Mental Imagery and Behavior

Mental imagery, or the ability to visualize things in our mind, can influence our behavior. This concept has been studied for a long time, even before psychology became a formal field of study. The philosopher Plato likened mental imagery to an artist painting pictures in our soul.

Stephen Kosslyn, a professor, has dedicated his career to studying mental imagery and its similarities with visual perception. He suggests that during mental imagery, we retrieve perceptual information from our long-term memory, which gives us the impression of “seeing with the mind’s eye.”

Since the 1960s, many theories have suggested that mental imagery shares many characteristics and processes with visual perception. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found overlapping brain activity during visual perception and mental imagery. This overlap mainly occurs in the frontal and parietal cortex of the brain.

Neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) have shown varied responses to different stimuli in the visual field.

Mental images have been a crucial topic in both classical and modern philosophy as they are central to the study of knowledge. For instance, in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, he uses mental images to explain our understanding of the world. Similarly, the 18th-century philosopher Bishop George Berkeley proposed that reality is equivalent to our mental images.

In experimental psychology, researchers have tested how the human brain uses mental imagery in cognition. One theory suggests that our mind processes mental images by breaking them down into underlying mathematical propositions. However, experiments have shown that our mind and brain maintain and manipulate mental images as whole images, not mathematical models.

Recent studies have further explored this, arguing that human mental imagery occurs both visually and kinesthetically. For example, people are slower at mentally rotating images of objects, like hands, in directions incompatible with the joints of the human body.

Mental imagery can act as a substitute for the imagined experience. Imagining an experience can evoke similar cognitive, physiological, and/or behavioral consequences as having the corresponding experience in reality. This has been documented in several ways, such as imagined experiences being given evidentiary value like physical evidence, and mental practice providing the same performance benefits as physical practice.

In the context of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), this understanding of mental imagery is very useful. It’s often referred to as ‘submodalities’ and can be a powerful tool for coaching and behavioral change.

In summary, mental imagery involves low-level visual systems in the visual cortex where neurons respond differently to stimuli in the visual field. It involves areas like the fusiform gyrus, which is associated with object recognition. Attention plays a crucial role in holding it all together, and the reticular activating system (RAS) looks for stimuli in the environment.