We Use Many of the Same Brain Cells to See and to Imagine Objects, a Study Suggests. The Findings Provide a New Window Into Memory

While past research has hinted at an overlap in relevant brain regions, the new work drills down to the cellular level. The discovery could help improve treatments for memory disorders, such as dementia, and certain psychiatric conditions, like schizophrenia

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 22, 2026

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Visualizing an object in the mind’s eye allows us to remember the face of someone we met long ago, or to picture an item we misplaced.

“I can look at an object in the world around me, but I can also close my eyes and imagine the object,” says Varun Wadia, a brain scientist now at Cedars-Sinai, to Jon Hamilton at NPR.

For a long time, scientists haven’t quite understood the neural mechanisms behind mental imagery in humans. Now, a new study by Wadia and his colleagues has found that looking at an object and imagining it from memory uses many of the same nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. The work, published in the journal Science on April 9, could help researchers develop new treatments for psychiatric conditions that disrupt mental imagery, like schizophrenia, as well as memory disorders, like dementia.

“What we saw is that when you imagine something you’ve seen before, your visual system is being put into the state that it was in when you first looked at it,” Wadia says in a statement.

Past research has suggested that imagining an object activates similar brain regions as actually seeing it. What’s more, damage to neural pathways important for vision often results in deficits in the ability to picture items. However, these studies have lacked the spatial resolution needed to investigate whether the same cells are involved in both seeing and imagining objects.

In the new work, the team looked at neural activity in 16 patients with epilepsy who had electrodes temporarily implanted in their brains to identify the sources of their seizures. That allowed recordings from more than 700 individual neurons in each participant as they looked at hundreds of images of faces, animals, plants, words and everyday objects.

The researchers homed in on cells in the ventral temporal cortex, a brain region responsible for visual recognition and categorization. Analyses of the brain activity recordings revealed that more than 60 percent of the examined neurons selectively responded to one of the shown categories, and about 80 percent of that subset responded to particular parts of the images.

Six of the participants were also asked to look at the images and then close their eyes and imagine some of them. In that experiment, the researchers found that roughly 40 percent of the neurons that responded to specific image features also became activated when the participant used their mind’s eye to visualize the previously seen objects.

“This has not been demonstrated before at the neural level,” says Kalanit Grill-Spector, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the work, to NPR.

The findings support the idea that the human brain creates mental images by reactivating the neural code used to perceive objects, using what some people call a “generative model,” Wadia tells Diana Kwon at Science News.

The results could also lead to new treatment options for certain psychiatric conditions that disrupt mental imagery, like schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. “There are many devastating conditions where people imagine things that don’t exist, and that has a negative effect on their well-being,” says study co-author Ueli Rutishauser, a neuroscientist at Caltech and Cedars-Sinai, in the statement. “Our work could have significant relevance in the field of psychiatry.”

Additionally, this new window into memory might help researchers improve clinical care for people with Alzheimer’s disease and similar conditions. “Tomorrow’s clinical care is today’s science project,” Wadia says in the statement.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.