Mental image
Encyclopedia
A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are sometimes episodes, particularly on falling asleep (hypnagogic imagery) and waking up (hypnopompic), when the imagery, being of a rapid, phantasmagoric and involuntary character, defies perception, presenting a kaleidoscopic field, in which no distinct object can be discerned.
The nature of these experiences, what makes them possible, and their function (if any) have long been subjects of research and controversy in philosophy
, psychology
, cognitive science
, and more recently, neuroscience
. As contemporary researchers use the expression, mental images (or mental imagery) can occur in the form of any sense, so that we may experience auditory images, olfactory images, and so forth. However, the vast majority of philosophical and scientific investigations of the topic focus upon visual mental imagery. It has been assumed that, like humans, many types of animals are capable of experiencing mental images. Due to the fundamentally subjective nature of the phenomenon, there is little to no evidence either for or against this view.
Philosophers such as George Berkeley
and David Hume
, and early experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt
and William James
, understood idea
s in general to be mental images, and today it is very widely believed that much imagery functions as mental representations (or mental model
s), playing an important role in memory and thinking. Some have gone so far as to suggest that images are best understood to be, by definition, a form of inner, mental or neural representation; in the case of hypnagogic and hypnapompic imagery, it is not representational at all. Others reject the view that the image experience may be identical with (or directly caused by) any such representation in the mind or the brain, but do not take account of the non-representational forms of imagery.
In 2010 IBM applied for a patent on how to extract mental images of human faces from the human brain.
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.
. In the Republic
, book VII, Plato
uses the metaphor
of a prisoner in a cave, bound and unable to move, sitting with his back to a fire and watching the shadows cast on the wall in front of him by people carrying objects behind his back. The objects that they are carrying are representations of real things in the world. The prisoner, explains Socrates
, is like a human being making mental images from the sense data that he experiences.
More recently, Bishop George Berkeley
has proposed similar ideas in his theory of idealism
. Berkeley stated that reality is equivalent to mental images — our mental images are not a copy of another material reality, but that reality itself. Berkeley, however, sharply distinguished between the images that he considered to constitute the external world, and the images of individual imagination. According to Berkeley, only the latter are considered "mental imagery" in the contemporary sense of the term.
David Deutsch addresses Johnson's objection to idealism in The Fabric of Reality when he states that if we judge the value of our mental images of the world by the quality and quantity of the sense data that they can explain, then the most valuable mental image — or theory — that we currently have is that the world has a real independent existence and that humans have successfully evolved by building up and adapting patterns of mental images to explain it. This is an important idea in scientific thought
.
Critics of scientific realism
ask how the inner perception of mental images actually occurs. This is sometimes called the "homunculus
problem" (see also the mind's eye
). The problem is similar to asking how the images you see on a computer screen exist in the memory of the computer. To scientific materialism
, mental images and the perception of them must be brain-states. According to critics, scientific realists cannot explain where the images and their perceiver exist in the brain. To use the analogy of the computer screen, these critics argue that cognitive science
and psychology
has been unsuccessful in identifying either the component in the brain (i.e. "hardware") or the mental processes that store these images (i.e. "software").
and (later) cognitive neuroscientists
have empirically tested some of the philosophical questions related to whether and how the human brain uses mental imagery in cognition.
One theory of the mind that was examined in these experiments was the "brain as serial computer" philosophical metaphor of the 1970s. Psychologist Zenon Pylyshyn
theorized that the human mind processes mental images by decomposing them into an underlying mathematical proposition. Roger Shepard
and Jacqueline Metzler challenged that view by presenting subjects with 2D line drawings of groups of 3D block "objects" and asking them to determine whether that "object" was the same as a second figure, some of which were rotations of the first "object". Shepard and Metzler proposed that if we decomposed and then mentally re-imaged the objects into basic mathematical propositions, as the then-dominant view of cognition "as a serial digital computer" assumed, then it would be expected that the time it took to determine whether the object was the same or not would be independent of how much the object was rotated. Shepard and Metzler found the opposite: a linear relationship between the degree of rotation in the mental imagery task and the time it took participants to reach their answer.
This mental rotation
finding implied that the human mind — and the human brain — maintains and manipulates mental images as topographic and topological wholes, an implication that was quickly put to test by psychologists. Stephen Kosslyn
and colleagues showed in a series of neuroimaging experiments that the mental image of objects like the letter "F" are mapped, maintained and rotated as an image-like whole in areas of the human visual cortex. Moreover, Kosslyn's work showed that there were considerable similarities between the neural mappings for imagined stimuli and perceived stimuli. The authors of these studies concluded that while the neural processes they studied rely on mathematical and computational underpinnings, the brain also seems optimized to handle the sort of mathematics that constantly computes a series of topologically-based images rather than calculating a mathematical model of an object.
