When I´m imagining a checkerboard in my mind, can one find, with all kinds of fancy equipment, a corresponding figure in the area of my visual cortex? For example, the neurons firing in such a way as they do when actually seeing a board, in which case the firing neurons obvious have the shape of a chessboard.

When I've seen a lot of chessboards I can imagine one by the same pattern of firing neurons (which have for this particular case all different, or more or less the same connection strengths) as in the actual case of seeing one.