Mental Imagery / Visualization

[Constantinos]

Hey people!

I'm new to this forum. I feel sorry I hadn't discovered it earlier. Some of the discussions here seem pretty interesting to me at least and I feel there are a lot of things to learn.

I open this post to talk about mental imagery, the visualization of concepts in physics mathematics or even other sciences and engineering. Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I found nothing through searching (which I found kind of odd, I expected it to have been discussed sometime).

So I guess we all have the experience of imagining the mathematics and physics we have learned. Either through doing arithmetic in our heads, manipulating an equation to be solved, doing geometry, thinking of a graphic representation of a function or its derivative and so on. This process seems to facilitate understanding and train the intuition. Moreover, the more one can visualize things, the more independence one has from calculators, computers, paper and the like.

But how far can it go? One can only do so much arithmetic inside the brain, big numbers and decimal points confuse and we are often wrong. The same goes with geometrical figures of irregular shapes not found in the observable world. It is sometimes better to use paper, or a machine to do your work. Better in terms of time taken to solve the problem (someone, for some reason might find intrinsic value in solving the problems in his head regardless of the time taken)

What is your opinion, When is it appropriate to use this faculty of our intelligence? Can it be trained? For example, I'm thinking of going back to all "High School" (its called Lyceo- Λύκειο in Greece and its not exactly High School) books and just read them and do the exercises without touching pencils or calculators, see if I am better at visualizing even the more advanced subjects in the textbooks I'm currently studying in the University. Do you think that might be worthwhile? And last (certainly not least) what are your philosophical opinions or known scientific facts about this experience of visualizing?

 

[HeLiXe]

There is a good thread on this here, I'll try to find it for you. It is about a certain aspect of this though, and probably not as broad as the visualization you are explaining.

There is a guy who I became interested in named Daniel Tammet. He's a savant...I don't know if that is still the correct term or if it has been replaced with another. As I was flipping through channels some years ago, I heard him mention that math is like learning a language and he is good at math and learning languages. As I heard him talk I realized we have a lot of similarities in the way we think about things albeit he is way better at learning and remembering languages than I am. The name of the documentary was The Boy with the Amazing Brain, and they discuss in detail how he experiences the world and visualizes things. I would recommend it.

When you ask how far it can go, I do not think there is enough known about the human brain to answer this definitively. In my experience, learning different things and making different connections in your brain can enhance your mental imagery. I really think the hippocampus has a lot to do with it. A semester ago I took a cultural geography class, and it really amplified my mapping (as I call it). I believe this was so because it gave another "dimension" to my maps which is cultural and behavioral.

I hope you find what you are looking for!

 

[apeiron]

When is it appropriate to use this faculty of our intelligence? Can it be trained?

All thinking involves imagery or anticipation. So it is basic to how the brain works and some kind of "visualisation" is always going to be involved. It is just most noticeable when a task is novel or unfamiliar, and so demands our strong attention. Once something becomes routine and habitual - even a pattern of thought - then the imagery part likewise drops out of obvious awareness.

Visualisation also comes broadly in two forms, reflecting a basic division of the brain into a handling of "what" information (objects, how they look, what they are) and "where" information (the way objects relate, their global spatial relations).

Clearly, much of mathematical, engineering and logical thinking depends on a mental feel for space, distance, scale and relationships. So you don't see an object in your mind, but do have an abstract feel for how a set of things relates.

There are parts of the brain important to this skill - like the IPO. And there are people who are number blind, have difficulty telling the time, etc, perhaps because of an IPO issue. It is called dyscalculia, and is one of those "disorders" like dyslexia.

As to being trainable, I don't buy the neurobics concept that you can take a brain area and pump it up with particular exercises.

But I think understanding that visualisation is basic and important to the learning of abstract concepts is helpful. It is only once something has been learned that the feeling of visualising would be expected to fade away into the background and so you "just know" stuff.

There is definitely a pervasive attitude that visual thinking is bad for the serious thinker. In Victorian times, it was associated with the primitive and savage mind. But all the actually creative thinkers were and are powerfully visual. Well, that is what the psychological literature reports.

 

[Constantinos]

There is a good thread on this here, I'll try to find it for you. It is about a certain aspect of this though, and probably not as broad as the visualization you are explaining.

Yes I'd appreciate that!

