‘Reality is not as fixed as people like to think'

Humans pride themselves on the fact that they cannot just see and perceive what is around them but also analyse their observations and form definite conclusions. However, this ability to understand reality is not foolproof, say researchers from the University College of London, UK, in a recent preprint paper published in the online repository PsyArXiv. Through a series of experiments, the researchers have determined that people are often akin to mistaking their imagination for real-life perception. DAKSHIANI PALICHA speaks to lead author of the study NADINE DIJKSTRA about the potential implications of their findings. Excerpts:

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What was the initial aim of your study, and what kind of experiments did you conduct?

Our research was two-fold—on the one hand, we wanted to investigate to what extent imagination works in similar ways to normal and regular perception. For this we use neuroimaging, mostly functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), to test whether the brain areas that become activated when we imagine something are the same as those when we actually see it. The other question we were trying to address is how we can distinguish between imagination and perception, given that the two overlap. Simply put, does our brain know when our digital cortex is activated and whether the object we see is real or only imagined?

We tested this through a series of experiments wherein people looked for pictures amid noisy stimuli. This is similar to when a television set tries to look for patterns and shows white noise. Just like in those patterns, we sometimes place in our stimuli an object that is quite hard to spot. So, we asked our participants to imagine an object, and then try and figure out whether what they see [amid the noisy patterns] is imagined or real.

We have done about five such experiments, wherein several times the participants reported that they saw the object when they were imagining it. We interpreted their feedback to conclude that people mistake their imagination for reality; when the participants of our experiments looked at the noise and imagined the object, they ended up believing that it was probably really there.

Were you expecting these results?