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Today, we briefly touched on mental images and what mechanism allows them to be seen/by what process are they seen, and whether they are seen in the same sense that what we physically percieve with our retinas is seen. This lead me to wonder about people with varying types of blindness, and their ability to "see" mental images. I would imagine, as I think we discussed, that someone who has blindness caused by some damage to the eye, retina, or early stage of the geniculo-striate pathway would still be able to "see" mental images, as their brains still maintain  the capacity to formulate perception, with images as the output derived from thought as the input. People with cortical blindness, however, or any type of blindness that affects V1 (the primary visual cortex), might not have the capacity to formulate mental images, as the part of the brain that allows for conscious perception and creation of visual images has been damaged.

Does the process by which mental images are formulated reside solely in the primary visual cortex or is there some element of this process residing in the tectopulvinar pathway, or another part of the visual system that might be able to supplement a damaged V1?