This distinction helps make sense of aphantasia, the condition where people do not form voluntary visual images. If the brain separates physical simulation from graphical rendering, someone might run rich, unconscious models of motion and causation without those models ever being converted into a visible scene in the mind. That separation raises questions about how imagination, memory, and social understanding develop when internal visuals are absent or reduced.
Thinking about rendering as a social feature opens new directions for research and inclusion. How do classrooms, workplaces, or creative fields change when some people think without images? Which tools and teaching approaches can tap into simulation skills without relying on internal pictures? Follow the full article to explore how this line of thought reshapes ideas about human potential, learning, and accessibility.
Inspired by an analogy with ‘game engines’, the software modules that support animations and games, Balaban and Ullman propose that there is a deep-seated distinction between ‘physical simulation’ and ‘graphical rendering’ in the brain, broadly mapping onto the dorsal and ventral streams of visual processing [1]. The developmental pathway giving rise to in silico game engines is very different from the evolutionary history of the human brain, constrained by evolutionary forces. Nevertheless, the analogy is illuminating.
