Close your eyes. Actually, wait until you've read the instructions in the next paragraph before you do that. You get the idea. Once you're done, close your eyes.
With eyes closed, see an apple in your mind, surrounded by black vacuum. Make the image as vivid as possible. Observe the vibrancy of the colors, and the subtle patterns of imperfection across the apple's surface. Keep the shape as solid as possible, not allowing it to shift or change.
If you’re having trouble, you can try using the AI-generated picture below as a visual aid before closing your eyes. I can promise you that outside of artwork generated through Midjourney, this article is at least 99% human-written, with only a little bit of input from ChatGPT on spelling errors and readability here and there. That is, if you are willing to believe such promises in this day and age…
Unless you are a good visualizer, you’ll notice how hard it is to fully control what you are seeing, and how the apple won’t stay stable under the gaze of your mind's eye. Depending on where your mind wants to go, it might move about, start spinning around its own axis, or change back and forth in size or hue.
The image you see might also appear dull and unclear. You might in fact be unable to see any apple at all. Or, you might be among those who are able to see the apple as vividly as in real life.
The Mind’s Eyes, Ears and Nose
Now, try doing the same exercise for your other senses. You can pick the imagery yourself. While typing this, I thought of someone hammering a nail into a wall; the smell of cinnamon; the taste of licorice; the touch of grass under my feet in the park in summer.
In any case, pick something vivid, but which you can still isolate to one sense as much as possible.
Notice how this too is quite difficult, as feeling the touch of grass might conjure up images and sounds. Once you have isolated each sense, try combining them into scenes: An apple in black vacuum, the sound of a nail being hammered into a wall, and the smell of cinnamon, all together. If this feels difficult, it just means you're like most people.
Fifty Shades of Eigengrau
You probably noticed in the above experiment that you don’t perceive mental images as well as you perceive things in the external world. The images usually come through less vivid and less specific than what you perceive externally.
If you close your eyes and clear your mind for a moment, you will perceive a darkness which if you ‘look’ at it is slightly more gray than black. This darkness is known as the ‘Eigengrau’ (German for ‘intrinsic gray’), and is the canvas onto which all mental imagery is painted.
As with most things, the ability to visualize mental imagery onto this canvas is unevenly distributed among individuals. Most people are able to perceive some mental imagery, but it comes across as less vivid than what we perceive through our external senses.
If you cannot get these exercises to work at all, and your attempts to summon mental images are met only with the darkness of the eigengrau, you might have a condition known as aphantasia.
This opposite, where your experience of the images you see in your mind as vivid as those you perceive with your real-world senses, is known as hyperphantasia.
No matter your position on this scale, this publication is devoted to both aphantasia and hyperphantasia, as well as mental imagery in all its forms, so feel free to take a small break and subscribe if you haven’t done so already.
Mental Imagery
What you have been doing so far in this article, is using your ‘mind’s eye’ to generate what is called ‘mental imagery’. In simple terms, the mind’s eye is that which produces, and mental imagery is that which is produced. Using this profoundly potent cognitive tool, you are generating sensory information inside your own mind, without input from the world around you.
Notice that your brain has the innate capacity to generate sensory information separate from the external world. This sensory information is separate from the physical world inasmuch as it relies on your brain's ability to generate it on its own, rather than using its senses to interpret the outside world.
External and Internal Senses Overlap
While most of us like to keep a clear separation between what is real and what is ‘just imagination’, these two worlds are perhaps closer to each other than we have believed until recently.
When you are generating mental imagery through your mind's eye, you are making use of many of the same brain regions as those used by your external senses. In other words, whether you are looking at a chair, or seeing the image of a chair in your mind's eye, you are using the same parts of your brain to process what you see.
In addition, this varies by what type of imagery you are generating. When you see with your mind's eye, you activate your visual cortex; when you hear with your “mind’s ear”, you use your auditory cortex, and so on. Along the same lines, you also have a “mind’s nose”, “mind’s tongue”, “mind’s fingertips”, and even motor imagery (the sensation of movement).
