I now return to posting blogs that address findings from the neurosciences that give compelling support to dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the material synaptic networks that are involved in cognition.
My first post addresses the findings of O’Craven and Kanwisher reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12:6, (2000) pp. 1013-1023. The authors refer to the “mind’s eye” of mental imagery that engages many of the same cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in visual perception of physical stimuli. Cortical regions selectively involved in the visual processing of a material object physically present show similar selectivity during mental imagery in the absence of a material stimulus. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses in the brain were robust to the extent that a single mental event could be determined with high accuracy in the inspection of raw fMRI data. Their “data are the first to show that the content of a single thought can be inferred from its fMRI signature alone.” I conclude with the authors’ statement, “The present study takes the final step . . . by showing that content-specific neural activity in . . . visual cortex can be created by a pure act of will even when no visual stimulus is present at all.”
The stimulus, whether real or imagined, could have generated wave forms actualized with specification within neural codes transmitting information through synaptic networks interpreted as to meaning by the cognitive mind of the subject.