How does the brain form full-color mental images?

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pluto2

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A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving or seeing some object, event, or scene, but that occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses.

My question is: How does the brain form these full-color mental images? Or to phrase the question differently, how do the electrical signals in our brain produce the full-color mental images we experience?
 
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pluto2 said:
A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving or seeing some object, event, or scene, but that occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses.

My question is: How does the brain form these full-color mental images? Or to phrase the question differently, how do the electrical signals in our brain produce the full-color mental images we experience?
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You really need to know something about neuroscience to truly get what's going on. But, in a nut shell. The retain is an extension of your brain. A small area in the retina called the macula has an area called the fovea - this area can detect multiple wavelengths of light. It's also the area that allows you to read. Anyway, neurons from this area project to the LGN (and area of the brain). The LGN processes the information and sends it to the higher cortical areas - the primary visual cortex which is located in inside a fold at the back of your brain. from your retina to this area the "wires" remain discrete. That is, you can point to an area here and know exactly where in the retina it is receiving info. from here information is sent to association area and it is in these areas of the brain you "perceive" color. It should also be noted that "you" actually exist in these areas.
 
to phrase the question differently, how do the electrical signals in our brain produce the full-color mental images
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and to rephrase the question, how do the electrical signals in electronic devices produce the full-color visual images?

We know that this answer is out there, and some clever people can explain its technology. We know its whole 150 years of history and we know how it has been evolved through generations, and how does it work in transistor level.

Current knowledge of DNA does not allow us to get the absolute working mechanism of a living thing, we've just started to isolate the individual genes and make artificial copies of them. We are kind of harvesting the nature in DNA level, just as our ancestors had harvested the soil to get what they needed from nature.


Many of us -apart from blind people- born and live with functional onboard cameras and hard disc memory capacity. When you get older, both will betray you. Currently, we might not be able to replicate what nature can do as a living organism, although at least we know the logic, limits and major roles of the components. We can predict that it's not an "essence" going inside of our brains, but it is a repeatable technology. Set of representations and interpretations: Cable carries electricity, but this electricity was already sent by a sensor in certain frequency and voltage, so a different electronic switches start to interpret light, colour, depth and produce a photography.

Nature does the similar thing, although it uses organic material instead of slicon. It may be doing it in a more sophisticated fashion than our non-replicating digital gadgets -and their 0-1 logic-; but it is a fact that it can not produce a material copy of the image. When we exactly grasp the technology behind the brain, we would be able to see the imagination board of our brains, we would download it, share it, motion picture it, print it; and other way around journey as well: We could send images and other information to brain's mental board.

Only if we could crack the system information code... Until then, what we know in this area is simply "limited".
 
I do not think anyone really knows the answer to this question.

These 'images' we are talking about are not like polaroid images, something we can easily give a location. We can set up a diagram with the viewer, the image and the line of sight. The 'images' in the brain are not like this at all. We cannot set up such a diagram. There is no image in the sense of a copy, or image 'out there'. The 'viewer' and the 'viewed' are not separated ' by distance. The issue involves the issue of consciousness and while all sorts of hoopla and MRIs have been made, we still don't know why there is a viewer. It would seem a machine with no consciousness would have served just as well.
 
Doreen said:
I can make images of things I have never seen. I can also have them in dreams.
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You can only make images of things that are made up of the constituents of images you have already seen.

Try and make up a different colour that lies outside any of the visible wavelengths. Can you imagine what infra-red may look like?
 
John Connellan said:
You can only make images of things that are made up of the constituents of images you have already seen.
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That doesn't really make any sense. How did we build up an archive to work with? For example, how did we see the first thing we saw? And then the second thing, which was not like the first, how did we see that?

Your color issue is problematic also since one can see things one has never seen before. I can make up stuff in my mind's eye that is not something I have seen.

He referred to memory. That is inadequate.
 
The first things we saw didn't make any sense. Gradually, we built up an internal model of the world, probably starting with our mother. It is this internal model that most of us use to see. Without it, all there are are vague colors and shapes.
 
Originally Posted by John Connellan
I'm pretty sure consciousness evolved for some advantageous reason.
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Doreen said:
At best evolutionary theory would say that it probably did no harm.

But it could also simply be a biproduct of certain kinds of complexity.
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What else coud "consciousness" be besides a product of complexity.???
 
cluelusshusbund said:
What else coud "consciousness" be besides a product of complexity.???
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Something that evolved because it was advantageous. I am not quite sure why you are asking me since you even quoted what I was responding to. He was claiming that it was advantageous. This is speculation.
 
Originally Posted by cluelusshusbund
What else coud "consciousness" be besides a product of complexity.??? ”

Doreen said:
as opposed to..?
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Yes thats my origonal queston... do you have an answr... or do you see consciousness as purely biological.???
 
Doreen said:
That doesn't really make any sense. How did we build up an archive to work with?
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We build up the archive by seeing things. We don't make them up in our mind. They are out there for us to see.

For example, how did we see the first thing we saw?
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With our eyes

And then the second thing, which was not like the first, how did we see that?
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same

Your color issue is problematic also since one can see things one has never seen before. I can make up stuff in my mind's eye that is not something I have seen.
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Like I said, the things you think you are making up are actually composed of colours shapes and textures that are already archived because you saw them before.

Creativity is simply putting them together in a different way. Same for sound.
 
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