Scanning the Brain for Mental Imagery
We know this through fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron-Emission Tomography) scans of the brain, which allow us to see which parts of the brain are activated when a person performs various mental tasks, such as generating mental imagery.
This is usually performed in an experimental setting, with experiments taking a variety of forms. Most utilize the same general method, where researchers give the participant one or several mental tasks to perform (input), while fMRI and/or PET is simultaneously used to measure the brain's output.
The fMRI-machine records everything, allowing insights into what is going on. The data gathered from this sort of experiment is of immense importance, as it allows scientists to analyze mental imagery, which is usually hidden from view, and compare it to other factors affecting us.
How Mental Imagery Impacts Our Emotions
If you have ever experienced mental imagery, you will know intuitively what it is, as it has been an important part of your thinking throughout your life. Still, you might not have given much thought to how it affects you.
Even though our mental imagery is not “real” in the sense of being part of the external world, it still affects us in many ways, just as if we had perceived it with our external senses. This makes sense, as we have already seen how our brains use the same neural apparatus to display both the external and our internal world to us.
Mental imagery plays an important part in causing us to feel happy, sad, angry, nostalgic, or just about any other feeling we are capable of, and there is a strong correlation between the vividness of mental imagery in our mind's eye, and the emotional effect it has on us [1].
We are still in the early days of understanding this relationship, but an increasing number of studies are starting to dig into it.
One study indicates that those who use negative visual imagery during an experiment, experience more anxiety than those who use verbal processing only [2].
Another has shown how impairments in certain types of mental imagery are linked to depression, and that using more positive forms of mental imagery can help work a person out of depression [3].
Another study found that people who frequently use visualization to process their thoughts tend to have better moods and feel more positive emotions. This holds true whether or not they've experienced depression in the past, and regardless of whether the images they visualize are positive or negative [4].
The Full Potential of the Mind’s Eye
I would argue that though we know some things about our mind's eye’s abilities, we don't know its full potential. And if there is one thing we are always seeking, seeing as it is so fundamental to our human nature, it is potential.
In scientific terms, when we (or an animal) perceive the potential inherent in our environment, we perceive what is known as affordances. For example, when we see a chair, we perceive that it affords us the ability to sit on it. When a tiger perceives its prey, it understands that the prey affords the ability for the tiger to eat it.
Affordances are always relational, meaning that they don’t exist physically, but as the potential for one thing to interact with another. They exist everywhere, and one of our most important abilities as humans is to envision and seek out new ones. These affordances always lie dormant in the physical world, until we understand how to bring them out.
Now, let’s see what affordances we can tease out of the mind’s eye itself.
How We Use Mental Imagery
The mind’s eye turns out to be a very flexible cognitive tool. It's thought that the visual cortex of the brain used for creating mental images acts like a dynamic 'blackboard' that can be recruited for a variety of mental tasks [5].
Affordance realization is a broad cognitive activity that plays a big part in our planning and problem-solving, and where the mind’s eye serves as an important supportive tool.
Visualizing the affordances provided by the environment before performing a task has been shown to increase reaction time even more than practicing the task physically without visualization [6].
Additionally, mental imagery serves us in a wide variety of areas, too numerous to go into detail here, but let’s mention some of them in quick succession:
In time, this publication will explore each of these in more detail.
The Affordance Generator
The mind’s eye is a meta-ability, in the sense that mental imagery serves to enhance a wide array of other abilities we either intrinsically have, or can achieve through its use.
Affordance realization is only one of these abilities, albeit an important one.
The mind’s eye can be said to be an affordance generator, helping us discover the potential inherent in the relationship between ourselves and our environment through mental imagery
What happens when we then turn the mind’s eye’s ability to perceive affordances on itself?
