This should be like front page news. This is something many would have not thought possible. It also poses many problems non-materialists that do not subscribe to a weird hand-wavy coincidentalism.
I don't see how this should pose problems to non-materialists. There's no reason the image can't be formed in the brain before or during transmission to the immaterial mind, for instance.
I'm not a dualist by any stretch but to claim this as evidence for materialism is mistaken.
No, you may not understand materialism. Sure, as I already said, if you subscribe to some weird coincidentalist view maybe not but for those not grasping at straws this removes a lot from a dualist conception and it even further shows it as an unneccessary hypothesis.
Not at all: proving that the brain forms images from sensory inputs only proves that the brain forms images from sensory inputs. It's a tenable dualist position that the material brain handles sense perception while the immaterial mind handles higher level consciousness and thought. In fact, the body was always classically assumed to handle most of sense perception even before this research.
I understand materialism just fine. But this doesn't prove materialism.
