The Eye's Mind - a study of the neural basis of visual imagination and its role in culture

Summary

Imagination is surely one of the things that makes us human. It allows us to escape from the here and now, and to travel into the past and the future, the minds of others, the centre of the atom and the outer reaches of space. It allows us to envisage unrealised possibilities, and, sometimes, to bring them about. Our ability to 'visualise', the see things 'in the mind's eye' is a key part of our ability to imagine. This project will bring together researchers from the sciences and the arts to increase our knowledge of visual imagination.

We will focus on three related areas of research. First, we will look systematically at the large body of research that has examined what happens in the brain when we imagine, searching for consistent patterns in the varied and sometimes conflicting results of previous studies. We will be alert to what these patterns may imply for the uses of visual imagination, from daydreaming to artistic creation.

Second, we will review the insights and theories which artists, students of art, philosophers and others have proposed over the two and half thousand years since such thinking began. We will ask what questions are raised, by these insights and theories, for the science of imagination.

Finally, we will study individuals whose visual imagery lies at the extremes of the vividness spectrum. A small proportion of healthy individuals, perhaps two or three in a hundred, lack visual imagination completely. This occurrence has been recognised repeatedly but never studied carefully. We will recruit a group of thirty such people and compare them with thirty people who use imagery constantly in their work as visual artists. We will interview the members of both groups to find out how the absence or abundance of visual imagery affects their experience and everyday lives; we will use brain imaging techniques, and psychological tests, to learn more about the causes and consequences of these normal variations in the ability to imagine.

Pursuing these questions will require a team including an art historian, a psychologist, a neurologist, a philosopher and an artist to meet regularly to exchange ideas and plan the work. We will recruit a young researcher to be the project's research fellow. We expect that he or she will have a background in the arts and an interest in the sciences. We will hold three workshops over the life of the project, which will allow all the researchers involved, and a growing group of collaborators to contribute to the work. The final workshop will be a larger conference at which we will report the findings of the project to experts in the area and interested members of the public. We will give two public lectures, designed to be widely accessible, alongside the conference. We will create a website at the start of the project, updating it as we proceed, providing easily understood information about the project and its findings, and offering opportunities for members of the public to become involved.

In summary, the project will unite researchers who normally work in isolation from one another in a study of our distinctively human ability to imagine. It will highlight links between our experience, brain science and art. It will throw light on the wide variation in our capacity to 'visualise'. It will pave the way for further work, for example on imagery in other senses, in collaboration with another AHRC project, Rethinking the senses; on neurological and psychiatric disorders, like depression, which can reduce imagination; on how this might be remedied and the use of visual imagination by normal subjects enhanced.

Impact Summary

Who will benefit?

The academic beneficiaries of this project are described separately, but we emphasise that they include a wide range of researcher in both the humanities and the sciences. Their involvement will help to propagate the wider benefits of the project. These wider benefits will accrue to members of several groups: i) around 25 individuals who have always lacked visual imagery ('aphantasia') have been in contact with us from around the world following our previous publication. They identify their lack of imagery as an important factor in their lives, which many of them would like to remedy if possible, and they are keenly interested in this research. Estimates suggest that 2-5% of individuals can visualise poorly or not at all, implying a large potential audience for our work among affected individuals; ii) as imagery is often used by educationalists and therapists outside the research community, the information that an appreciable proportion of people will find it very difficult to use techniques based on imagery will be important; iii) there is a wide public interest in work of the kind we propose, as attested by the intense press attention to related work (see Pathways to Impact) exploring the neural basis of cultural experience.

How will they benefit?

The academic community will benefit from the knowledge gains produced by our project which are described elsewhere. The community will also benefit from the opportunities created by the project workshops and conference for interaction across disciplines and the development of interdisciplinary approaches which will help to build research capacity. The project research fellow will receive a unique training in methods from both the humanities and the sciences of relevance to the study of imagination.

Individuals with 'aphantasia' will benefit by gaining a fuller understanding of their condition, access to up-to-date information and contact with other individuals in the same situation (assuming appropriate consent). These opportunities will all be provided by our website. Their condition affects their quality of life, and several such individuals have told us that it is therapeutic simply to discover that others report a similar state and researchers are investigating the condition. We anticipate that the artists involved in the project will be stimulated by the realisation that their visual gifts have a partly neural basis.

Educationalists and therapists may be encouraged to screen their students and clients for aphantasia, and to adapt their methods if further research suggests that this would be advisable.

The general public has a keen interest in work bridging the divide between human experience - whether of emotion, thought, memory or imagination - and the processes in the brain that underlie it. This seems to be especially true when the experience in question has a cultural dimension. Through our website, closing conference, public lectures and subsequent educational events we will involve the general public in the excitement of this work.