Scientists have discovered how to extract the building blocks or templates of our imagination.

The experiment that brought this about is an odd one and consisted of "white noise" images. White noise is used to fork images that are only random arrangements of colored blocks.

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These images are shown to people who are asked if they are reminded of anything when they look at them.

Most of the time, people will say it's just random colors and shapes. Some of the time, however, people will see a car in the image.

That image is set aside. With enough car images set aside, scientists were able to see a very general template of a car in them.

This is how Carl Vondrick and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge started their research.

Vondrick and company now say the process extracts the visual template the human brain uses to distinguish a car. Since the procedure is based on noise and imagination alone, they say it provides insights into the nature of human imagination.

One interesting discovery is that there are cultural differences among imaginations formed in different parts of the world.

People from India for instance have a red circular blur as their ball template, while people in America have an orange or brown circular blur.

The difference is a cultural one, as India's most popular sport is cricket which has a red ball, while basketball is the most popular sport of the U.S., which has a brown or orange ball.

Apart from a view into the nature of the human brain, this is also a good way to train machine algorithms to behave more like a human's.

"Our hope is that our ideas will inspire future work on building machines with the ability to imagine new visual concepts just like a human," said the team.

TagsBuilding blocks, imagination, Random Image experiment, White Noise, MIT