The Issue
Mental imagery, the process by which people summon and think with images not immediately drawn from their senses has been a topic of contention in the field of Cognitive Science for some time. The question, in its most general sense, is whether or not people use mental imagery as a way of thinking about problems and arriving at solutions. Like many areas in cognitive science, philosophers, psychologists, and thinkers have struggled with how the mind works with imagery for thousands of years, and there is still no firm consensus on the matter. More recently, scientific experiments have been able to shed a great deal of light on how the brain works, and the ways in which it is subdivided functionally. More and more is being learned about the detailed workings of the mind all the time, and this has allowed for increased precision and scrutiny of the thoeries that are advanced about the use of mental imagery as an element of human cognition. As a result, the question of mental imagery has increasingly shifted from one of feasability to one of the implementation and pervasiveness of this form of thought. How does the brain deal with what we would call mental images? Just how much like a perceptual image is a mental image? These are the questions that are now being asked by the modern theories of mental imagery.
Alternatives
The first theory to examine is that there is no mental imagery to speak of - that mental imagery plays no part in human cognition, and that, regardless of the underlying explanatory mechanism postulated, humans do not make use of mental imagery. The second theory is that humans think only in mental imagery, to the exclusion of all other forms of thought. Like the first one, this theory adopts a...
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Another example of imagery that is strong is, “I look in the mirror and hold up my mangled hand, only the baby finger left, sticking straight up, I know it’s the wrong goddamned finger, but fuck you all anyway.” (Smith) Patricia uses imagery here perfectly. The use of descriptive words like mangled and baby, add the image of a man just staring into a mirror saying, “Fuck the world” and even though he does not have the right finger to do it he still uses it to replace the middle finger he lost.
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Thinking in Pictures expresses Temple Grandin’s emotional struggles she encountered while being autistic. Autism is a condition, present from early childhood, characterized by arduousness in communicating and composing relationships with other people and in utilizing language and abstract concepts. Grandin grew up dealing with the fundamental emotions like happiness, anger, sadness and fear. Fear became her most immensely colossal emotion when going through puberty and her happiness stayed the same no matter her age. Growing up she was bullied so she always lost her temper and she had to learn how to control it. Sadness and depression always had a play in being constantly bullied. She compares her anger to an afternoon thunderstorm.
Imagery is a way to describe objects, scenarios, scenes, etc. by using language that would appeal to physical senses such as; smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound. For example, “Then the darkening firs And the sudden whirring of water of the knifed down a fern-hidden Cliff and splashed unseen into mist in the shadows.” (II. 5. 3-4) This quote is explaining how the day is turning into night, the trees are darkening, the water is swaying with the wind, and the trees vanishing behind the thick fog. “we slogged Through the
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The other main method in cognitive neuroscience is functional brain imaging. We have already learned in Chapters 10 and 11 that areas in right frontal and auditory cortex are activated during melodic tasks, and that activity in rostromedial prefrontal cortex is cor- related with tonality. Are these areas also involved in musical imagery? What about the regions involved in visual imagery, like SMA?
High level symbolic thought and the formation of equivalence classes, groups of objects that differ in some ways but are the same or very similar in others, may rely on categorical perception (Harnard, 1990). A big part of cognitive psychology seeks to understand how symbols (stored words and images) affect the brain’s organization of information, and categorial perception potentially represents a key part of the upper level cognitive processes that allow humans to conceive of broad
12-Matthew J. Brooks. Jiri Vrba, Karen J. Mullinger, Geroa Bjork Geirsdottir, Winston X. Yan, Claire M. Stevenson, Richard Bowtell, Petter G. Morris. Source Ilcalisation in concurrent EEG/fMRI: Application at 7T. NeuroImage 45(2009) 440-452.
Children’s processing of information is elementary and so the “copying” of pictures in one’s head is just a crude system of percepti...
The classic stories “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll consist of dreamlike adventures in a crazy world of nonsense. However this nonsense can be deciphered into a complex new system of thinking. This way of thinking can be transferred and directly applied to the mind. How the mind works, its many varying functions, and lastly the unconscious mind can all be tied to Alice. The unconscious mind can be compared to Alice, as can a dreamlike state of mind.
There are many different Visual Perception principles in perception. The main principles are Gestalt. Gestalt is a German word meaning 'form' or 'shape'. Gestalt psychologists formulated a series of principles that describe how t...
Mental Imagery and Visualization: I will not be changing anything from this technique. Practicing this technique in the morning and at night are good times. These I look forward to mental imagery and visualization because it allows me to go places I enjoy. I see it as an instant vacation without having to spend any money.
Motor Imagery or the cognitive simulation process is “the process of using multiple senses to create a representation of an action in the mind, typically in the absence of overt physical movement” (4). Imagery involves the creation of a symbolic representation from memory, and is primarily a top-down, knowledge-driven process that is primarily under the conscious control of the imager (5).