Question: When we imagine things we almost see them, how does our brain do this?

Scott Lawrie answered on 11 Mar 2016:

Great question! The brain is the least well understood thing we know if. How on earth does a collection of simple cells passing chemicals and electrical signals to each other make a picture? It’s like magic. We know the brain CAN make pictures because it takes the light collected by our eyes and turns it into a sensible picture we can understand and think about. When we’re using our imagination, we’re using all the memories of things we’ve seen and making a new picture in our heads. That’s why it’s hard to imagine something we’ve never seen because we have no idea what it looks like. Can you imagine a seven-dimensional orangey-green doodlemaflip? Probably not!