Imagination Refined: The Brain Carves Images by Quieting Its Own Noise

A new theory proposes that imagination works by dampening ongoing activity in early visual brain areas to carve familiar images from the brain’s background signals, rather than building them from scratch. This suppression-based view explains why mental images are often weaker than seeing, relates to conditions like aphantasia and hyperphantasia, and is supported by evidence linking imagined perception to reduced neural activity and by animal experiments showing small neuronal interventions can steer behavior.