eople with a “particularly strong imagination” can struggle to differentiate reality from an illusion, a study has found.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) found that the more vividly a person imagines something, the more likely they are to believe it is real.
For the study, over 600 participants were asked to imagine images of alternating white and black lines while looking at a computer screen.
After they imagined a stimulus, participants then had to report how vividly they were able to visualise it.
Then, without the participant’s knowledge, at the end of the experiment a stimulus with the same features was gradually faded in to view on the computer screen.
Participants were asked to rate how vividly they imagined the stimulus and described whether what they saw was real or imagined.
The results showed that the imagined and perceived stimuli became intermixed in the participants’ minds.
When a real stimulus was faded in, participants believed their imagination had simply become more vivid.
And when imagining more vividly, the participants were more likely to believe that they had seen a real stimulus – even when nothing had been presented to them.
The researchers said that imagination and perception are controlled by brain circuits that overlap, which can blur the distinction between what is real and what is imagined.
Dr Nadine Dijkstra, of UCL’s Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and the study’s lead author, said: “Our results suggest that if you have a particularly strong imagination, you might occasionally be fooled into thinking what you are imagining is real, when in fact it’s illusory.”
She added that the results of the study could potentially have implications for the rise of VR technology and the metaverse, which aims to simulate reality.
“When we have a VR headset on, we usually like to think that we know it’s not real. But as VR becomes more and more realistic, knowing what is real and what is computer generated may become more difficult.
“Our results suggest that, counterintuitively, there is no categorical difference between imagination and reality; instead, it is a difference in degree, not in kind.”
Professor Stephen Fleming, of UCL’s Psychology and Language Sciences and Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, said: “Normally imagination is relatively weak, and so we don’t confuse it with reality. But if imagination becomes strong or vivid enough, it may get treated as real.
“In near-future scenarios, in which brain stimulation or virtual reality technology become novel sources of strong sensory signals, our findings imply it may be more difficult than we think to tell apart reality and unreality.”
The study was published today (Thursday) in Nature Communications.
