Joel Pearson
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
You see this link between very strong imagery and schizophrenia.
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.
Now I imagine the red one.
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.
We don't see that same response.
It was actually the first sort of objective method to measure visual imagination.
Since then, we've developed a few other ways.
If you look up at the light, our pupils contract, right?
When you're in the dark, of course, your pupil opens right up.
Your pupil actually constricts.
You don't get these effects.
Can you give someone who has a Fantasia imagery?
With the right approach, uh,
I think that would be possible, yeah.
I can't stimulate your brain and you can start speaking a new language.
You have to learn that content first.
You have to learn how to connect your frontal cortex with your visual cortex to drive visual cortex.
I think there are ways we can do this.
Training with brain stimulation over some time could probably do it.
We haven't done that yet.
If you took someone who'd never had imagery and you gave them imagery, let's say in a week, I think that could be quite a dangerous thing.