[Science Solitaire] Your Imagining Brain

In a defining scene in the film “Goldrush” which starred Charlie Chaplin, he convinces himself and his friend, in the middle of a very harsh winter, that a boiled shoe makes for a sumptuous meal.  As he negotiates each part of the shoe, it was as if Chaplin were holding in his head, an image of fine, slow-cooked meat, assigning the scrumptious dimensions of that imagined dish to the forlorn shoe. He even removed some nails from the shoe and smacked his lips on them, sucking their juices out. By the time he got to the shoelaces, tenderly winding them on his fork as if it were al-dente pasta, he was already starting to work out a burp of satisfaction. When the scene ends, he has already convinced his friend and me that a leather shoe is worthy of its place among the best-tasting entrees in culinary history.

That is imagination and it is powerful. It is our ability to make things “appear” in our heads, hold them there and “do” things to them as we “watch” what happens.  Imagining is beyond what each of our senses is able to individually and directly pipe into our brains. Imagination is the fantastic laboratory in our heads, experimenting with this and that with this and that and then surprising even yourself at what comes up.

Imagination has come to be such a defining trait of our species as humans that we have created marvellous enterprises from it in every facet of our personal and collective lives. But how do we imagine? Do we just imagine with our right hemisphere just like how most popular sketches of the brain depicts its functions?  Scientists from Dartmouth College were able to show us what our imagining brain looks like in a study that appeared last week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the US entitled “Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace”. And it turns out that imagination is no isolated, exclusive domain of the right hemisphere.

The researchers found that there are 11 bilateral brain regions that are active when we imagine things. “Bilateral” means they occur in both your left and right brains. Imagination requires a twin process of maintaining mental images and then manipulating them.  Think of jigsaw puzzles and exploding them so that you see each uniquely shaped piece.  Try focusing on one and rotating it, draw it closer to connect it to another piece – what will you see?  Do it again to another piece till you have a figure made up of 2 pieces on any side.  

This what the scientists made 16 female subjects do as they looked at the subjects’ brains through functional MRI (fMRI) which enabled them to see which brain parts have increased oxygenated blood flow during both  the maintenance and manipulation stages.  And they saw that the enterprise of imagining involved the cortex and subcortex on both sides of the brains. 

The cortex and subcortex make up what is called the “higher brain” as this is thicker in humans than any other species. This is what enables us to plan and imagine our futures. Imagining something first before actually doing it is a very safe way to fail and it allows us to rethink things, perhaps adjust or change them to really make them work.  

The scientists saw that this mental workspace that we inhabit in our heads when we are imagining visual images gives rise to dense neural connections between the 11 regions – like thick power lines extending across 11 provinces. For manipulation, the connections among the 11 are less and in fact, more “left-sided”.  This is the first time that scientists are able to see what the brains of imagining humans look like in terms of active brain regions.  

Imagine if our perception started with our senses and stopped there. What you heard is exactly what you heard and what you saw is exactly what you saw and you go about your days absorbing all the arrows of sights, sound, taste, smell and touch without being able to bend any one in an unexpected direction?

If our hunting ancestors could not imagine what to do with a piece of stone or wood to help them hunt, how would they have ended up? If the ones who came before us could not imagine what they could do with pieces of dried bark or leaves to protect them from the weather, where would we be?  If the likes of Mozart could not imagine stringing notes together the way he did in a way that makes our souls sway like cut-up pieces of dancing rainbow, where would our musical souls go to dance? If Newton could not imagine the planets being held by the same force as an apple was, where would our satellites be?  Imagination has much to do with survival as with civilization.

We are, and more importantly, we become, because we can imagine.

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire”. Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com