Question: what part of the brain controls the imaganation?

Jen Machin answered on 10 Mar 2015:

No one knows for sure yet, but at the moment some people think that the part of the brain that controls the imagination is the same part that allows us to remember things. People study this in a few different ways. One is that they put someone inside a machine called an fMRI scanner, which shows us which parts of the brain are working when someone does a particular task. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt to have this done – you just have to lie very still. We already know which part of the brain is working when someone remembers something, so we can compare this with the part of the brain that works when the person in the scanner is asked to imagine something. They seem to be using the same (or a very similar) part of the brain. This makes sense, because you use your memories to help you imagine things, even if you’ve never seen the thing you are trying to imagine. If I asked you to imagine a classroom, you would use your existing knowledge of classrooms to imagine another one. This would probably be very different to the classroom I would imagine, because the classrooms we are used to probably don’t look the same. If I asked you to imagine something weird, like a blue horse with pink spots, you would use what you know about the shape of horses and what you know about colours and patterns, and put these together to make an image in your mind. The brain is very clever! 🙂