Yellow and Black Bricks

I realized this as I was attempting to take a nap the other day. I think finally taking a psych course is affecting the meanderings of my half-asleep thoughts....

Try a thing! Concentrate as much as possible on the following task:

Close your eyes (after reading these instructions, of course). Imagine a field of totally generic, evenly spaced bricks that extends as far as your mental imagery mechanism can fathom. These bricks are all a generic shade of yellow.

Now that you've established your life-like, colossal brick wall, begin from the lowest row that you can imagine and methodically change each brick's color to black, from left to right in that row. Once you reach the end of the row (however long you have been able to visualize it to be), go up to the next row and do the same thing. Keep snaking along the rows of bricks, changing each brick one at a time from yellow to black, until you reach the very last brick on the top row of your imaginary wall.

Pretty cool, no? You now have a giant black wall of bricks.

At this point, open your eyes.

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(don't read ahead until you've accomplished all of the above)

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Here's the catch. Think back to how you made your wall of black bricks. The brick wall is obviously not real. You made it up, "thought" it up, because I asked you to. But as you were painting your imaginary bricks, I can bet you one hundred dollars that you were moving your eyes along with where the bricks would actually be if they were indeed in front of you. Isn't that weird? You subconsciously tracked the paint action with your eyes, as if you were ACTUALLY seeing the wall. Maybe you were even moving your head along with the rows.

Now that you're aware of this, try another thing. Close your eyes again and try to do the exact same task. Try your hardest to keep your eyeballs still. Even when you know about this strange quirk, you can't HELP but move your eyes as if you were actually seeing the brick wall. And while you work hard to stall your eyeballs, no bricks can change color.

Weird, no? Cool, no!? I wonder why. Perhaps this suggests that our mental imagery mechanism is so inherently tied to a visual sensory processing system beginning on the retina.

My generalized hypothesis: Wherever our mental focus lies in a mental image, our actual physical eyes focus on the point of space where the object would lie if it was real.