HWNI member Doris Tsao is a senior author on a new study published in Science that shows that both seeing an object, and then later imagining it, activates many of the same neurons in the human brain, using the same code, providing insight into how mental imagery works.
The study was led by Varun Wadia, who was a graduate student in Tsao’s lab when she was a faculty member at Caltech, and builds on Tsao’s work. Tsao is now a professor of neuroscience and Pivotal Life Sciences Faculty Scholar at UC Berkeley. Their team, including clinical colleagues at Cedars-Sinai, analyzed the activity of individual neurons in the brains of patients with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted to monitor seizures.
The researchers found that many of the same neurons that were active when subjects looked at an object were also active when they imagined that object from memory, and that there’s a shared code for seeing and imagining objects. These findings could aid in the development of better treatments for diseases that affect memory, such as Alzheimer’s, and those that involve visual hallucinations, such as schizophrenia, as well as in the development of more efficient AI systems.
