Dear colleagues,

I propose a debate on the most fundamental "blind spot" in the science of the mind: internal imagery. What, physically, is the "mind's eye"? Neuroscience has given us exquisite maps of brain activity during imagination, but these maps are like the shadow of an object whose true shape we don't know. We remain trapped in the metaphor of a "Cartesian theater," a ghost we have inherited that prevents us from seeing the solution. I urge you to read the book my colleague Teed Rockwell shared with me: "Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Non-Dualist Alternative to Mind-Brain Identity Theory" https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4910.001.0001.

The discoveries of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1950s and 1960s regarding hierarchical processing in the visual cortex were undoubtedly a milestone that earned them a well-deserved Nobel Prize and defined the neuroscience of vision for the next half-century. Their work gave us an exquisite map of how the brain deconstructs reality into lines, edges, and motion. However, in the wake of this monumental contribution, the science of vision, although it has made immense progress in the details, seems to have fallen into a conceptual stagnation. We have become expert cartographers of a territory we have only half explored. The map describes with astonishing precision how the eye functions as a "camera" that receives the world, but remains almost dogmatically silent on the deeper question: how does it function as the "projector" that creates our internal worlds? The failure to formulate, in over 50 years, a bold and falsifiable hypothesis that attempts to explain the mechanisms of imagery, dreams, and hallucination is not a sign of scientific prudence. It is a renunciation of ambition. It is, at its core, a lack of love for science, for the act of thinking, and for human evolution itself, which demands that we not only describe reality but also dare to understand it in its entirety.

My work proposes a hypothesis that is both a heresy and a radical simplification: imagination does not occur in a "place" in the brain; it is projected onto a "place" in the body.

I postulate that the entire visual system, from the retina to the cortex, is not a one-way street. It is a dual-use interface: a feedback loop, a camera for the outside world, and a holographic display for the inner universe. The brain, in this model, does not "think" images; it projects them. Dreams, memories, insights... are neurodynamic patterns that the brain "draws" on the hardware of our own vision.

This idea, though bold, is not an act of faith. It is a falsifiable model. It proposes that the coherence of these internal projections leaves a measurable "fractal signature" in the EEG. The chaos of a schizophrenic hallucination with blindness from birth, or vice versa, and the clarity of a mathematical insight should have radically different neurodynamic geometries.

This brings me to the central question of this debate, one that is both uncomfortable and, I believe, necessary:

Have we been ignoring the solution out of purposeful dogma or innocence?

If we could demonstrate that the eye, even a blind eye, is indispensable for the function of imagining, justifying this necessary curiosity with exemplary isolated cases such as Charles Bonnet syndrome? The patient without eyeballs since childhood with a total absence of visual perception but recurrent visual dreams? Visual hallucinations induced by extreme sensory deprivation? A patient with bilateral optic nerve damage but vivid internal visual imagery? Etc., etc. Wouldn't we be forced to admit that consciousness isn't mere brain software, but an embodied process that extends to the periphery of our being?

What if the "vivid form" of our deepest thoughts literally has a geometric shape projected onto the very place where we see reality?

I look forward to your perspectives, your critiques, and, above all, your rebuttals.

The debate is open.