What?
Where am I?
I was just walking on a beach with Benedict Cumberbatch,
Oh where were we?
Right.
DNews.
Hi there, Julia here for DNews.
Ever been lost in a daydream?
Ever had trouble separating imagination from reality?
Yeah me too.
But there is a difference, and scientists have discovered what it is.
Turns out when you are revelling on a beach with Benedict Cumberbatch your brain is running
in the opposite direction of reality.
Literally.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin identified the neural pathways in which daydreams
and reality travel and they appear to be heading in opposite directions.
The researchers tracked the electrical activity of subjects, using EEG, or electroencephalography.
EEGS are noninvasive sensors placed on the scalp, it looks like a sci-fi hair net.
Some subjects imagined riding a bike while focusing on details, like shapes and colors,
and then watched silent nature videos.
The other subjects watched short videos and then replayed them in their head.
What the scientists found was surprising.
Neural activity seemed to flow in specific directions.
For those imagining scenes, the information flowed from parietal lobe to the occipital
lobe.
From a higher–order region that synthesizes information from the senses to a lower order
region, where the visual information is registered.
When taking in information from reality, the information followed the reverse path, from
the occipital lobe “up” to the parietal lobe.
How about people who seem to confuse reality and daydreams?
They might be lacking a specific fold in the brain, called the paracingulate sulcus, or
PCS.
Those with the fold have an easier time remembering if something actually happened or if they
just imagined it.
They also perform better on memory tests.
The size of the PCS fold varies naturally within people, some people just have larger
ones than others.
Unfortunately, the fold forms just before birth so there’s not much you can do if
you don’t have one or if yours is small.
So where does imagination happen in the brain?
Imagination has been a tricky thing to pin down.
Imagination and creativity used to be considered the domain of the “so-called” right brain.
Which is now pretty much considered junk science.
Some scientists consider the hippocampus to be a prime location for imagination.
It’s active in both imagining and remembering images and events.
This close location could be one of the reasons memory is so unreliable.
Yet researchers from Dartmouth University have found out that the imagination isn’t
isolated to just one part of the brain.
12 regions across the brain seem to play a part in imagining.
The so called mental playground is a large cortical and subcortical network across the
brain.
It’s a place where you can visualize and play around with images.
We can combine shapes or see scenarios which may not even happen in real life.
Which makes sense, since imagining something requires a lot of different processes.
It blends emotions, memory, thoughts, and more to make-up something completely different.
These types of studies can help us understand what makes us separate from other species.
What gives humans our imaginative edge?
And they could potentially lead to new tools to find out what happens when we sleep and
dream.
Or could lead to a new cognitive neuroscientific theory on consciousness.
What do you think?
Do you ever get lost in a daydream?
How contrary to reality is your imagination?
Let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe here for more DNews every
day of the week.