How Mental Images Form in The Brain
Common examples of mental images include daydreaming and the mental visualization that occurs while reading a book. When a musician hears a song, he or she can sometimes "see" the song notes in their head, as well as hear them with all their tonal qualities. This is considered different from an after-effect, such as an after-image. Calling up an image in our minds can be a voluntary act, so it can be characterized as being under various degrees of conscious control.
According to psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, our experiences of the world are represented in our minds as mental images. These mental images can then be associated and compared with others, and can be used to synthesize completely new images. In this view, mental images allow us to form useful theories of how the world works by formulating likely sequences of mental images in our heads without having to directly experience that outcome. Whether other creatures have this capability is debatable.
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Famous quotes containing the words mental, images, form and/or brain:
“Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“What images are these
That turn dull-eyed away,
Or shift Time’s filthy load,
Straighten aged knees,
Hesitate or stay?
What heads shake or nod?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)