Researchers from Karolinska Institutet have found that our imagination makes us experience the world in a different way as our perception of things change according to our imagination.
What we hear and think in our imagination changes our perception of things around us, thus making us experience the world in a different manner, researchers from Karolinska Institutet found in a new study. This study is in line with previous ones conducted in the field of psychology and neuroscience, which addresses the questions about how our brains combine information from the different senses.
The study was conducted through a series of experiments in which 96 healthy participants took part. The experiments were mostly based on how sensory information from one sense changes or distorts one's perception of another sense.
In one experiment, participants were given the illusion of two objects colliding into each other and the participants had to imagine the sound this collision would have created. In a second experiment, the participants' perception of this sound was biased towards a location where they imagined seeing the brief appearance of a white circle. Another experiment was conducted where the participants' perception of what a person was saying was changed by their imagination of a particular sound.
"We often think about the things we imagine and the things we perceive as being clearly dissociable," says Christopher Berger, doctoral student at the Department of Neuroscience and lead author of the study. "However, what this study shows is that our imagination of a sound or a shape changes how we perceive the world around us in the same way actually hearing that sound or seeing that shape does. Specifically, we found that what we imagine hearing can change what we actually see, and what we imagine seeing can change what we actually hear."
Authors of this study reveal that the findings could help experts understand the mechanism behind why some people suffering from mental disorders like schizophrenia have difficulty in distinguishing imagination from reality.
"This is the first set of experiments to definitively establish that the sensory signals generated by one's imagination are strong enough to change one's real-world perception of a different sensory modality", says Professor Henrik Ehrsson, the principle investigator behind the study.
The study was published in the scientific journal Current Biology