There is a guy who I became interested in named Daniel Tammet. He's a savant...I don't know if that is still the correct term or if it has been replaced with another. As I was flipping through channels some years ago, I heard him mention that math is like learning a language and he is good at math and learning languages. As I heard him talk I realized we have a lot of similarities in the way we think about things albeit he is way better at learning and remembering languages than I am. The name of the documentary was The Boy with the Amazing Brain, and they discuss in detail how he experiences the world and visualizes things. I would recommend it.

Yes I remember seeing him as well in some television program but I didn't know there was a documentary as well. I'll sure check it out;)

When you ask how far it can go, I do not think there is enough known about the human brain to answer this definitively. In my experience, learning different things and making different connections in your brain can enhance your mental imagery. I really think the hippocampus has a lot to do with it. A semester ago I took a cultural geography class, and it really amplified my mapping (as I call it). I believe this was so because it gave another "dimension" to my maps which is cultural and behavioral.

That's something I do as well. When learning different things from fields of study that are seemingly unrelated, I feel as if the images I perceive are qualitative different from those viewed in the prism of another field for the same system under study. For example, I used to work on distributed software and that requires a lot of interaction between software agents (I study computer engineering by the way) Although one could view these interactions as a complex work of stacks and queues and message sending between nodes, it is much more intuitive to view it as a protocol of communication between two entities, something of a social interaction. Different studies give different ways to perceive the same things or as you say different dimensions. This indeed stops when there are no alternative views, no other methods that give some more understanding of a system. From that point on I believe it is a matter of complexity, i.e how many objects and different views one can hold in his head at the same time.

 

[Constantinos]

Once something becomes routine and habitual - even a pattern of thought - then the imagery part likewise drops out of obvious awareness.

That I haven't noticed but I believe you are right. Since someone uses a concept too often, then it might be best for the brain to "hard wire" it in a way, i.e to be able to compute something so quickly that imagery becomes redundant and time consuming.

There is definitely a pervasive attitude that visual thinking is bad for the serious thinker. In Victorian times, it was associated with the primitive and savage mind. But all the actually creative thinkers were and are powerfully visual. Well, that is what the psychological literature reports.

That I didn't know! So what do those holding such an opinion believe is the best type of thinking for a "serious thinker" (- and what does that mean?)

 

[apeiron]

That I didn't know! So what do those holding such an opinion believe is the best type of thinking for a "serious thinker" (- and what does that mean?)

You can read Galton's paper...

The first results of my inquiry amazed me. I had begun by questioning friends in the scientific world, as they were the most likely class of men to give accurate answers concerning this faculty of visualising, to which novelists and poets continually allude, which has left an abiding mark on the vocabularies of every language, and which supplies the material out of which dreams and the well-known hallucinations of sick people are built up.

My own conclusion is, that an over-readiness to perceive clear mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly generalised and abstract thought, and that if the faculty of producing them was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse. The highest minds are probably those in which it is not lost, but subordinated, and is ready for use on suitable occasions.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

And...

However, the belief that imagery (as opposed to verbal thought) is more characteristic of minds that are somehow defective or undeveloped was not confined to, and did not originate with, the Nazis and their sympathizers. Indeed, it seems to have been widespread in the early 20th century. In 1912, a distinguished British psychiatrist apparently thought it quite uncontroversial that there is a "predominance of verbal thought in civilised man, and of concrete imagery in more primitive races" (Mapother, 1912 p. 73), and the most famous psychiatrist of the age, Sigmund Freud, seems implicitly to have regarded the visual images reported by his patients as part and parcel of their neuroses, as something to be exorcized and replaced by verbally mediated, “rational” insights (Esrock, 1994 ch. 3; Martin, 2007 p. 204). Furthermore, according to Jay (1993), in France (and, by implication, to a large extent in continental western Europe in general) 20th century intellectual life, across the political spectrum, was permeated by a “denigration of the visual”: visually based thought and experience was actively disvalued in comparison to other modes of sense experience and to verbally mediated thinking.

Arguably, signs of a similar attitude are evident some decades earlier in England, in the responses Francis Galton received to his pioneering questionnaire about mental imagery vividness. According to Galton, unlike the regular folk he questioned, many of the scientists and other intellectuals amongst his respondents were distinctly unwilling to admit to ever experiencing (visual) mental imagery (Galton, 1880, 1883; see also Roe, 1951).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/european-responses.html

But...

A replication of Galton's study with modern scientists and modern university undergraduates found no scientists totally lacking in visual imagery and very few with feeble visual imagery. Examination of Galton's published data shows that his own published data do not support his claims about deficient visual imagery in scientists.

