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Mental images... Definition of mental image

Definition of mental image

What is a mental image?
The image is the remaining trace of the feeling in the soul after the disappearance of the external influence, and therefore some of them said that it is the memory of the feeling. Bossueya said:
Let the thing that I am looking at go away in front of me, and let the noise that I hear subside, and let me stop drinking the drink that I made in pleasure, and let the fire that was warming me go out, and let the heat be followed - if you will - by a feeling of coldness, so I imagine and imagine this color, this noise, and this heat. And that deliciousness. If the image of what I heard and saw came back to me in the darkness and stillness, I did not say that I saw or heard it, but rather I said that I imagined it. (1)

The image is therefore part of the nature of the feeling, because it is mostly a copy of it, and it is a simple psychological phenomenon, except that it is not primary, like the feeling. It has been said: The feeling is a first image, and the image is a second feeling.

We will shortly discuss how an image is similar to a feeling and how it differs from it. For now, here are the characteristics of the following image (Consecutive Image).

1 - The following picture:
The next image is the image that immediately follows the feeling. If I stare at a luminous object and then close my eyes, I see the image of that luminous object in the dark. If you stare at a luminous object and then look at a white wall, you will see an image of that object in its natural colors, or in colors complementary to the first. If you see the object in its natural colors, its subsequent image will be positive, and if you see it in its complementary colors, its subsequent image will be negative (1).

Hearing, smell, taste, and other senses have secondary forms, just as sight does. But all of these images are positive, meaning they follow the feeling without changing it.

Scientists have distinguished between the following image and the real mental image that returns to the feeling after the disappearance of the feeling. They said that the following image is the one that immediately follows the feeling, while the real mental image is the one that returns to the feeling after the feeling has disappeared from it. The best difference between the real image and the next image is what William James mentioned in the book Psychology. He said: The following image becomes larger if you move the barrier farther away and becomes smaller if you bring it closer, but the real image remains the same. This indicates that the following image arises from a nerve effect that is still preserved in the nerves after the stimulus has disappeared. It is like a feeling. It is better to call it a subsequent feeling, not a subsequent image.

2- The real picture:
The true image is not generated from a present influence, but rather from absent influences. It is a psychological state similar to a feeling, except that it does not return to feeling except after the absence of what is felt from it. They distinguished between image and perception, saying: Image is a simple psychological state isolated from others, while perception is an index of a complex psychological state that includes many images.

Hearing, smell, and the other senses have different forms. For example, as I write these lines, I see an image of Lebanon from the sea at the entrance to Beirut. This image may appear clearly to me if I close my eyes, and I may hear, as I read the rustle of branches and the murmur of water, and smell the scent of flowers, and taste the taste of wine, and none of that is in front of me.
The return of images to the arena of feeling may be automatic or it may be voluntary. But people vary in their ability to revive their mental images. Some people are close to the senses and only think in images. Some of them tend towards intelligibles devoid of sensory attachments, but the scholars of our time (between him and the Farz Borg school) prove that imagining images is not necessary for thinking about things.

A person may think of a triangle or snow, for example, and he does not need in his thinking to imagine the image of a tangible triangle or cold snow. There is a group of scholars whose thinking reaches such a degree that they do not need to retrieve images of tangible things. Galton proved that many scholars are deprived of this inner vision, and that the ability to revive visual images with clear colors exists in abundance among the uneducated, women, young men, and young women. But if the ability to revive images exists for every human being, then the ability to think abstractly is not Depends on the images being revived.