Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School / Cognitive Neurologist, BWH / Network neuroimaging of cognition 🧠⚡️ @braincircuits.bsky.social
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Thank you! Was fun presenting “What Does It Mean to See?” with Mike Erkkinen and Barbara Schildkrout at #ANPA @braincircuits.bsky.social @massgenbrigham.bsky.social
A recent @natneuro.nature.com paper analyzed lesion network mapping and raised concerns about the validity of the method.
See below 👇 for our response.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Can a brain injury make someone lose their imagination?
We describe rare cases of acquired aphantasia, people who lost the ability to visually imagine after a stroke or other brain injury. Now published in Cortex 🧠 @braincircuits.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Excited for the start of #ANPA meeting today in Providence - make sure to stop by Julian Kutsche's poster this evening on visual imagery and #aphantasia - @braincircuits.bsky.social
Free access to the full article and PDF for 50 days (until April 9, 2026): authors.elsevier.com/a/1me1p2VHYJ...
www.newscientist.com/article/2516...
Amazing collaboration led by Julian Kutsche w/ @calvinwhow.bsky.social @drdrxanderli.bsky.social @matthiasmichel.bsky.social @foxmdphd.bsky.social @mgbresearch.bsky.social
Why is the fusiform imagery node essential for visual imagination? It may be uniquely situated to connect regions for semantic processing (L ant. temporal) w/ memory (med. temporal) to ventral visual cortex. A semantic concept can be evoked->access stored memories->form visual mental representation
People with acquired aphantasia had injuries in many different brain locations, but 100% of cases were connected to the fusiform imagery node, a region in the left ventral visual pathway that is active during visual imagery tasks and altered in people with congenital aphantasia.
