Visual mental imagery

Visual mental imagery refers to the perceptual experience of “seeing in the mind’s eye.” Mario Senden and coworkers published an article in 2019 that addressed the subjective correspondence known between imagined images and physical image perception and further showed that correspondence exists in their neural representations (https://dol.org/10.1007/s00429-019-01828-6). Visual “imagery-based reconstructions of letter shapes are recognizable [by fMRI] and preserve their physical geometry” in the visual cortex. Their results confirmed “that visual mental imagery preserves perceptual topographic organization” in the brain. Images of letters directly perceived by sight were generated via waveforms (photons) transmitted from the letters perceived and transmitted through the retina and optic nerve to the visual cortex. Of great interest in their study is that imagined letters were also detected in visual cortex by fMRI with the same “physical geometry” or topography. This finding suggests that mental imagery by the cognitive immaterial mind also generates waveforms that are transmitted through coherent neural networks to topographically corresponding visual cortex as neural codes. It is the cognitive mind that interprets the codes as perceived, or imagined, imagery. One can reason that the Mind of God has the power to stimulate neural networks to generate images as in dreams and visions?

Stan Lennard