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2006-07908-005

 

[mishrashubham]

Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene" has given a good hypothesis on the development of visualisation and simulation. By the way if you are not familiar with the book, you might note that he calls living organisms, "Survival Machines".

One of the most interesting methods of predicting the future is simulation. If a general wishes to know whether a particular military plan will be better than alternatives, he has a problem in prediction. There are unknown quantities in the weather, in the morale of his own troops, and in the possible countermeasures of the enemy. One way of discovering whether it is a good plan is to try and see, but it is undesirable to use this test for all the tentative plans dreamed up, if only because the supply of young men prepared to die 'for their
country' is exhaustible, and the supply of possible plans is very large. It is better to try the various plans out in dummy runs rather than in deadly earnest. This may take the form of full-scale exercises with 'Northland' fighting 'Southland' using blank ammunition, but even this is expensive in time and materials. Less wastefully, war games may be played, with tin soldiers and little toy tanks being shuffled around a large map.
Recently, computers have taken over large parts of the simulation function, not only in military strategy, but in all fields where prediction of the future is necessary, fields like economics, ecology, sociology, and many others. The technique works like this. A model of some aspect of the world is set up in the computer. This does not mean that if you unscrewed the lid you would see a little miniature dummy inside with the same shape as the object simulated. In the chess-playing computer there is no 'mental picture' inside the memory banks recognizable as a chess board with knights and pawns sitting on it. The chess board and its current position would be represented by lists of electronically coded numbers. To us a map is a miniature scale model of a part of the world, compressed into two dimensions. In a computer, a map might alternatively be represented as a list of towns and other spots, each with two numbers—its latitude and longitude. But it does not matter how the computer actually holds its model of the world in its head, provided that it holds it in a form in which it can operate on it, manipulate it, do experiments with it, and report back to the human operators in terms which they can understand. Through the technique of simulation, model battles can be won or lost, simulated airliners fly or crash, economic policies lead to prosperity or to ruin. In each case the whole process goes on inside the computer in a tiny fraction of the time it would take in real life. Of course there are good models of the world and bad ones, and even the good ones are only approximations. No amount of simulation can predict exactly what will happen in reality, but a good simulation is enormously preferable to blind trial and error. Simulation could be called vicarious trial and error, a term unfortunately pre-empted long ago by rat psychologists.
If simulation is such a good idea, we might expect that survival machines would have discovered it first. After all, they invented many of the other techniques of human engineering long before we came on the scene: the focusing lens and the parabolic reflector, frequency analysis of sound waves, servo-control, sonar, buffer
storage of incoming information, and countless others with long names, whose details don't matter. What about simulation? Well, when you yourself have a difficult decision to make involving unknown quantities in the future, you do go in for a form of simulation. You imagine what would happen if you did each of the alternatives open to you. You set up a model in your head, not of everything in the world, but of the restricted set of entities which you think may be relevant. You may see them vividly in your mind's eye, or you may see and manipulate stylized abstractions of them. In either case it is unlikely that somewhere kid out in your brain is an actual spatial model of the events you are imagining. But, just as in the computer, the details of how your brain represents its model of the world are less important than the fact that it is able to use it to predict possible events'. Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.

 

[HeLiXe]

Yes I'd appreciate that!

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=400140"
Here it is. Sorry for the delay. It is more about involuntary mental imagery.

Yes I remember seeing him as well in some television program but I didn't know there was a documentary as well. I'll sure check it out;)

Sorry I recalled the name incorrectly, it was "The Boy with the Incredible Brain." Here is the link to the first of five clips on you tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ss
I think the mental imagery falls under the same category of that on the thread I linked.

That's something I do as well. When learning different things from fields of study that are seemingly unrelated, I feel as if the images I perceive are qualitative different from those viewed in the prism of another field for the same system under study. For example, I used to work on distributed software and that requires a lot of interaction between software agents (I study computer engineering by the way) Although one could view these interactions as a complex work of stacks and queues and message sending between nodes, it is much more intuitive to view it as a protocol of communication between two entities, something of a social interaction. Different studies give different ways to perceive the same things or as you say different dimensions. This indeed stops when there are no alternative views, no other methods that give some more understanding of a system. From that point on I believe it is a matter of complexity, i.e how many objects and different views one can hold in his head at the same time.

I can relate in a fundamental way. I have my first computer programming class this semester :) Programming connects to so many things and I really appreciate my experience with logic and calculus because when I'm mapping a program it really activates my brain --the imagery is so intense. I think your last point is key to quantifying just how far it can go.