Peering into the Mind’s Eye

With eyes closed, see an apple in your mind, surrounded by a black vacuum. Make the image as vivid as possible. Observe the vibrancy of the colors, and the subtle patterns of imperfection across the apple’s surface. Keep the shape as solid as possible, not allowing it to shift or change.

If you’re having trouble, you can try using the picture above as a visual aid before closing your eyes.

Unless you are a good visualizer, you’ll anyhow notice how hard it is to fully control what you are seeing, and how the apple won’t stay entirely stable under the gaze of your mind’s eye. Depending on where your mind wants to go, it might move about, start spinning around its own axis, or change back and forth in size or hue.

The image you see might also appear dull and unclear. You might in fact be unable to see any apple at all. Or, you might be among those who are able to see the apple as vividly as in real life.

The Mind’s Eyes, Ears and Nose

Now, try doing the same exercise for your other senses. You can pick the imagery yourself. While typing this, I thought of someone hammering a nail into a wall; the smell of cinnamon; the taste of licorice; the touch of grass under my feet in the park in summer.

In any case, pick something vivid, but which you can still isolate to one sense as much as possible.

Notice how this too is quite difficult, as feeling the touch of grass might conjure up images and sounds. Once you have isolated each sense, try combining them into scenes: An apple in black vacuum, the sound of a nail being hammered into a wall, and the smell of cinnamon, all together. If this feels difficult, it just means you’re like most people.

Fifty Shades of Eigengrau

You probably noticed in the above experiments that you don’t perceive mental images as well as you perceive things in the external world. The images usually come through less vivid and less specific than what you perceive externally.

If you close your eyes and clear your mind for a moment, you will perceive a darkness which if you ‘look’ at it is slightly more gray than black. This darkness is known as the ‘Eigengrau’ (German for ‘intrinsic gray’), and is the canvas onto which all mental imagery is painted.

As with most things, the ability to visualize onto this canvas is unevenly distributed among individuals. Most people are able to visualize objects and scenes, but they come across as less vivid than what we perceive through our external senses.

If you cannot get these exercises to work at all, and your attempts to summon mental images are met only with the darkness of the eigengrau, you might have a condition known as aphantasia.

This opposite, where your experience of the images you see in your mind as vivid as those you perceive with your real-world senses, is known as hyperphantasia.

Exactly where you fall on this scale can be measured by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ). Most people fall somewhere in between the two extremes, with a canvas onto which thoughts can be visualized, but where it is always less vivid than what is perceived through the external senses.

Mental Imagery

What you have been doing so far in this article, is using your ‘mind’s eye’ to generate what is called ‘mental imagery’. In simple terms, the mind’s eye is that which produces, and mental imagery is that which is produced. Using this profoundly potent cognitive tool, you are generating sensory output inside your own mind, without sensory input from the world around you.

Notice that your brain has the innate capacity to generate sensory information separate from the external world. This sensory information is separate from the physical world inasmuch as it relies on your brain’s ability to generate it on its own, rather than using its senses to interpret the outside world.

External and Internal Senses Overlap

While most of us like to keep a clear separation between what is real and what is ‘just imagination’, these two worlds are perhaps closer to each other than we have believed until recently.

When you are generating mental imagery through your mind’s eye, you are making use of many of the same brain regions as those used by your external senses. In other words, whether you are looking at a chair, or seeing the image of a chair in your mind’s eye, you are using the same parts of your brain to process what you see.

In addition, this varies by what type of imagery you are generating. When you see with your mind’s eye, you activate your visual cortex; when you hear with your “mind’s ear”, you use your auditory cortex, and so on. Along the same lines, you also have a “mind’s nose”, “mind’s tongue”, “mind’s fingertips”, and even motor imagery (the sensation of movement).

Scanning the Brain for Mental Imagery

We can know all this through fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron-Emission Tomography) scans of the brain, which allow us to see which parts of the brain are activated when a person performs various mental tasks, such as generating mental imagery.

This is usually performed in an experimental setting, with experiments taking a variety of forms. Most utilize the same general method, where researchers give the participant one or several mental tasks to perform (input), while fMRI and/or PET is simultaneously used to measure the brain’s output.

The fMRI-machine records everything, allowing insights into what is going on. The data gathered from this sort of experiment is immensely valuable, as it allows scientists to analyze mental imagery, which is usually hidden from the researchers’ view, and compare it to other factors affecting us.

How Mental Imagery Impacts Our Emotions

If you have ever experienced mental imagery, you will know intuitively what it is, as it has been an important part of your thinking throughout your life. Still, you might not have given much thought to how it affects you.

Even though our mental imagery is not “real” in the sense of being part of the external world, it still affects us in many ways, just as if we had perceived it with our external senses. This makes sense, as we have already seen how our brains use the same neural apparatus to display both the external and our internal world to us.

Mental imagery plays an important part in causing us to feel happy, sad, angry, nostalgic, or just about any other feeling we are capable of, and there is a strong correlation between the vividness of mental imagery in our mind’s eye, and the emotional effect it has on us [1].

We are still in the early days of understanding this relationship, but an increasing number of studies are starting to dig into it.

One study indicates that those who use negative visual imagery during an experiment, experience more anxiety than those who use verbal processing only [2].

Another has shown how impairments in certain types of mental imagery are linked to depression, and that using more positive forms of mental imagery can help work a person out of depression [3].

Another study found that people who frequently use visualization to process their thoughts tend to have better moods and feel more positive emotions. This holds true whether or not they’ve experienced depression in the past, and regardless of whether the images they visualize are positive or negative [4].

The Full Potential of the Mind’s Eye

Though we currently understand some things about the abilities of our mind’s eye, we know little about its full potential. Let’s see what we can find, once we go looking for it.