Recent studies in neurology and neuropsychology on mental imagery have further questioned the "mind as serial computer" theory, arguing instead that human mental imagery manifests both visually and kinesthetically
. For example, several studies have provided evidence that people are slower at rotating line drawings of objects such as hands in directions incompatible with the joints of the human body, and that patients with painful, injured arms are slower at mentally rotating line drawings of the hand from the side of the injured arm.
Some psychologists, including Kosslyn, have argued that such results occur because of interference in the brain between distinct systems in the brain that process the visual and motor mental imagery. Subsequent neuroimaging
studies showed that the interference between the motor and visual imagery system could be induced by having participants physically handle actual 3D blocks glued together to form objects similar to those depicted in the line-drawings. Amorim et al. have recently shown that when a cylindrical "head" was added to Shepard and Metzler's line drawings of 3D block figures, participants were quicker and more accurate at solving mental rotation problems. They argue that motoric embodiment is not just "interference" that inhibits visual mental imagery, but is capable of facilitating mental imagery.
These and numerous related studies have led to a relative consensus within cognitive science
, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy on the neural status of mental images. Researchers generally agree that while there is no homunculus
inside the head viewing these mental images, our brains do form and maintain mental images as image-like wholes. The problem of exactly how these images are stored and manipulated within the human brain, particularly within language and communication, remains a fertile area of study.
One of the longest running research topics on the mental image has been the fact that people report large individual differences in the vividness of their images. Special questionnaires have been developed to assess such differences, including the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)
developed by David Marks
. Laboratory studies have suggested that the subjectively reported variations in imagery vividness are associated with different neural states within the brain and also different cognitive competences such as the ability to accurately recall information presented in pictures Rodway, Gillies and Schepman used a novel long-term change detection task to determine whether participants with low and high vividness scores on the VVIQ2 showed any performance differences. Rodway et al. found that high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. This replicated an earlier study.
Recent studies have found that individual differences in VVIQ scores can be used to predict changes in a person's brain while visualizing different activities. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study the association between early visual cortex activity relative to the whole brain while participants visualized themselves or another person bench pressing or stair climbing. Reported image vividness correlates significantly with the relative fMRI signal in the visual cortex. Thus individual differences in the vividness of visual imagery can be measured objectively.
have drawn from the idea of mental imagery in their studies of learning styles
. Proponents of these theories state that people often have learning processes which emphasize visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems of experience. According to these theorists, teaching in multiple overlapping sensory systems benefits learning, and they encourage teachers to use content and media that integrates well with the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems whenever possible.
Educational researchers have examined whether the experience of mental imagery affects the degree of learning. For example, imagining playing a 5-finger piano exercise (mental practice) resulted in a significant improvement in performance over no mental practice — though not as significant as that produced by physical practice. The authors of the study stated that "mental practice alone seems to be sufficient to promote the modulation of neural circuits involved in the early stages of motor skill learning."
Buddhism
, Bön and Tantra
in general, utilize sophisticated visualization or imaginal (in the language of Jean Houston
of Transpersonal Psychology
) processes in the thoughtform
construction of the yidam
sadhana
, kye-rim, and dzog-rim modes of meditation
and in the yantra
, thangka
, and mandala
traditions, where holding the fully realized form in the mind is a prerequisite prior to creating an 'authentic' new art work that will provide a sacred support or foundation for deity.
The nature of these experiences, what makes them possible, and their function (if any) have long been subjects of research and controversy in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, and more recently, neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
. As contemporary researchers use the expression, mental images (or mental imagery) can occur in the form of any sense, so that we may experience auditory images, olfactory images, and so forth. However, the vast majority of philosophical and scientific investigations of the topic focus upon visual mental imagery. It has been assumed that, like humans, many types of animals are capable of experiencing mental images. Due to the fundamentally subjective nature of the phenomenon, there is little to no evidence either for or against this view.
