(YouTube) Why don't we hallucinate our mental images? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxY3RSexbzg Alexander Sulfaro on #aphantasia and #hyperphantasia, #MentalImagery. Have you ever wondered why mental images aren't as vivid as real images? And what's the difference between imagining something and hallucinating it?

This paper from 2020 by Rebecca Keogh, Johanna Bergmann and Joel Pearson shows that electrical manipulation of the excitability of neurons in the prefrontal and visual cortices can be used to temporarily increase or decrease vividness of mental imagery (at least for people with some visual imagery): https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.50232

Mike Perrotta provides some background, and makes the research a little more accessible for the layperson in this 2021 article for the Aphantasia Network: https://aphantasia.com/article/science/shocking-insights/

#aphantasia #tDCS #TMS #PrefrontalCortex #VisualCortex #MentalImagery #neuroscience

“The Temporal Lobe” is finally out in print and I couldn’t be happier! My first book chapter, and my name is among so many great authors and contributors (Catani, Amunts, Doricchi, Cohen, Migliaccio… among many others).
Check out the Table of Contents below, and I look forward to hearing from you all with comments and ideas on the cognitive computational model I drew to explain #/Human #MentalImagery

Edited by Miceli, Navarro, and Bartolomeo for the Handbook of Clinical Neurology / Elsevier.

Does anyone have any behavioural measures of involuntary mental imagery that they would care to recommend?

Please boost/share to get as many eyes on this as possible. We've been looking for a while and are not coming up with anything that is quite right.

#Psychology #Research #CognitivePsychology #MentalImagery #Vision #Psychophysics #neuropsychology

Updated preprint: Fundamental constraints on distinguishing reality from imagination https://psyarxiv.com/bw872 "when virtual or imagined signals are strong enough, they become indistinguishable from reality"; by Nadine Dijkstra and Steve Fleming @smfleming #neuroscience #MentalImagery #VR #SSD