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Visual thinking, also called visual or spatial learning or picture thinking, is the phenomenon of thinking through visual processing. Visual thinking has been described as seeing words as a series of pictures. It is common in approximately 60–65% of the general population. "Real picture thinkers", those who use visual thinking almost to the exclusion of other kinds of thinking, make up a smaller percentage of the population. Research by child development theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be true "picture thinkers".
In the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and cognitive science, 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 and waking up, when the mental imagery may be dynamic, phantasmagoric, and involuntary in character, repeatedly presenting identifiable objects or actions, spilling over from waking events, or defying perception, presenting a kaleidoscopic field, in which no distinct object can be discerned. Mental imagery can sometimes produce the same effects as would be produced by the behavior or experience imagined.
Visual memory describes the relationship between perceptual processing and the encoding, storage and retrieval of the resulting neural representations. Visual memory occurs over a broad time range spanning from eye movements to years in order to visually navigate to a previously visited location. Visual memory is a form of memory which preserves some characteristics of our senses pertaining to visual experience. We are able to place in memory visual information which resembles objects, places, animals or people in a mental image. The experience of visual memory is also referred to as the mind's eye through which we can retrieve from our memory a mental image of original objects, places, animals or people. Visual memory is one of several cognitive systems, which are all interconnected parts that combine to form the human memory. Types of palinopsia, the persistence or recurrence of a visual image after the stimulus has been removed, is a dysfunction of visual memory.
Auditory imagery is a form of mental imagery that is used to organize and analyze sounds when there is no external auditory stimulus present. This form of imagery is broken up into a couple of auditory modalities such as verbal imagery or musical imagery. This modality of mental imagery differs from other sensory images such as motor imagery or visual imagery. The vividness and detail of auditory imagery can vary from person to person depending on their background and condition of their brain. Through all of the research developed to understand auditory imagery behavioral neuroscientists have found that the auditory images developed in subjects' minds are generated in real time and consist of fairly precise information about quantifiable auditory properties as well as melodic and harmonic relationships. These studies have been able to recently gain confirmation and recognition due to the arrival of Positron emission tomography and fMRI scans that can confirm a physiological and psychological correlation.
Visual agnosia is an impairment in recognition of visually presented objects. It is not due to a deficit in vision, language, memory, or intellect. While cortical blindness results from lesions to primary visual cortex, visual agnosia is often due to damage to more anterior cortex such as the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain.[2] There are two types of visual agnosia: apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia.
Creative visualization is the cognitive process of purposefully generating visual mental imagery, with eyes open or closed, simulating or recreating visual perception, in order to maintain, inspect, and transform those images, consequently modifying their associated emotions or feelings, with intent to experience a subsequent beneficial physiological, psychological, or social effect, such as expediting the healing of wounds to the body, minimizing physical pain, alleviating psychological pain including anxiety, sadness, and low mood, improving self-esteem or self-confidence, and enhancing the capacity to cope when interacting with others.
Cerebral achromatopsia is a type of color blindness caused by damage to the cerebral cortex of the brain, rather than abnormalities in the cells of the eye's retina. It is often confused with congenital achromatopsia but underlying physiological deficits of the disorders are completely distinct. A similar, but distinct, deficit called color agnosia exists in which a person has intact color perception but has deficits in color recognition, such as knowing which color they are looking at.
Imagination is the production of sensations, feelings and thoughts informing oneself. These experiences can be re-creations of past experiences, such as vivid memories with imagined changes, or completely invented and possibly fantastic scenes. Imagination helps apply knowledge to solve problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process.
The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) was developed 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 mental image formed in thinking about specific scenes and situations. The vividness of the image is rated along a 5-point scale. The questionnaire has been widely used as a measure of individual differences in vividness of visual imagery. The large body of evidence confirms that the VVIQ is a valid and reliable psychometric measure of visual image vividness.
Body schema is an organism's internal model of its own body, including the position of its limbs. The neurologist Sir Henry Head originally defined it as a postural model of the body that actively organizes and modifies 'the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensation of body position, or of locality, rises into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has happened before'. As a postural model that keeps track of limb position, it plays an important role in control of action.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.
Exceptional memory is the ability to have accurate and detailed recall in a variety of ways, including hyperthymesia, eidetic memory, synesthesia, and emotional memory. Exceptional memory is also prevalent in those with savant syndrome and mnemonists.
Charcot–Wilbrand syndrome (CWS) is dream loss following focal brain damage specifically characterised by visual agnosia and loss of ability to mentally recall or "revisualize" images. The name of this condition dates back to the case study work of Jean-Martin Charcot and Hermann Wilbrand, and was first described by Otto Potzl as "mind blindness with disturbance of optic imagination". MacDonald Critchley, former president of the World Federation of Neurology, more recently summarized CWS as "a patient loses the power to conjure up visual images or memories, and furthermore, ceases to dream during his sleeping hours". This condition is quite rare and affects only a handful of brain damage patients. Further study could help illuminate the neurological pathway for dream formation.
