The Neural Similarities Between Remembering and Imagining - Facts So Romantic

Not yours or your friend's or one you saw in a home makeover show, but one purely from your imagination--perhaps your ideal living room. You should have no trouble doing it: We take this kind of imagination for granted. Rarely do we find ourselves wondering how the mind chooses what objects to put into these novel scenes and which ones to exclude. But it's worth reflecting on, perhaps especially for creative types, because our visual imagination appears to be constrained by regularities in visual memories. Diversifying what you see may mean enriching what you can imagine. In a recent study Irish neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, of University College London, had people imagine novel scenes and compared this to people imagining single objects against a white background.