If an image is in our head and we are blindfolded or blind does the brain treat that image the same as if it were created visually?
For today’s $64,000 question…
Thank you for not putting this in GQ!
I suspect we are still trying to find out “how the brain does” pretty much anything.
There is some data on memory creation and storage. Sight and synthetic vision are probably years away from even the most primitive comprehension.
If we really understood how pain works, we might not still be playing with brain chemistry to mask it.
If we understood depression, maybe we could do better than the current anti-depressives, which just slow down the synapses.
Any neuroscientists out there?
To at least some degree yes; imagining something creates a sort of distorted image of what is being imagined on the visual cortex that can be detected with the right instrumentation. And in a related subject, imagining using a tool causes the motor context to act much as if the tool was actually being used.
Brains are biologically expensive; it makes sense that as much as possible the same tissue would be used for multiple similar tasks.
No great answer off the top of my head without digging back into a bunch of general audience books to refresh my memory on details, but some books you should conciser are The Mind’s Eye (and anything else) by Oliver Sacks and Beyond the Zonules of Zinn by David Bainbridge.
These don’t necessarily follow. We know the exact tracts that pain signals take into the brain, actually. Down to the individual fibrils, and we know every last bit of the anatomy. While there is a bit of a mystery what the brain does with the pain signals, we know for certain that if we suppress conduction on those individual fibrils, we completely block pain. There is a form of spinal pain block that works this way, but there are many problems associated with it.
The point is, there is a vast gulf between knowing what the exact problem is and being able to do anything about it. Any sort of brain surgery to insert probes to manipulate the signaling is quite hazardous, and unfortunately, that’s probably the only way that the laws of physics in our universe will allow us to truly tamper with this kind of thing.
There most likely are “memory” regions inside the visual cortex that serve an analogous role to the “framebuffer” in a camera. I don’t know how accurate state of the art knowledge is on that.
Had a chance to browse through a few more books in my collection. Especially of use to you would be Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman (especially Chapter 2: The Testimony of the Senses) and The Tell-Tale Brain by V S Ramachandran (especially Chapter 2: Seeing and Knowing.) The Google Books previews will give you a taste of it.
That was interesting, exactly what I had in mind when I posted