Overview
- The Science paper, published Thursday, reports that mental images reawaken a subset of the very cells that fired when people first saw the pictures.
- Researchers at Cedars-Sinai recorded activity from more than 700 neurons in the ventral temporal cortex of 16 adults with epilepsy who already had clinical electrodes implanted.
- About 450 of those cells responded selectively to image categories such as faces or text, and most of these tuned to specific visual features identified with machine learning.
- In a follow-up task with six participants, roughly 40% of neurons active during viewing also responded during imagination, and neural data let the team reconstruct the recalled images.
- The results back theories that imagery reuses the brain’s perception code, though the evidence is early given the small, clinically selected sample and recordings from one brain area.