Is Your Brain Lying to You? The Wild Truth About Imagination vs. Reality

A recent neuroscience study has uncovered a key mechanism the brain uses for distinguishing imagination from reality, offering new insights into disorders like schizophrenia and how the mind filters internal from external experiences.

The researchers found that a part of the brain known as the fusiform gyrus—which sits in the underside of the temporal lobe and is responsible for visual processing—plays a critical role in helping us decide whether something we "see" is real or simply imagined. When this part of the brain becomes strongly activated, especially during vivid mental imagery, it can actually fool us into believing an imagined object is real.

When Imagination Overrides Perception

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the study monitored the brain activity of 26 participants who were shown simple visual patterns while also being asked to imagine those patterns. Sometimes the real pattern was shown; other times, it wasn’t. Participants reported when they saw a pattern and rated how vivid their imagined pattern was.

What the researchers discovered was surprising: when participants imagined a pattern vividly, they were more likely to say they saw it—even if it wasn’t there. Brain scans showed that strong activation in the fusiform gyrus correlated with these false perceptions.

This suggests that vivid imagination can override actual perception, leading to misinterpretations of what is real. Under normal conditions, the fusiform gyrus is more active when we see something real than when we imagine it. But when mental imagery becomes very strong, this activation difference can disappear, confusing the brain’s reality filter.

The Prefrontal Cortex and Cognitive Reality Checks

Alongside the fusiform gyrus, researchers found that the anterior insula, a part of the prefrontal cortex involved in higher-order thinking and decision-making, also plays a role in reality discrimination. When participants said an imagined image was real, activity in both the fusiform gyrus and the anterior insula increased.

This coordination between visual processing and cognitive control regions suggests that the brain uses a sort of checks-and-balances system: the strength of visual signals is weighed alongside cognitive evaluations to determine what’s real.

This system may break down in psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, where patients often struggle to separate internal thoughts or hallucinations from external reality. Understanding how these brain regions interact offers new potential avenues for therapy, such as neurofeedback, EEG-based interventions, or emerging technologies that could strengthen reality-testing mechanisms in the brain.

Implications for Therapy and Virtual Reality

This research not only helps explain how some mental health conditions affect perception but also points toward future developments in emerging therapy tools. For instance, virtual reality therapies might one day use this knowledge to better simulate or distinguish imagined experiences in controlled settings. It could also enhance diagnostic tools for reality distortion symptoms seen in psychotic disorders.

By identifying how the brain distinguishes imagination from reality, we may be better equipped to treat disorders of perception, improve cognitive training, and design innovative modalities that sharpen mental boundaries between what's internal and what's external.

Discover more at interventionalpsychiatry.org

Citations

1. Dijkstra, N., von Rein, T., Kok, P., & Fleming, S. M. (2025). A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality. Neuron. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.04.013

2. University College London. (2025, June 5). How the brain tells imagination from reality—and when it fails. Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/imagination-reality-neuroscience-26097/