11/20/2023 0 Comments Look deeper into peoples eyes![]() We all have the experience of picturing things in our heads, of course. Zenon Pylyshyn, a cognitive scientist at Rutgers University, doesn’t think mental images are essential to figuring such things out. When we start driving home from a friend’s house, for example, we envision the different routes we can take in order to decide on the best way to go. Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard psychologist, goes so far as to argue that we rely on the mind’s eye to make decisions about what we should do in the future. Some scientists have argued that the mind’s eye is constantly at work whenever we look at our internal simulations of the world. MX gave Della Sala and Zeman the chance to test two ideas about the role of the mind’s eye in our inner life. When you close your eyes and conjure up a face, the parts of the brain that receive signals from the eyes are dormant, but the regions that recognize the features defining an individual again light up. When you look at a person up close, for example, a particular network of brain regions becomes active, including areas that process raw signals from your eyes as well as more sophisticated regions that recognize individual faces. A number of brain scan studies have supported this view. Scientists have long speculated that the act of seeing things in our mind’s eye employs some of the same brain circuits that we use when seeing with our physical eyes. ![]() Della Sala proposed running a series of exams. Neither Zeman nor Della Sala could offer MX a cure for his condition, unfortunately, but they recognized a rare chance to study how the mind’s eye works. Zeman was so intrigued by the case that he teamed up with Sergio Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh who specializes in how the brain handles visual information. Worried, MX paid a visit to Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a “reverberation” in his head and a tingling in his left arm. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind.
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