence Nanay (Antwerp) as part of their Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition project (jointly funded by the Austrian FWF and the Belgian FWO), the workshop brought together 12 speakers drawn from disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience for three days of productive dialogue about the nature and extent of imagistic cognition.

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Book Symposium: Dunin-Kozicka Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Can we be creative in using rulers and thinking in images?

And why even ask such an odd question? First, any time when we use rulers we recreate an old simple procedure — we apply the ruler to the thing to be measured and read the standardized measurement results. We are substantially uncreative then. Second, when we think in images our chances to come up with something new are good — for not only can we operate with images in many ways (e.g. rotating them, combining them, seeing them from a different perspective) but we can also arrive at a new image as a result of such operations. Indeed, we can be original when thinking in images. Why even put rulers and images together in this question then?

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Book Symposium: Rucińska Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Piotr Kozak’s Thinking in Images is an insightful book that deals with some of the most fundamental questions regarding imagistic thinking, including: a) what is thinking?; b) what are images?; and c) what, specifically, is thinking with images?

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Book Symposium: Tooming Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Thinking in Images is a rich and elaborate book that defends a view that images play an indispensable role in thinking as measurement devices. In articulating that view, Kozak covers a lot of ground by critically engaging with a wide range of literature and carving out new paths in the theoretical landscape.

Inevitably, this short commentary cannot to justice to the wealth of detail in Kozak’s book. For instance, the reader can find there a fascinating discussion of the representational role of knot diagrams and black hole pictures. The book also presents an innovative account of recognition-based identification in terms of construction invariants. These are just a couple of examples of what the book offers but that I don’t have space to discuss here.

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Book Symposium: Introduction from Piotr Kozak

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Piotr Kozak’s recent book: Thinking in Images: Imagistic Cognition and Non-propositional Content. Today we begin with an introduction from Piotr Kozak. Commentaries will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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When we are asked how many windows are in our flat, we will probably form and inspect a mental image of the flat and count the windows. If architects design a house, they use drawings. You may use a map to get from Berlin to Paris. These are instantiations of what can be called imagistic thinking. The main question of my book is what such thinking can be.

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Empathy beyond accuracy

A post by Jimena Clavel

Is there any value to empathy when it is just an exercise in misunderstanding? I think there is. Consider the following case. In a recent episode of This American Life, “Nine Months Later”, we hear the story of Lilly, a seventeen-year-old teenager, who wanted an abortion after Roe v. Wade had been overturned (see Glass, 2023). Lilly found out about her pregnancy in the ER, with her dad in the room. She was shocked and she could tell that her dad was shocked too: but was he also angry? Mad at her? What was going on in his mind? She wanted to know. In the next few days, Lilly started making arrangements. Her dad checked in with her, but would say very little. For Lilly, this was a sign of disappointment. As it turns out, this was not how he felt. He might have been angry at first. But this was not all. When he heard about her decision, Lilly’s dad was surprised. With Lilly’s personality in mind, he thought that she might not want an abortion. He also realized that his own thoughts about what Lilly should do were selfish. So once she told him what she wanted, he kept to himself to give her space. He was worried that he might put pressure on her otherwise.

Something that caught my attention about Lilly’s story are the attempts both she and her dad made of reading each other’s minds. Both were concerned about what the other thought and both tried to put themselves in each other’s shoes. Their exercises, though, were not accurate. They did not lead to understanding: neither Lilly nor her dad apprehended each other’s mental states.

This conclusion, though, bugs me. These exercises are only unsuccessful when we think about them in terms of accuracy. But this leaves out other aspects of perspective-taking. For instance, although inaccurate, the exercises deployed by Lilly and her dad are caring: they acted with each other in mind. There can be something valuable and rich about these exercises despite their inaccuracy. However, to truly see this value we need to move away from accuracy as a measure of success. Let me rehearse my case for this.

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Imagination and Oppression

A post by Nils-Hennes Stear and Robin Zheng

Suppose you visualize punching a colleague, indulge a risqué sexual fantasy, or engage in blackface. Suppose further that, in doing so, you mean nothing by it, doing so in a spirit of free play. Finally, suppose no harmful consequences ensue. One might nonetheless wonder: is there something inherently wrong with so imagining? This is the question we attempt to answer in ‘Imagining in Oppressive Contexts’.

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