We already know that the mind’s eye affords us certain abilities, but what happens when we start to seek out the affordances in our environment and our technologies to feed back into our mental imagery?
Finding the affordances inherent within the affordance generator itself could lead to cascading positive effects in how we are able to make sense and use of the world around us.
This is the true goal of Generative Reality.
Generative Reality
So far in this article, we have discussed how:
Our minds generate mental imagery using the same brain areas as when sensing the external world.
We can use fMRI and PET scans to see this happening in real time inside the brain.
The ability to generate mental imagery is unevenly spread among humans, from experiencing intensely vivid imagery, to experiencing no imagery at all.
Mental imagery has a strong effect on our emotions.
We use mental imagery in many cognitive tasks, including perceiving the affordances inherent in the relationship between ourselves and our environment.
We have only recently begun to grasp the potential of the mind’s eye as an affordance generator. The full potential of the mind’s eye remains mostly undiscovered.
Now, imagine there was some way by which the vividness and your control over your mental imagery could be enhanced, enabling you to generate and maintain vivid experiences in your mind at will.
That is, once you decide to 'call forth' the image of a car, it appears to you just as vivid as that of a car perceived in the physical world. Simultaneously, you are able to make it move about however you please, unbound by the laws of physics.
Given this possibility, what thoughts would you then fill your head with?
Imagine what it would be like to create an entire world behind your eyes, and that this world seemed just as real to you as the world in front of them, except now you are in complete control of its contents. Imagine the ability to generate multiple such worlds for you to explore and inhabit, all according to your specifications, all of which lie literally the blink of an eye away at any time.
What, then, is reality?
Signal Strength: The Fine Line Defining Our Reality
Recent research [15] shows that not only is there an overlap in brain area use during normal sensory experiences and mental imagery, but that the main factor that helps us differentiate between the real and the imagined is the strength of the signal.
In other words, what we perceive as real is strongly related to how vividly we perceive it. When virtual or imagined signals are vivid enough, they become subjectively indistinguishable from reality.
This opens up a multitude of philosophical and existential questions. If our brains can't tell the difference between vividly imagined scenarios and reality, then where does the boundary lie?
This blurred line between reality and imagination could revolutionize our understanding of consciousness, self-perception, and the nature of reality itself.
Could we then, in a sense, become the architects of our own reality, consciously shaping our experiences and emotions through controlled mental imagery?
Generative Reality and the Immersion Revolution
Welcome to Generative Reality (GR), the technology that will one day, perhaps soon, allow us to take the next step beyond VR in terms of immersiveness.
In GR, you are not launched into a VR-world which has been made for you by programmers or clever algorithms. Instead, you are the one creating and exploring worlds using the power of your mind’s eye, enhanced by new advances in technology.
This all probably sounds very much like a half-crazed science-fiction author’s pipe dream. Moreover, if it would be at all possible, it sounds extremely dangerous.
The part about GR being science-fiction is increasingly becoming untrue, as our understanding of the human brain and our ability to interact with it through technological means is increasing by leaps and bounds.
The latter part about it being potentially dangerous is absolutely true.
If this piques your interest, and you haven’t already done so, I would humbly suggest that you read the article on Generative Reality, where this is dealt with in detail. You might even consider subscribing.
Generative Reality has the potential to significantly enhance our lived lives, in a wide variety of ways. It also has the potential to destroy our entire civilization. It all comes down to how we choose to approach it.
The Generative Reality Grid
To avoid confusion between this publication and its subject, I'll sometimes refer to this publication as the Generative Reality Grid.
Generative Reality Grid aims to explore Generative Reality in depth, and especially the risks and rewards associated with it.
If you don’t want to miss out on future articles which go into Generative Reality in ever more vivid detail, subscribe on Medium, and sign up for our Newsletter.
For an overview of Generative Reality, visit the Generative Reality Resources Page, where you will find all articles related to GR sorted and categorized.
The journey to Generative Reality begins now.
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