Power of Mental Imagery: Being the Fifth of a Series of Twelve Volumes on the; Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and; Business EfficiencyHilton, Warren
Science
Power of Mental Imagery: Being the Fifth of a Series of Twelve Volumes on the; Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and; Business Efficiency
Hilton, Warren
Imagery (Psychology); Psychology, Applied
When I was in college I was very fond of handball and was a
member of the handball team. It has been many years since I
played the game, yet I can distinctly feel the peculiar tension
of the right arm and shoulder muscles that accompanied the
"service." Nor do I feel the slightest difficulty in evoking a
distinct mental image of the prickly sensations that so annoyed
me as a boy when I would first put on woolen underwear in the
fall of the year.
[Sidenote: _Personal Differences in Mental Imagery_]
From these examples, it is apparent that we can form mental
images of past sensations of sight, sound, taste, smell and
feeling, and indeed of every kind, including the muscular or
motor sense and the sense of heat and cold.
But there is the greatest possible difference in individuals in
this respect. Some persons have distinct images of things they
have seen, are good visualizers. Others are weak in this respect,
but have clear auditory images. And so as to all the various
kinds of sensory images.
This is a fact of comparatively recent discovery. The first
proponent of the idea was Fechner, but no statistical work was
done in this line until Galton entered the field, in 1880. In
his "Inquiries into Human Faculties," he says:
[Sidenote: _Investigations of Doctor Galton_]
"To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men
of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery
was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and
fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really
expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They
had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man, who
has not discerned his defect, has of the nature of color. They
had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware and naturally
enough supposed that those who affirmed they possessed it were
romancing."
[Sidenote: _Investigations of Professor James_]
The investigations of Dr. Galton were continued by Professor
James, of Harvard University. He collected from hundreds of
persons descriptions of their own mental images. The following
are extracts from two cases of distinctly different types. The
one who is a good visualizer says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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