'“The line between imagination and reality is just not so solid.”
Nadine Dijkstra is a Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL. Her research in Imaging Neuroscience explores how the brain generates mental images and differentiates them from actual perception. Utilizing neuroimaging, psychophysics, machine learning, and computational modeling, Dijkstra addresses fundamental questions about the overlap between perception and imagery.
Recently, Dijkstra has been leading the Imagine Reality Lab at UCL's Department of Imaging Neuroscience, focusing on the intersection of imagination and reality. Dijkstra's 2023 paper in Nature Communications showed the brain evaluates images against a 'reality threshold' to distinguish between images and perception. Her work also investigates how changes in these neural processes could impact mental health.
“They’ve done a great job...of taking an issue that philosophers have been debating about for centuries and defining models with predictable outcomes.” — Thomas Naselaris