Mental Image: A Beginner’s Guide
DRAFT
Creative Component:
My creative component will be a website where there will be a lot of different things you can explore that are connected to the mental image. For example here are examples of unusual experiences involving mental images that the website will explain with accompanied examples/images:
-Aphantasia
-Eidetic Memory/Photographic Memory
-Blindness in terms of mental imagery
-Synesthesia
Critical Essay (a sample):
How can we think about mental images? This question is frustrating because it is hard to wrap your head around something that is so intrinsically connected to the head-wrapping process. A mental image is a visual image formed in one’s mind of something that is either not present or not real. Mental images are a key element in our thought processes, memories and emotions, yet they seem so intangible and indescribable. In Irving Massey’s article, “Words and Images: Harmony and Dissonance”, he attempts to describe the thought process saying, “the natural movement of the mind is from image to image…what thought seems to consist of, by and large, is an image with a few words preceding and/or attached to it” (Massey 377). What Massey seems to be getting at is the idea that thoughts, which are predominately made up of mental images, are messy, fleeting and constant. In this essay, I aim to present a way to think about mental images, a beginners guide to mental images if you will.
While words can be remembered, repeated and transcribed, image making in thinking is extremely evanescent. So evanescent, in fact, that there has been a lot of debate over whether mental images even exist. The controversy falls between two parties: the “pictorialists” and the “descriptionalists” (Eckardt 441). It is generally accepted that there are two ways of thinking: sensuously, which is perception and imagination, and contemplatively, which is abstract though (Maloney 237). The controversy does not lie here, but rather in the more complicated sphere of cognitive theory.
In J. Christopher Maloney’s article “Mental Images and Cognitive Theory”, he articulates the split in cognitive theory as, “pictures and overt sentence tokens constitute fundamentally different types of representations in the public domain, so too, mental images and contemplative vehicles are hypothesized to be essentially different kinds of representations in the mental realm” (Maloney 238). In this explanation, Maloney relies on the reader’s fundamental understanding of the difference between word and image to describe the mental process of forming images versus forming ideas. And while Massey has already claimed that there is an intrinsic connection between the two during the thought process, it is important to differentiate between the two in order to prove that the formation of mental images is a real cognitive process.
Works Cited
Chan, Chiu-Shiu. “Mental Image and Internal Representation.” Journal of Architectural Planning Research 41.1 (1997): 52-77. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web.
Eckhardt, Barbara Von. “Mental Image and Their Explanations.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 53.3 (1988): 441-60. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web.
Massey, Irving. “Words and Images: Harmony Dissonance.” The Georgia Review 34.2 (1980): 375-95. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web.
Maloney, J. Christopher. “Mental Images and Cognitive Theory.” American Philosophical Quarterly 21.3 (1984): 237-47. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web.
Mitchell, William JT. “What is an Image?.” New Literary History 15.3 (1984): 503-537.
Hi India,
What an interesting idea! I have never really thought about the mental image, I’ve always just accepted it as part of my daily life. I really like how your explaining the cognitive aspects of the mental image!
One thing to work on would be a thesis. I think that you are trying to just give a background guide, but it could be helpful for the reader if you had a central argument. I think it would make your paper easier to follow and more compelling.
Something to think about would be your creative component. Will your website be interactive? Or will it just be a collection of images? Is there any way to have examples that mimic the mental image in your brain?
I’m really excited to see your final product!
Hi India!
Like Lauren, I haven’t thought much about mental images and never in an academic or formal way. Conceptually, one thing I love about the topic you have chosen is relationship between the intangibility of a mental image (as opposed to a physical one) and the equally intangible language/ forms of expression we use to translate that image to other people.
I appreciated the tone of your critical essay – it is still very academic, but still reads casually and doesn’t get bogged down in trying to be overly technical. I think this is valuable because I anticipate you will be discussing a number of more technical concepts and theories and they way you have written the initial part of your critical component keeps the material accessible.
Because this is just a sample/ draft I am not sure to what extent you intend to explain (with text) the terms/ experiences you list under your creative section, and I would definitely recommend doing something to consciously explain/ give background on them at the beginning of your creative and critical components.
One thing to think about, with a website, is possibly integrating your creative and critical components within the site structure, so they can be found together and build off each other. I am trying to do this with my site (though I still have lots left to write), and how I have decided to do it is to have the critical component broken up into pages that are linked in the main menu and to have the creative elements through posts and as the central focus of the site.
India, my comments on your drafts are similar to Lauren’s and Ela’s. Like them, I find that this topic is very interesting and the idea of creating a guide to understand mental images is also really cool. I also believe that you could narrow your scope a little bit and draw from examples in different fields to explain the cognitive theory behind it. For instance, you could draw from examples in literature to explain the creation of mental image through imagery and other types of rhetorical tropes. That could also be something that you could explore in your website, imagining it will be interactive in some way.
This is a great idea and I can’t wait to see your final product!