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Emotional responses to imagined scenes depend strongly on the presence or absence of visual imagery. In a study led by Joel Pearson and colleagues, people with typical imagery read a series of short, frightening scenarios in a darkened room while their skin conductance a measure of autonomic arousal was recorded. Their conductance rose steadily as the stories unfolded. People with verified aphantasia, reading the same scenarios, showed little to no change, despite understanding the content. When both groups were shown actual frightening images, however, their physiological responses were similar. The body reacted strongly to perception in both cases. It reacted to imagination only when the mind could generate pictures. This separation hints at a quiet role for imagery in everyday emotion. The same scene, described in words, can land differently in a body that translates those words into internal pictures and a body that does not. Visual imagination seems to act as a kind of amplifier for feelings connected to past and future events, feeding richer sensory material into the circuits that regulate heart rate, sweat, and muscle tension. Imagined music recruits motor systems as well as auditory ones. Functional imaging studies show that when musicians silently hear a practiced piece in their minds, premotor and supplementary motor areas involved in planning finger and hand movements become active, even if the hands themselves are still. Over years of practice, playing and listening bind tightly together in the brain, so that summoning the sound also summons the pattern of movement that would produce it.