Bland, this is true but with a caveat they don't mention: research by Stephen Kosslyn at Harvard showed, about 10 years ago or more, that the signal strength is HALF when you visualize or imagine compared to actual experience. Still, half ain't bad, especially if you keep visualizing the same thing. It follows the same path but in reverse, through the brain, and of course the brain doesn't care about direction, so it does lay down "memory" traces. Which is one reason people who were part of the recovered memory hoopla some years ago, people who believed they were sexually or physically abused but had forgotten it, or people who think they were abducted by aliens but repressed it, can become convinced they actually were, because they spend so much time in quasi therapy sessions "remembering" or "visualizing" this stuff, and the brain does record it as real.
It's fascinating and definitely shows the mind-body connection and the power of imagining, thinking and so on. |
