The findings differ from prior work, showing it's tough to disentangle how similarly our brains register imagined thoughts and real sensations.

Anderson et al. map brain activity during cued imagination with individual-level precision fMRI and show that imagined scenes and inner speech recruit distinct networks whose engagement tracks self-reported vividness. Overlap with perception was mainly in association networks, rather than nearby sensory networks, suggesting that transmodal brain systems support mental imagery.

Human cognition relies on two modes: a perceptually-coupled mode where mental states are driven by sensory input and a perceptually-decoupled mode featuring self-generated mental content. Past work su...