How and Where Does Imagination Occur in Human Brains?

By Maria Bernabo

Imagination plays a key role in some of the most wonderful things in life — the beauty of art, scientific discoveries, engineering feats — among innumerable other findings. On a more minute level, our behavior and choices are dictated by our imagination — and the scope in which we see our reality including our memories. Despite its pervasive role, there is an incredible gap in what we know of imagination, where it comes from and what it looks like in the brain. In a study from Dartmouth University, researchers explored what they have dubbed “the mental workspace” to bridge the gap in understanding.

The Mental Workspace

The mental workspace is a network of neurons where images, symbols, ideas and theories are manipulated to create ideas and solve problems. It is important to note that the workspace extends over both right and left hemispheres as they have defined it. Researchers hooked 15 participants up to an fMRI scanner and asked them to visualize specific abstract shapes. In the second step of the study, the participants needed to imagine combining those shapes into more complex figures. For example, imagining a bee with the head of a bull or attaching arms to the body of a ladybug.

During the second step, a large cortical and subcortical network across the brain produced the manipulations of imagery. Watching a person manipulate mental imagery in his or her brain’s expansive network demonstrates a human being’s ability to think creatively. Insight from this study is thought to provide a pathway to recreating the same creative process in machines. Many prominent psychology studies have described this very thing that sets humans apart from other species — the conscious experience and our diverse cognitive abilities.

This study shows a big step forward in explaining a source for imagination. Since manipulations of imagery were witnessed in a large portion of the brain, the new goal of these researchers is to move away from smaller studies that merely isolate the brain’s activity in one area. New studies from Dartmouth researchers will be devoted to exploring how neural networks, and in turn creativity, function across the entire mental workspace.