Philosophers such as George Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
and David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, and early experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology"...
and William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
, understood idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s in general to be mental images, and today it is very widely believed that much imagery functions as mental representations (or mental model
Mental model
A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences...
s), playing an important role in memory and thinking. Some have gone so far as to suggest that images are best understood to be, by definition, a form of inner, mental or neural representation; in the case of hypnagogic and hypnapompic imagery, it is not representational at all. Others reject the view that the image experience may be identical with (or directly caused by) any such representation in the mind or the brain, but do not take account of the non-representational forms of imagery.
In 2010 IBM applied for a patent on how to extract mental images of human faces from the human brain.
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
Animal cognition
Animal cognition is the title given to the study of the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology...
is debatable.
Philosophical ideas about mental images
Mental images are an important topic in classical and modern philosophy, as they are central to the study of knowledgeKnowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
. In the Republic
Republic (Plato)
The Republic is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato around 380 BC concerning the definition of justice and the order and character of the just city-state and the just man...
, book VII, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
uses the metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
of a prisoner in a cave, bound and unable to move, sitting with his back to a fire and watching the shadows cast on the wall in front of him by people carrying objects behind his back. The objects that they are carrying are representations of real things in the world. The prisoner, explains Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
, is like a human being making mental images from the sense data that he experiences.
More recently, Bishop George Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
has proposed similar ideas in his theory of idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. Berkeley stated that reality is equivalent to mental images — our mental images are not a copy of another material reality, but that reality itself. Berkeley, however, sharply distinguished between the images that he considered to constitute the external world, and the images of individual imagination. According to Berkeley, only the latter are considered "mental imagery" in the contemporary sense of the term.
David Deutsch addresses Johnson's objection to idealism in The Fabric of Reality when he states that if we judge the value of our mental images of the world by the quality and quantity of the sense data that they can explain, then the most valuable mental image — or theory — that we currently have is that the world has a real independent existence and that humans have successfully evolved by building up and adapting patterns of mental images to explain it. This is an important idea in scientific thought
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
.
Critics of scientific realism
Scientific realism
Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be...
ask how the inner perception of mental images actually occurs. This is sometimes called the "homunculus
Homunculus
Homunculus is a term used, generally, in various fields of study to refer to any representation of a human being. Historically, it referred specifically to the concept of a miniature though fully formed human body, for example, in the studies of alchemy and preformationism...
problem" (see also the mind's eye
Mind's eye
The phrase "mind's eye" refers to the human ability for visualization, i.e., for the experiencing of visual mental imagery; in other words, one's ability to "see" things with the mind.- Physical basis :...
). The problem is similar to asking how the images you see on a computer screen exist in the memory of the computer. To scientific materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
, mental images and the perception of them must be brain-states. According to critics, scientific realists cannot explain where the images and their perceiver exist in the brain. To use the analogy of the computer screen, these critics argue that cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
and psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
has been unsuccessful in identifying either the component in the brain (i.e. "hardware") or the mental processes that store these images (i.e. "software").
Mental imagery in experimental psychology
Cognitive psychologistsCognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
and (later) cognitive neuroscientists
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
have empirically tested some of the philosophical questions related to whether and how the human brain uses mental imagery in cognition.
One theory of the mind that was examined in these experiments was the "brain as serial computer" philosophical metaphor of the 1970s. Psychologist Zenon PylyshynZenon Pylyshyn
Zenon Pylyshyn is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher.He holds degrees in Engineering-Physics from McGill University and in Control Systems and Experimental Psychology , both from the University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies...
theorized that the human mind processes mental images by decomposing them into an underlying mathematical proposition. Roger Shepard
Roger Shepard
Roger Newland Shepard is a cognitive scientist and author of Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science. He is seen as a father of research on spatial relations....
and Jacqueline Metzler challenged that view by presenting subjects with 2D line drawings of groups of 3D block "objects" and asking them to determine whether that "object" was the same as a second figure, some of which were rotations of the first "object". Shepard and Metzler proposed that if we decomposed and then mentally re-imaged the objects into basic mathematical propositions, as the then-dominant view of cognition "as a serial digital computer" assumed, then it would be expected that the time it took to determine whether the object was the same or not would be independent of how much the object was rotated. Shepard and Metzler found the opposite: a linear relationship between the degree of rotation in the mental imagery task and the time it took participants to reach their answer.
