transmodal brain – New MRI findings suggest imagining sights and sounds activates shared, high-level brain systems—not separate sensory-only areas.
A classic mental scene—like picturing a waterfall with its roar—feels intensely real. The question is what that “reality” looks like inside the brain.
Misryoum reports that when people imagine sounds and sights. the overlap doesn’t show up in brain regions tied to a single sensory channel.. Instead. researchers see the strongest connection in high-level “transmodal” areas—systems that can integrate information regardless of whether it originally arrived through vision. hearing. or something else.
The work sits inside a broader effort to understand how mental imagery is built.. For years. cognitive neuroscientist Rodrigo Braga has been trying to determine whether imagination runs like a replay of sensory perception. or whether the brain uses different machinery altogether.. His starting point is personal as well as scientific: he recalls noticing. as a teenager. that he could hear a voice “in his head. ” and wondering how unusual that experience was.
To test the brain’s imagination wiring, Braga and colleagues invited eight participants into an MRI scanner.. They prompted the volunteers to imagine a range of experiences—scenes. faces. someone speaking. internal monologues. and sounds—while the researchers collected hours of brain data.. The sample was small on purpose.. Misryoum notes that the team used individualized brain mapping rather than averaging across many people. allowing them to pick up individual variation in how imagination lights up the brain.
The prompts were intentionally open-ended. such as imagining a castle on a hill or hearing a rock song on the radio.. After each prompt. participants rated both their visual and auditory experience. focusing on vividness: how clear. realistic. and compelling the imagined experience felt.. Outside the scanner. the researchers followed up with more detailed questions about what made one mental picture more vivid than another.
That “vividness” wasn’t treated as one uniform thing.. The researchers grouped responses into two broad categories.. When participants reported thinking about locations and events. they showed higher visual vividness and increased engagement in a system linked to spatial processing: the brain’s default network A.. When participants focused more on speech and language. auditory vividness rose and language-related networks engaged—areas typically involved in understanding speech or reading it.
Misryoum emphasizes the key concept here: the networks involved were described as transmodal. meaning they respond to new information regardless of the sensory route that brought it in.. In other words. the brain doesn’t simply “turn up the volume” on vision for imagined images and “turn up the volume” on hearing for imagined sounds.. Instead. higher-level integrative systems appear to coordinate the experience—suggesting imagination is less a direct sensory replay and more an organized construction.
This finding also fits with a long-running idea in cognitive neuroscience: sensory areas can contribute to mental representations. but not all sensory-level details are equally necessary for the experience of imagining.. Misryoum reports that other work has found activation in visual representation areas when people imagine objects they have seen.. But the new study’s holistic prompts may have nudged participants away from ultra-fine details—like edges. colors. and precise line orientations—and toward broader. scene-level meaning.. That distinction matters. because it hints that “imagining” may recruit different subcomponents depending on what kind of mental task you ask for.
Why does any of this matter beyond curiosity?. Mental imagery is a fundamental tool for daily life—planning, remembering, rehearsing conversations, and understanding stories.. If imagination relies on transmodal systems and distinct sub-networks for spatial scenes versus language. then differences in how people generate vivid mental experiences could have measurable neural signatures.. That. in turn. could influence how clinicians and technologists think about supporting patients who struggle with imagery—whether due to neurological conditions. trauma. or changes in cognition.
The study also suggests a path forward for research design.. Open-ended prompts may better mirror how people actually use imagery—more like building a castle on a hill than painting every brick in perfect detail.. Still. researchers say it would be useful to separate the components of complex imagination tasks in future work. testing how fine-grained sensory detail. narrative context. and attention shape which brain networks come online.
For now. Misryoum’s takeaway is clear: when people imagine what they can’t currently see or hear. the brain appears to draw on shared. high-level integration systems.. Imagination isn’t just “screening” sensory areas—it’s more like composing experience through networks built to understand information across senses.