Mental Image
My hybrid project is a beginner’s guide to mental images that is digitally formatted:
http://hybrid.indiakline.com/blog/
The panels on the homepage of the website are six different unusual phenomenons relating to mental images. Each one is represented by an illustration that I drew, and in the post there is a brief explanation of the term and an account from an individual who experienced it. The website, illustrations and collection of interesting phenomenons is my creative element. In the menu, there is a “critical” section, which contains a research essay about the psychology and philosophy behind the generation of mental images.
Hi India,
Woah, your website is super cool! It is so visually appealing and very easy to navigate. I really love your drawings and love how they capture the unusual phenomenon. I think they look beautiful and enticing, but they’re also intellectually stimulating.
When exploring your project, I learned a ton about the mental image. I didn’t realize how large the overlap in our brain was between the visual and verbal worlds. My take-away was that the brain operates to understand both images and words, and that those two entities are actually much closer related than we thought.
Do you think it’s possible to have mental images that are completely separate from verbal language? I agree with you when you said that your verbal thought-process is essential to assigning meaning to the mental images. So do you think we can have one without the other?
I learned a lot from diving into your project and I really enjoyed it!
Hey India,
I really enjoyed engaging with your project in the digital space and I think you chose a really effective theme/ layout to present your project. I learned so much about mental images reading your critical component and it was great to get to focus on some of the specific types through your creative component. I was really impressed by your art, and I think it would have been great if your art also appeared in the posts, instead of just the main page, so we could engage with it more while reading the text. In your critical component you start and end with variations of the question “how do we think about mental images when the process is so tied up in the product.” Exploring your creative component, I was thinking a lot about if/how we can take mental images out of our heads and present them. How do we represent those intangible images through word and art? I really appreciated the links you provided to “experience” each type of mental image through existing art and writing. I would love to read your reflections on how effective or ineffective trying to reproduce or explain one’s own mental images is, and the different roles that words and images play in this process. I was looking into the New Yorker article a little more because it just seemed so fantastical and I was really interested in the author’s style of writing and I noticed it was published in the “Shouts and Murmurs” section, which is daily humour articles. This reinforced for me that Simms experiences did not actually occur, however I think this only makes the article more interesting to engage with in the context of mental images which can themselves be hard to define as “real”. I also think Simm’s article can tell us something about public perception and perhaps misperception of “Life Review”.
India, your website is really cool. At first I didn’t quite understand the idea of creating a beginner’s guide to mental images, so I loved how your project turned out and how you were able to translate it in a digital space. Your website is easy to navigate and your drawings illustrate certain concepts very well. I like that the images are in black and white, too. Maybe you could talk about your color choices in your reflection. Like Lauren and Ela have noted, the idea that mental images manifest themselves pictorially or through language is very interesting. You grapple with these separate cognitive theories clearly in your critical component. One thing that I kept thinking about while reading your work was memory. Do we remember pictorially or linguistically? What about dreams and our memories of dreams? How can we conjure images of things we’ve never actually experiences or don’t really remember? You explored a really interesting topic in your project and did so using accesible language, images, and engaging examples.
Hey India,
I know I’m not in your group but I was reading through all the projects and loved yours! I actually have aphantasia and really appreciated your inclusion of that in your discussion of mental images.
Katie
Your beginner’s guide to mental images is a fascinating, visually appealing, beautifully designed, informative website. I love the visual layout, and your drawings are vivid and enticing. I resisted temptation, however, and started with the critical essay. I’m glad I did, because you introduced me to the concept, delivering a lot of complex theoretical and scientific information in clear, accessible language. I’m still not sure I understand what the “visual buffer” in the brain is, and I would have liked some examples to illustrate the various theories and concepts. But I was able to follow your lucid, well-organized argument. I also appreciated the way you (perhaps informed by Mitchell) were able to analyze the subtle ways in which various theorists privileged words vs. images. And it was very satisfying to reach your conclusion, where you spoke honestly and intelligently about your own experience of mental images. In short, I like the way you think about thinking!
On to the images, which were beautiful and brilliant. I like the way you can navigate through them in multiple ways, though the click through slider at the bottom didn’t seem to take me to them all, so I ended up clicking back to the homepage in order to see them all. I love the taxonomy of mental images, but found myself a little disappointed in the amount of information provided about each concept. Like Ela, I wished I could see the illustration with the concept, and each link took me to another site, which means you risk losing me to all the click-bait elsewhere. You earned my trust in the critical essay, so I really wanted your examples and discussion of each kind of mental image.
A few easy improvements: embed your illustrations within each post, edit each link to open in a new window, and embed the links in prose rather than pasting in the ugly HTML code, which doesn’t match the sophistication of your site. But consider whether it’s worth sending your readers away at all—especially to that hilarious New Yorker piece, which seems to satirize the very concept you propose to take seriously.