This mental rotation
Mental rotation
Mental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects.-Introduction:Mental rotation is somewhat localized to the right cerebral hemisphere. It is thought to take place largely in the same areas as perception...
finding implied that the human mind — and the human brain — maintains and manipulates mental images as topographic and topological wholes, an implication that was quickly put to test by psychologists. Stephen Kosslyn
Stephen Kosslyn
Stephen Michael Kosslyn is an American psychologist who specializes in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Until 31 December 2010 he was John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University, having previously...
and colleagues showed in a series of neuroimaging experiments that the mental image of objects like the letter "F" are mapped, maintained and rotated as an image-like whole in areas of the human visual cortex. Moreover, Kosslyn's work showed that there were considerable similarities between the neural mappings for imagined stimuli and perceived stimuli. The authors of these studies concluded that while the neural processes they studied rely on mathematical and computational underpinnings, the brain also seems optimized to handle the sort of mathematics that constantly computes a series of topologically-based images rather than calculating a mathematical model of an object.
Recent studies in neurology and neuropsychology on mental imagery have further questioned the "mind as serial computer" theory, arguing instead that human mental imagery manifests both visually and kinesthetically
Motor imagery
Motor imagery is a mental process by which an individual rehearses or simulates a given action. It is widely used in sport training , neurological rehabilitation, and has also been employed as a research paradigm in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology to investigate the content and the...
. For example, several studies have provided evidence that people are slower at rotating line drawings of objects such as hands in directions incompatible with the joints of the human body, and that patients with painful, injured arms are slower at mentally rotating line drawings of the hand from the side of the injured arm.
Some psychologists, including Kosslyn, have argued that such results occur because of interference in the brain between distinct systems in the brain that process the visual and motor mental imagery. Subsequent neuroimaging
Neuroimaging
Neuroimaging includes the use of various techniques to either directly or indirectly image the structure, function/pharmacology of the brain...
studies showed that the interference between the motor and visual imagery system could be induced by having participants physically handle actual 3D blocks glued together to form objects similar to those depicted in the line-drawings. Amorim et al. have recently shown that when a cylindrical "head" was added to Shepard and Metzler's line drawings of 3D block figures, participants were quicker and more accurate at solving mental rotation problems. They argue that motoric embodiment is not just "interference" that inhibits visual mental imagery, but is capable of facilitating mental imagery.
These and numerous related studies have led to a relative consensus within cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy on the neural status of mental images. Researchers generally agree that while there is no homunculus
Homunculus
Homunculus is a term used, generally, in various fields of study to refer to any representation of a human being. Historically, it referred specifically to the concept of a miniature though fully formed human body, for example, in the studies of alchemy and preformationism...
inside the head viewing these mental images, our brains do form and maintain mental images as image-like wholes. The problem of exactly how these images are stored and manipulated within the human brain, particularly within language and communication, remains a fertile area of study.
One of the longest running research topics on the mental image has been the fact that people report large individual differences in the vividness of their images. Special questionnaires have been developed to assess such differences, including the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)
Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)
The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire was published in 1973 by the British psychologist David Marks . The VVIQ consists of 16 items in four groups of 4 items in which the participant is invited to consider the image formed in thinking about a specific scenes and situations. The vividness...
developed by David Marks
David Marks (psychologist)
David F. Marks is a psychologist who is largely concerned with four areas of psychological research - health psychology, cognitive psychology, parapsychology and IQ score variations...
. Laboratory studies have suggested that the subjectively reported variations in imagery vividness are associated with different neural states within the brain and also different cognitive competences such as the ability to accurately recall information presented in pictures Rodway, Gillies and Schepman used a novel long-term change detection task to determine whether participants with low and high vividness scores on the VVIQ2 showed any performance differences. Rodway et al. found that high vividness participants were significantly more accurate at detecting salient changes to pictures compared to low vividness participants. This replicated an earlier study.
Recent studies have found that individual differences in VVIQ scores can be used to predict changes in a person's brain while visualizing different activities. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study the association between early visual cortex activity relative to the whole brain while participants visualized themselves or another person bench pressing or stair climbing. Reported image vividness correlates significantly with the relative fMRI signal in the visual cortex. Thus individual differences in the vividness of visual imagery can be measured objectively.
Training and learning styles
Some educational theoristsLearning theory (education)
In psychology and education, learning is commonly defined as a process that brings together cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences and experiences for acquiring, enhancing, or making changes in one's knowledge, skills, values, and world views . Learning as a process focuses on what...
have drawn from the idea of mental imagery in their studies of learning styles
Learning styles
Learning styles are various approaches or ways of learning. They involve educating methods, particular to an individual, that are presumed to allow that individual to learn best. Most people prefer an identifiable method of interacting with, taking in, and processing stimuli or information...
