Introducing the brain: real or imaginary (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 14, 2025, 21:03 (13 days ago) @ David Turell

The areas controlling tis is found:

https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/strikingly-simple-dial-in-the-brain-may-help...

"Imagination relies on an ability to differentiate between what's real and what's not — and now, scientists have uncovered potential brain mechanisms that make this distinction possible. These, they hypothesize, may be significant in conditions like schizophrenia, which can affect people's perception of reality.

"A paper published June 5 in the journal Neuron explored these mechanisms. Scientists know from previous research that a specific brain region — the fusiform gyrus, a large ridge that runs across two lobes of the brain — is active both when you see something in reality and when you imagine something, first study author Nadine Dijkstra, a neuroscientist at University College London, told Live Science.

"'But what we found was that the activity levels in that region predicted whether or not you think something is real, irrespective of whether you see or imagine it," she explained.

"The fusiform gyrus is involved in high-level visual processing, such as identifying objects and people's faces from their appearance. The study suggests that during imagination, the signal strength is weaker compared with during perception; this difference in signal strength enables the brain to distinguish between the two. That is, if the activity crosses a certain threshold, the brain interprets it as reality.

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"The fMRI scans helped the researchers monitor the patterns of activity in specific parts of the brain associated with perception and imagination. The fusiform gyrus was active both when the lines were imaginary and when they were real. However, when the activity crossed a certain threshold, the study participants assumed it was real, Dijkstra said.

"'In general, the activation during imagination [alone] is not strong enough to cross this threshold," she added.

"When the activity in the fusiform gyrus went up, so did the activity of the anterior insula, a region in the brain's prefrontal cortex, which is broadly responsible for cognitive behaviors like decision-making and problem-solving. It's almost as if the anterior insula "reads out" a reality signal from the fusiform gyrus, the researchers noted in their paper. However, the mechanism behind this connection between the two brain areas is still unclear.

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"The study suggests "our sense of reality is a judgment call based on signal strength, and by its very design, this system can be influenced by the power of our own mind," he told Live Science in an email. It's a "finding that helps explain how reality monitoring can fail, and lays the foundation for understanding complex experiences like hallucinations.'"

Comment: this is an early step in this aspect of brain research. Our brain must have a control of this sort, since we have such enormous intellectual capacity for imagination. I think lower forms of brains do not have this and it is a de novo development.