The Neuroscience of Imagination

Imagination allows us to escape our current time, place, or perspective in favor of an alternative context, whether that may be fanciful or mundane. So imagination is a mechanism for specifying and maintaining a context that differs from our more immediate and stimulus-driven experiences or contexts. According to Buckner & Carroll, this kind of "self-projection" from one context to another is the essential function that underpins the involvement of the prefrontal & medial temporal lobe (MTL) circuit in a variety of tasks, including those requiring retrieval from long-term memory, planning, theory of mind, and possibly even navigation.

Although somewhat vague, this idea is not as crazy as it might sound. Buckner & Carroll remind us that others have espoused similar views. For example, they review arguments that the prefrontal cortex can 'transpose the effective reference point from self to other, from here to there, and from now to then." Other recent work has emphasized the role of this circuit in "mental time travel."

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