Imagination is not just replaying what we see and hear

If you were to imagine a waterfall, a misty cascade into an azure pool surrounded by towering trees might come to mind. That mental vision might also be accompanied by the imagined roar of water splashing down. But when it comes to our brains, does imagining a waterfall activate different areas compared with seeing or hearing one in real life?

For both sounds and sights, the overlap between imagination and perception appears not in brain areas linked to a single sense, but in high-level areas that accept multiple types of sensory inputs, researchers report March 31 in Neuron.

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