The very first night of Desert Storm, nearly two decade ago now, CNN’s John Holliman was sleeping fitfully in his hotel room in Baghdad. The deadline for Saddam Hussein to quit Kuwait had passed, and everyone was waiting to see what the first President Bush would do.

Since John was in the proverbial line of fire, he thought he’d get what rest he could before the action began … not even knowing for sure that there would be any action. But he wasn’t kept in limbo for long. The night sky lit up. Explosions surrounded him. Smart missiles buzzed by his balcony in precision, pre-programmed control. He lay on the floor for hours, barking into his telephone, reporting what he saw, heard, felt.

During our interview, he said to me, “Do you remember the pictures from that night?” I was puzzled. I remembered the night well, but no pictures came up for me. After a beat, he said, “There were none.” CNN had showed a single fixed slide and simply aired his voice.

But people stopped him everywhere he went, and besides quoting accurately what he had said, they insisted they had seen tanks coming down the street and all kinds of images. No matter what he said, he couldn’t convince them otherwise.

I was reminded of this capacity of the human mind to add video to audio recently on a long road trip. I had scanned the low numbered channels for an NPR station and found one playing the audio track from public television’s Antiques Road Show. For the better part of an hour, I drove along, and it was as if I was watching TV.

The blond twin brothers were absolutely clear in my mind’s eye, as were the appraisers who engaged the lucky antique owners. My imaginings refined as details emerged – the patina, the nub, the mark. There was the personal diary of a revolutionary war soldier and his canteen. The pear-shaped tobacco tin that turned out to be a tea caddy. The Chinese porcelain surprisingly made by a Japanese master.

The routine “Do you have any idea of its value?” was followed by the also routine appraisal of what it would bring at auction, and then something interesting happened: Just as if I had been watching television, I heard that familiar zing! But I could only vaguely come up with the yellow band that zips across the bottom of the screen, and while I’d just heard the value, I couldn’t conjure a number up for the yellow band, or create the short text description below.

So some of the experience was possible to reconstitute, but not all.

What hits me from both of these experiences – the late John Holliman’s reporting from Baghdad and my Antiques Road Show from Interstate 80 – is that without the technologies of radio and television, they wouldn’t exist. And possibly – just possibly – we are now all routinely using our brains in ways that are completely new to humans.

Still I can’t help but wonder: Could we use this ability to automatically add phantom video to audio to create new forms of entertainment, far beyond the radio serials of old and the opportunistic programming of today?

As we learn scientifically what the modern brain can conjure up, it’s possible that we might create entertainments which engage the mind in new and extraordinary ways, like a talented chef hits every spot on the tongue, every note on the palette. And with the help of science and technology, we will know for sure.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.