Eidetic memory, also known as photographic memory and total recall, is the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device.
Guided imagery is a mind-body intervention by which a trained practitioner or teacher helps a participant or patient to evoke and generate mental images that simulate or recreate the sensory perception of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, movements, and images associated with touch, such as texture, temperature, and pressure, as well as imaginative or mental content that the participant or patient experiences as defying conventional sensory categories, and that may precipitate strong emotions or feelings in the absence of the stimuli to which correlating sensory receptors are receptive.
Allochiria is a neurological disorder in which the patient responds to stimuli presented to one side of their body as if the stimuli had been presented at the opposite side. It is associated with spatial transpositions, usually symmetrical, of stimuli from one side of the body to the opposite one. Thus a touch to the left side of the body will be reported as a touch to the right side, which is also known as somatosensory allochiria. If the auditory or visual senses are affected, sounds will be reported as being heard on the opposite side to that on which they occur and objects presented visually will be reported as having been presented on the opposite side. Often patients may express allochiria in their drawing while copying an image. Allochiria often co-occurs with unilateral neglect and, like hemispatial neglect, the disorder arises commonly from damage to the right parietal lobe.
Topographical disorientation is the inability to orient oneself in one's surroundings, sometimes as a result of focal brain damage. This disability may result from the inability to make use of selective spatial information or to orient by means of specific cognitive strategies such as the ability to form a mental representation of the environment, also known as a cognitive map. It may be part of a syndrome known as visuospatial dysgnosia.
Aphantasia is the inability to visualize.
Prefrontal synthesis is the conscious purposeful process of synthesizing novel mental images. PFS is neurologically different from the other types of imagination, such as simple memory recall and dreaming. Unlike dreaming, which is spontaneous and not controlled by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), PFS is controlled by and completely dependent on the intact lateral prefrontal cortex. Unlike simple memory recall that involves activation of a single neuronal ensemble (NE) encoded at some point in the past, PFS involves active combination of two or more object-encoding neuronal ensembles (objectNE). The mechanism of PFS is hypothesized to involve synchronization of several independent objectNEs. When objectNEs fire out-of-sync, the objects are perceived one at a time. However, once those objectNEs are time-shifted by the lateral PFC to fire in-phase with each other, they are consciously experienced as one unified object or scene.
Hyperphantasia is the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. It is the opposite condition to aphantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. The experience of hyperphantasia is more common than aphantasia and has been described as being "as vivid as real seeing". Hyperphantasia constitutes all five senses within vivid mental imagery, although literature on the subject is dominated by "visual" mental imagery research, with a lack of research on the other four senses.
References
- ↑ "Adam Zbynek Zeman". Companies House. Retrieved 22 April 2023.
- 1 2 3 Clemens, Anna (1 August 2018). "When the Mind's Eye Is Blind". Scientific American. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
- 1 2 Zeman, Adam; Dewar, Michaela; Della Sala, Sergio (2015). "Lives without imagery: Congenital aphantasia" (PDF). Cortex. 73: 378–380. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019. PMID 26115582.
- 1 2 "The Emergence of Personhood: A Quantum Leap?" (PDF) (Programme of symposium held at Chicheley Hall). October 2011. Retrieved 9 September 2024.
- 1 2 3 4 "Professor Adam Zeman". University of Exeter. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
- ↑ Zeman, Adam (1994), The cerebrospinal fluid and serum in multiple sclerosis and other neurological disorders: the significance of oligoclonal bands (MD thesis), University of Oxford
- ↑ "Sleep Centres – South West England". Narcolepsy UK. Retrieved 11 April 2024.
- ↑ Lemmin-Woolfrey, Ulrike (10 July 2023). "Why Some People Can't Visualize Images and May Dream in Words". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 5 April 2024.
- 1 2 Zimmer, Carl (8 June 2021). "Many People Have a Vivid 'Mind's Eye,' While Others Have None at All". New York Times. Retrieved 5 April 2024.
- 1 2 Griffin, Andrew (25 April 2016). "Aphantasia: Software engineer Blake Ross writes 'mind-blowing' post about being unable to imagine things". Independent. Retrieved 5 April 2024.
- ↑ Zeman, A.Z.J.; et al. (2010). "Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: A case of 'blind imagination'". Neuropsychologia. 48 (1): 145–155. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.08.024. PMID 19733188.
- ↑ Monzel, Merlin; et al. (2022). "Aphantasia, dysikonesia, anauralia: call for a single term for the lack of mental imagery-Commentary on Dance et al. (2021) and Hinwar and Lambert (2021)" (PDF). Cortex. 150: 149–152. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2022.02.002. PMID 35314076.
- ↑ "The Eye's Mind". University of Glasgow. Retrieved 9 April 2024.
- ↑ "Extreme Imagination Exhibition". University of Glasgow. Retrieved 9 April 2024.
- ↑ "The Case of the Blind Mind's Eye". The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry. Series 21. Episode 1. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 9 April 2024.
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