Joel Pearson

We had to sort of take someone's word for it, that that's what they were imagining.

That's what their experience was like.

I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales.

It was almost an accidental discovery.

I was programming an experiment.

And it's an amazing illusion where you present very different pictures, one to each eye.

Right, your brain's fusing those two different images together.

But like... When those images are very different, like this experiment, your brain can't do that.

So instead... You get these beautiful oscillations.

So literally your consciousness is changing back and forward in this sort of really random manner.

So I was programming an experiment to look at that.

And for some reason, and today I don't remember why, I thought, huh, I'm going to imagine one of these two pictures.

What?

No, this can't be.

Let me try that again.

Now I imagine the red one.

Huh.

And now I saw the red picture in the binocular ivory.

Turns out that what we imagine does change our visual perception.

It literally changes how we see the world with the caveat, you know, if you have mental imagery.