How does the brain form full-color mental images?
- Thread starter pluto2
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Light waves are processed in an area of the brain that encodes and integrates the common elements of information obtained through the eye. This ability we have to form mental images develops after the age of about 5 and is working in our brains by about 7 years old.
Three careful sleep laboratory studies (Amadeo & Gomez, 1966; Berger, Olley, & Oswald, 1962; Kerr, Foulkes, & Schmidt, 1982) and at least one rigorous study of home dream reports (Hurovitz, Dunn, Domhoff, & Fiss, 1999) have shown that congenitally blind dreamers and those who became blind in infancy do not have visual imagery in their dreams, whereas those blinded in adolescence or young adulthood often retain visual mental imagery in their waking life and in their dreams. These controlled experiments confirm what has been reported in a number of earlier self-report studies reviewed by Kirtley (1975), who concluded on the basis of his extensive appraisal that individuals blinded before the age of about 5 report no visual imagery in dreams as adults, whereas those blinded after about the age of 7 are likely to retain visual imagery in dreaming.
http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html
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Actually, we can. The cornea and lense focus light on the retina, specifically the fovea. The different wavelengths of light on the fovea then stimulate different photoreceptors which then transmit the information to the brain via the optic nerves. Each point in your visual field cooresponds to a certain point in your retinal and even in your visual cortex. Damage to the brain, optic nerve, or anywhere along the pathway from the retina to the visual cortex will produce a specific visual field defect. In fact, one can often determine exactly what part of a person's brain has been damaged by plotting the visual field. A pituitary tumor, for instance, will create a bitemporal heminopsia:
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kmguru
Staff member
A simpler answer could be along the lines of an example. When images form in a CCD device in a digital camera, each pixel produces a level of electrical signal. The processor in the camera collects and forms images by placing corresponding value for that pixel (with color information). The file thus created has those values that an image viewer reproduces (after some serious computation).
No one knows how the image is perceived in the mind. But my guess is that there is a viewer and also there is a processor that acts on the raw information. A viewer could be the Pineal Gland that projects the image as in the dream. But the brain also can process the information without the display mode. It is same as a Graphic processor in a computer that does not need to display the image for processing.
When you are aware of the image, then you are using a mind's viewer. All new images are the result of the pre-processing in a simulation which feeds the data to the viewer.
Just a guess....
yea same, its always creeped me out when iv'e had a dream i could not explain, nor remember doing at all possibly in any lifetime.
I think the frequency of the light beam is coded into the electrochemical signal sent into your brain for interpretation along with the angle that it stuck the eyes. The information being received for interpretation is then rapidly coded into proteins, with the individual colour depth and angle all coded in the one frequency of many potential frequencies that would code for different angles, colours etc. these proteins arrange specifically in a tiny three dimensional space in your brain. This three dimensional space then has light passed through it and the image is magnified out to the point where it feels right out in front of us. This system can be feed by frequencies stored in our brain as memories or created by using as set of biological components acting like little frequency manipulators. I'm still working on the bit where it has become necessary to 'experience' this information but its just a temporarily missing link.
But how did scientists actually discover all that knowledge? Did they dissect small animals (like frogs and fishes) or what?
It would have been a mix of things, some of it might have been dissection of corpses, some would have been finding someone with specific medical conditions that would then be observed (possibly with an autopsy at a later date observed as well), in more recent years there's far better equipment for observation and methods used in biochemistry to recreate reactions. I guess you can imply that the medical science's in question contains a number of different schools of science to try and create an overall foundation from what knowledge is ascertained.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Many artists make a living doing this.