Imagery and the Brain

Richardson, John T. E.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-6407-8_1

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…Others found either no asymmetry between the hemispheres or larger activation in the right hemisphere (Farah, Hammond, Levine, & Calvinio, 1988;Mellet, Tzourio, Denis, & Mazoyer, 1995). Results indicating no asymmetry between the hemispheres have led researchers to propose that both the left and right hemisphere participate in imagery processing (Richardson, 1991). This makes sense in light of the observation that many tasks involving imagery processing have both a visual and verbal component (Goldenberg, Artner, & Podreka, 1991).…”

Section: The Nature Of Imagery Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

I Saw It on the Radio: The Allocation of Attention to High-Imagery Radio Advertisements

Bolls¹,

Lang²

2003

Media Psychology

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Section: The Nature Of Imagery Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

I Saw It on the Radio: The Allocation of Attention to High-Imagery Radio Advertisements

Bolls¹,

Lang²

2003

Media Psychology

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“…As noted above, Richardson (1991) and others have shown that the brain substrates of mental imagery are almost the same as for an actual perception.…”

Section: The Anomaly Of the Non-passivity Of Conscious Attention: "Enmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Similarly, as summarized by Isaac Asimov (1965: 193) and Ellis (1986: 46-52), the transition from sleep to waking consciousness requires that the activities of the hypothalamus and cortex achieve a widely-distributed pattern of synchronization or coordination that was not present during sleep. Jonathan Winson (1986: 46ff), Richard Restak (1984: 315-333), Richardson (1991), andJouvet (1967) show that, when we are conscious of dream images during sleep, both efferent and afferent activity throughout the brain are detected, whereas during non-dreaming sleep both the afferent activity and some of the efferent activity are comparatively much less pronounced. These examples suggest that consciousness requires globally distributed processes in the brain, combining local mechanisms which under different circumstances would be active in various non-conscious processes.…”

Section: The Anomaly Of Physical Overexplanationmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Consciousness occurs only when efferent (outflowing) nervous activity takes the lead in selecting and directing afferent (inflowing) activity; conscious beings are self-organizing emotionally and motivationally directed beings that actively direct their attention, and can imagine things with no afferent input (with neural substrates remarkably similar to the imaging activities in perceptual consciousness -see John Richardson's (1991) collection of studies, for example). Consistent with Jean-Paul Sartre's suggestion in The Psychology of the Imagination (1966), subjects form perceptual imagery largely as a result of formulating their own questions about reality rather than just passively reacting to "stimulus-response" mechanisms.…”

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confidence: 98%

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Phenomenology-Friendly Neuroscience: The Return To Merleau-Ponty As Psychologist

Ellis

2006

Hum Stud

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This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology -the "enactive" approach to the mindbody relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from passivity, that the mental be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century ago.One of the most striking impressions of an initial reader of Maurice MerleauPonty's early works, Phenomenology of Perception (1941/1962) or The Structure of Behavior (1942Behavior ( /1967) is the careful attention both books give to neurophysiological and empirical psychological detail. Indeed, a glance at the reference list of the books just mentioned reveals that both cite considerably more physiology and psychology than they do philosophy. Yet philosophical commentators have tended to neglect Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on psychology, especially neuropsychology, while neuroscientists until very recently had tended to be unaware of Merleau-Ponty's important contributions to their own field.In fact, this neglect of Merleau-Ponty in neuropsychology was due to a philosophical trend: both psychology and philosophy of mind after Merleau-Ponty's death became inclined to the view that mental processes are reducible to lower-level mechanistic processes, without reference to the self-organizational dimension stressed by Merleau-Ponty, and seemingly almost to the exclusion of phenomenology altogether. But the good news is that neuroscience is now swinging back the other way, and is again becoming phenomenology-friendly. Neuropsychologists during the past decade have rediscovered the importance of self-organization and self-energized movement in biology, and the philosophy of mind has again begun to recognize

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“…Similarly, the transition from sleep to waking consciousness requires that the activities of the hypothalamus and cortex achieve a pattern of synchronization or coordination which was not present during sleep (Asimov 1965: 193;Ellis 1986: 46-52). When we are conscious of dream images during sleep, both efferent and afferent activity throughout the brain are detected, whereas during non-dreaming sleep both the afferent activity and some of the efferent activity are comparatively much less pronounced (Winson 1986: 46ff;Restak 1984: 315-333;Richardson 1991;Jouvet 1967).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Ray Jackendoff's phenomenology of language as a refutation of the 'appendage' theory of consciousness

Ellis

1996

P&C

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Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes.Ray Jackendoff s phenomenology of consciousness (pp. 17-27) reveals in a subtle, compelling, and useful way the process through which language allows attention to be focused on selected aspects of ideas and situations with increased processing intensity, and through which this attentional focus allows the human organism to think in a much more abstract and sophisticated way than can animals without language, who therefore cannot direct the focus of their attention in these complex ways. Jackendoff is clear that attention

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Imagery and the Brain

Cited by 13 publications

References 85 publications

I Saw It on the Radio: The Allocation of Attention to High-Imagery Radio Advertisements

I Saw It on the Radio: The Allocation of Attention to High-Imagery Radio Advertisements

Phenomenology-Friendly Neuroscience: The Return To Merleau-Ponty As Psychologist

Ray Jackendoff's phenomenology of language as a refutation of the 'appendage' theory of consciousness

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