January 28th, 2022
Ofttimes, while drifting to sleep or waking up, I will see things with my eyes closed. These are not retinal images; they are creations of my visual cortex. They are not images; they are a cortical representation of images. That is, the visual cortex system higher than the system that recognizes images from the retina yet a tad lower than the system that generates the final interpretation of the image generates these “images” that I “see”. What’s striking about this activity is that my mind recognizes traits of the associated object that are not part of the visual image.
The “imagery” drifts from one concept to another. First I might recognize a block of something rather soft, like cheese. I do not actually see a block of cheese, nor do I see any details; instead, my vision shows a vaguely shaped block and, as part of the vision, I know that the block consists of a soft material. Thus, the visual cortex is grabbing information from elsewhere in the brain to associate with the image.
The image smoothly evolves into something else that is initially unrecognizable, then the system sharpens into an “image” of something completely different with its own invisible but known traits.
Addendum January 29th
I was able to observe foveal generated images last night. It takes a lot of concentration, but I saw several tiny generated images. One looked like a standard emoticon, except that it was sideways and had large teeth (!). The second was a tiny image of a few books on a bookshelf. In both cases, the generated images were circular and occupied a tiny portion of the overall black visual field.