Perceiving potential is of our most valuable cognitive tools. In scientific terms, when we (or an animal) perceive the potential inherent in our environment, we perceive what is known as affordances. For example, when we see a chair, we perceive that it affords us the ability to sit on it. When a tiger perceives its prey, it understands that the prey affords the ability for the tiger to eat it. In short, we (or the tiger) have the ability to perceive potential in the environment.

Affordances are always relational, meaning that they don’t exist physically, but as the potential for one thing to interact with another. They exist everywhere, and one of our most important abilities as humans is to envision and seek out new ones. These affordances always lie dormant in the physical world, until we understand how to bring them out.

Now, let’s see what affordances we can tease out of the mind’s eye itself.

Using Mental Imagery to Find Affordances

The mind’s eye turns out to be a flexible cognitive tool. It’s thought that the visual cortex of the brain used for creating mental images acts like a dynamic ‘blackboard’ that can be recruited for a variety of mental tasks [5].

In this role as a blackboard, the mind’s eye serves as an important tool in the process of affordance realization, a broad cognitive activity that plays a big part in our planning and problem-solving.

Visualizing the affordances provided by the environment using mental imagery, before performing a task in that environment, has been shown to increase reaction time even more than practicing the task physically without visualization [6].

In addition to affordance realization, mental imagery serves us in a wide variety of areas, too numerous to go into detail here, but let’s mention some of them in quick succession:

• Emotional regulation [7]
• Memory formation and recall [8]
• Learning [9]
• Creativity [10]
• Navigation [11]
• Targeted use cases, such as cognitive therapy [12], performance enhancement [13] and stress reduction [14].

In time, this publication will explore each of these in more detail.

The Affordance Generator

The mind’s eye is a meta-ability, in the sense that mental imagery serves to enhance a wide array of other abilities we either intrinsically have, or can achieve through its use.

The mind’s eye can in this way be said to be an affordance generator, helping us discover the potential inherent in the relationship between ourselves and our environment through mental imagery

What happens if we then turn the mind’s eye’s ability to perceive affordances on itself?

We already know that the mind’s eye affords us certain abilities, but what happens when we start to seek out the affordances in our environment and our technologies that can feed back into our mental imagery?

Finding the affordances inherent within the affordance generator itself could, I would argue, lead to cascading positive effects in how we are able to make sense and use of the world around us.

This is the true goal of what is called Generative Reality.

Generative Reality

So far in this article, we have discussed how:

• Our minds generate mental imagery using the same brain areas as when sensing the external world.
• We can use fMRI and PET scans to see this happening in real time inside the brain.
• The ability to generate mental imagery is unevenly spread among humans, from experiencing intensely vivid imagery, to experiencing no imagery at all.
• Mental imagery has a strong effect on our emotions.
• We use mental imagery in many cognitive tasks, including perceiving the affordances inherent in the relationship between ourselves and our environment.
• We have only recently begun to grasp the potential of the mind’s eye as an affordance generator. The full potential of the mind’s eye remains mostly undiscovered.

Now, imagine there was some way by which the vividness and your control over your mental imagery could be enhanced, enabling you to generate and maintain vivid experiences in your mind at will.

That is, once you decide to ‘call forth’ the image of a car, it appears to you just as vivid as that of a car perceived in the physical world. Simultaneously, you are able to make it move about however you please, unbound by the laws of physics.

Given this possibility, what thoughts would you then fill your head with?

Imagine what it would be like to create an entire world behind your eyes, and that this world seemed just as real to you as the world in front of them, except now you are in complete control of its contents. Imagine the ability to generate multiple such worlds for you to explore and inhabit, all according to your specifications, all of which lie literally the blink of an eye away at any time.

Imagine what this would all mean for our understanding of reality.

Signal Strength: The Fine Line Defining Our Reality

Recent research [15] shows that not only is there an overlap in brain area use during normal sensory experiences and mental imagery, but that the main factor that helps us differentiate between the real and the imagined is the strength of the signal.

In other words, what we perceive as real is strongly related to how vividly we perceive it. When virtual or imagined signals are vivid enough, they become subjectively indistinguishable from reality.

This opens up a multitude of philosophical and existential questions. If our brains can’t tell the difference between vividly imagined scenarios and reality, then where does the boundary lie?

This blurred line between reality and imagination could revolutionize our understanding of consciousness, self-perception, and the nature of reality itself.

Could we then, in a sense, become the architects of our own reality, consciously shaping our experiences and emotions through controlled mental imagery?

Generative Reality and the Immersion Revolution

Welcome to Generative Reality (GR), the set of technologies that will one day, perhaps soon, allow us to take the next step beyond VR in terms of immersiveness.

In GR, you are not launched into a VR-world which has been pre-made for you by programmers or clever algorithms. Instead, you are the one creating and exploring worlds using the power of your mind’s eye, its vividness and controllability enhanced by new advances in technology.

This all probably sounds very much like a half-crazed science-fiction author’s pipe dream. Moreover, if it would be at all possible, it sounds extremely dangerous.

The part about GR being science-fiction is increasingly becoming untrue, as our understanding of the human brain and our ability to interact with it through technological means is increasing by leaps and bounds.

The latter part about it being extremely dangerous is absolutely true. Generative Reality has the potential to significantly enhance our lived lives, in a wide variety of ways, but it also has the potential to bring down our entire civilization. I’ll spare you the doom and gloom for now, but there are several more articles waiting for you, if you want to dive into this side of the issue (the article on Lucid Dreaming and GR, as an example).

The Generative Reality Grid

If this has piqued your interest, and you haven’t already done so, I would humbly suggest that you read up on more articles on Generative Reality. You might even consider subscribing.

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