A collaboration between and Daniel Mitchell at the CBU and Rhodri Cusack at Western’s Brain and Mind Institute  used a new type of real-time fMRI scanning to compare brain activity patterns when volunteers imagined objects to the activity patterns when they actually saw many different objects. They found that when something is imagined, volunteers didn’t recreate a picture of the object, but rather recreated their knowledge of it, and their emotional response to it.

To read the full paper www.nature.com/articles/srep20232