. Proponents of these theories state that people often have learning processes which emphasize visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems of experience. According to these theorists, teaching in multiple overlapping sensory systems benefits learning, and they encourage teachers to use content and media that integrates well with the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems whenever possible.
Educational researchers have examined whether the experience of mental imagery affects the degree of learning. For example, imagining playing a 5-finger piano exercise (mental practice) resulted in a significant improvement in performance over no mental practice — though not as significant as that produced by physical practice. The authors of the study stated that "mental practice alone seems to be sufficient to promote the modulation of neural circuits involved in the early stages of motor skill learning."
Mental imagery, visualization and the Himalayan traditions
VajrayanaVajrayana
Vajrayāna Buddhism is also known as Tantric Buddhism, Tantrayāna, Mantrayāna, Secret Mantra, Esoteric Buddhism and the Diamond Vehicle...
Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
, Bön and Tantra
Tantra
Tantra , anglicised tantricism or tantrism or tantram, is the name scholars give to an inter-religious spiritual movement that arose in medieval India, expressed in scriptures ....
in general, utilize sophisticated visualization or imaginal (in the language of Jean Houston
Jean Houston
Jean Houston is an American scholar, lecturer, author and philosopher who has helped pioneer and motivate the human potentials movement. As a teacher and visionary thinker, Houston holds conferences and seminars with social leaders, educational institutions and business organizations worldwide...
of Transpersonal Psychology
Transpersonal psychology
Transpersonal psychology is a form of psychology that studies the transpersonal, self-transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human experience....
) processes in the thoughtform
Thoughtform
A thoughtform is a manifestation of mental energy, also known as a tulpa in Tibetan mysticism. Its concept is related to the Western philosophy and practice of magic. links mantras and yantras to thoughtforms:...
construction of the yidam
Yidam
In Vajrayana Buddhism, an Ishta-deva or Ishta-devata is a fully enlightened being who is the focus of personal meditation, during a retreat or for life. The term is often translated into English as tutelary deity, meditation deity, or meditational deity...
sadhana
Sadhana
Sādhanā literally "a means of accomplishing something" is ego-transcending spiritual practice. It includes a variety of disciplines in Hindu, Sikh , Buddhist and Muslim traditions that are followed in order to achieve various spiritual or ritual objectives.The historian N...
, kye-rim, and dzog-rim modes of meditation
Meditation
Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....
and in the yantra
Yantra
Yantra is the Sanskrit word for "instrument" or "machine". Much like the word "instrument" itself, it can stand for symbols, processes, automata, machinery or anything that has structure and organization, depending on context....
, thangka
Thangka
A "Thangka," also known as "Tangka", "Thanka" or "Tanka" is a Tibetan silk painting with embroidery, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, famous scene, or mandala of some sort. The thankga is not a flat creation like an oil painting or acrylic painting...
, and mandala
Mandala
Maṇḍala is a Sanskrit word that means "circle". In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point...
traditions, where holding the fully realized form in the mind is a prerequisite prior to creating an 'authentic' new art work that will provide a sacred support or foundation for deity.
See also
- Animal cognitionAnimal cognitionAnimal cognition is the title given to the study of the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology...
- CognitionCognitionIn science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
- ImaginationImaginationImagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
- Mental eventMental eventA mental event is a particular occurrence of something going on in the mind or mind substitute. It can be a thought, a dream, a feeling, a realization, or any other mental activity. Mental events are not limited to human thought but can be associated with animal and artificial intelligence as...
- Mental rotationMental rotationMental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects.-Introduction:Mental rotation is somewhat localized to the right cerebral hemisphere. It is thought to take place largely in the same areas as perception...
- MindMindThe concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
- Motor imageryMotor imageryMotor imagery is a mental process by which an individual rehearses or simulates a given action. It is widely used in sport training , neurological rehabilitation, and has also been employed as a research paradigm in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology to investigate the content and the...
Further reading
- Amorim, Michel-Ange, Brice Isableu and Mohammed Jarraya (2006) Embodied Spatial Transformations: “Body Analogy” for the Mental Rotation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
- Barsalou, L.W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577-660.
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External links
- Mental Imagery in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Imagination, Mental Imagery, Consciousness, and Cognition: Scientific, Philosophical and Historical Approaches.
- Roadmind University The Roerich Psychodynamic Inventory (RPI) provides statistical data to determine the validity of mental imagery for cognition of the minds raw emotional state. (Dr. Robert Roerich MD.)
- Mental Imagery in Mathematics