“As a neuroscientist, I’m encouraged that this could be a window into how your brain generates consciousness through your lived reality.”
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As a cognitive neuroscientist, part of my research involves studying how the brain creates visual representations of the world—both the real world and the world that exists only in our imaginations: made up of memories, daydreams, or future plans. I’m interested in what David Chalmers calls the “hard problem of consciousness,” how brain activity leads to conscious, subjective experiences. Observing the brain as it perceives or creates mental imagery, I believe, can give us insight into the neurological functions that give rise to consciousness.
To do this kind of research, my colleagues and I put people in an fMRI machine (a specialized scanner that maps brain activity in real time) and ask them to—for example—look at a picture of an apple and then close their eyes and imagine the apple. By doing this, we’ve observed some interesting similarities and important distinctions between what happens in your brain while you are perceiving images in front of you versus what happens when you are creating images from scratch. But we’ve also run into a fascinating subset of people who cannot create mental imagery at all.
About 3 percent of the population has aphantasia, the lack of a so-called mind’s eye. When they close their eyes and imagine an apple, try as they might, they can’t. They may be able to conjure the sweet taste or smell of the fruit, or the feel of it in their hand, but the color and shape of an apple won’t materialize. Most people with aphantasia don’t know they have it, including, as it turned out, my own father and sister, who learned about this quirk of their brains from the kinds of dinner table conversations neuroscientists are wont to start.
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