“It is imagination that allows us to predict future events and use that to guide our actions.” (Tai Sing Lee 2016).
In the early part of the last century Wilder Penfield reported that as he was removing neocortical tissue from his awake epileptic patients that they experienced no change in their consciousness, even when large sections of association cortex were removed (reviewed in Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, and Chen 2025). This observation was surely apparent to Karl Lashley (1929, the stepfather of Peter H. Schiller) who overlapped with Penfield and who advanced the equipotentiality hypothesis that the neocortex lacks functional specificity and that it imagines and controls behavior holistically.
So, what is the lowest number of neurons required for an organism to experience imagination? Of late much effort has gone into studying the mushroom body of the fruit fly, a homologue of the mammalian neocortex, which contains 2,000 neurons with each neuron having, on average, 350 synapses for learning explicit associations between the senses (Dorkenwald et al. 2024; Lin 2023; Schlegel et al. 2024). This yields an overall storage capacity of 700,000 bits of information by the mushroom body (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, and Chen 2025). The human neocortex, on the other hand, contains 16 billion neurons (Herculano-Houzel 2009) to make explicit associations between the senses, but the human neocortex can store up to 1.6 x 10^14 bits of information, which is necessary for a 600-fold increase in relative longevity and body size, as compared to the fruit fly (fruit flies live for 1.5 months and have a 4 x 10^-7% of mass of humans, Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, and Chen 2025).
But rather than concentrate on the number of neurons to support imagination as the previous passage entertains for the fruit fly, let us consider how an organism expresses imagination. An amoeba is required to imagine the location of food as well as the location of predators (Saigusa et al. 2008). Even though an amoeba is a single cell, it should contain all the genetic machinery to imagine and guide its actions (Kandel 2006), which is the sole requirement for imagination (Tai Sing Lee 2016).
Consciousness depends entirely on neurons. When Penfield scooped out sections of association cortex the remaining neocortical neurons filled in the missing pieces, much like the blind spot is filled in by the association cortex. And to get a patient to notice the missing pieces, neuropsychological tests need to be conducted to bring the missing pieces to the awareness of a patient, such as establishing the awareness of the blind spot to us through testing. When the fibers between the neocortex and cerebellum are transected at the level of the pons and thalamus all consciousness is lost. The neocortex controls conscious processes and the cerebellum stores well-learned psycho-motor routines. The cerebellum houses Freud’s id and it contains the details of how Einstein came up with ‘E = mc^2’. Of course these details are in motor coordinates. The conscious coordinates can be found in Einstein’s notebooks, fragments of which were stored in his neocortex as declarative memory.
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