Seeing and imagining activate some of the same brain cells

Seeing and imagining activate some of the same brain cells Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now Menu All Topics Health Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology View All Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes View All Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment View All Physics Materials Science Quantum Physics Particle Physics View All Space Astronomy Planetary Science Cosmology View All Magazine Menu All Stories Multimedia Reviews Puzzles Collections Educator Portal Century of Science Unsung characters Coronavirus Outbreak Newsletters Investors Lab About SN Explores Our Store SIGN IN Donate Home INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SINCE 1921 SIGN IN Search Open search Close search Home INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SINCE 1921 All Topics Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes Physics Materials Science Quantum Physics Particle Physics Space Astronomy Planetary Science Cosmology Tech Computing Artificial Intelligence Chemistry Math Science & Society All Topics Health Humans Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology Recent posts in Humans Science & Society Snippets of hair may expose chronic stress in war refugees By Sujata GuptaApril 6, 2026 Health & Medicine When our minds wander to the body, it may affect mental health By Diana KwonApril 3, 2026 Health & Medicine Supreme Court ruling on ‘conversion therapy’ puts medical talk in the hot seat By Aimee CunninghamApril 3, 2026 Life Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes Recent posts in Life Neuroscience Seeing and imagining activate some of the same brain cells By Diana KwonApril 9, 2026 Paleontology Mummified reptile hints at the origins of how we breathe By Carolyn GramlingApril 8, 2026 Paleontology The ‘oldest fossil octopus’ is probably another animal By Jake BuehlerApril 7, 2026 Earth Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment Recent posts in Earth Climate Emperor penguins are marching toward extinction. 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Olga Pankova/Moment/Getty Images By Diana Kwon April 9, 2026 at 2:00 pm Share this:Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print Listen to this article This is a human-written story voiced by AI. Got feedback? Take our survey . (See our AI policy here .) The ability to conjure pictures in the mind’s eye enables us to remember the past and imagine the future. It also allows us to plan, navigate and create works of art. In a study published April 9 in Science, researchers report that imagining an object reactivates some of the same neurons involved in seeing it in the first place, providing new insight into how mental imagery is produced in the brain. Previous research had hinted that the neurons involved in perceiving and imagining images overlapped. These studies used various methods, such as asking participants to view and then imagine pictures while lying in a functional MRI scanner, to show that the same brain regions were involved in these processes. But whether the same individual neurons were involved remained an open question, says Ueli Rutishauser, a neuroscientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. Because measuring neuronal activity requires electrodes in the brain, Rutishauser and colleagues studied 16 adults with epilepsy who had already had electrodes temporarily implanted into their brains to identify the origin of their seizures. Participants viewed hundreds of images from five categories — faces, text, plants, animals and everyday objects — while researchers recorded activity from over 700 neurons in the ventral temporal cortex, a region involved in representing visual objects. Of those, about 450 selectively responded to individual categories. Machine learning then revealed that 80 percent of those category-responsive neurons were selective to specific visual features within the images. The researchers then examined what happened when six of the participants conjured mental images of some of the objects they had previously viewed. About 40 percent of the neurons active during perception responded similarly when objects were visualized in the mind’s eye. To confirm their findings, the researchers used data from the neural recordings to reconstruct the pictures the participants were asked to recall. These observations support the idea that the human brain implements what some call a generative model, where the reactivation of the neural code used to perceive objects enables us to create mental images, says study coauthor Varun Wadia, a neuroscientist at Cedars-Sinai. In addition, because disruptions to mental imagery may contribute to certain psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and PTSD, better understanding the neuronal underpinning of mental imagery could pave the way for new therapies, Wadia adds. Scientists had built hypotheses about mental imagery and other cognitive processes on the assumption that the same neurons are active during perception and imagination, but this had not been proven until now, says Nadine Dijkstra, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved in this work. “This was a study that the field was waiting for.” Whether similar mechanisms are at play in more co