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| Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium30 April-1 May 2004The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AHMental imagery and imaginationProfessor Ian Robertson1 Mental imagery and verbal-analytical thinking can be mutually inhibitory, under certain circumstances. Pre-school children’s thought is heavily dominated by mental imagery-based thought processes, but these capacities tend to atrophy under the influence of a largely verbal-analytic-based school curriculum. While certain types of problem are better solved by verbal-analytic thought processes, others insight problem solving for instance are best solved when these modes of thinking are suppressed and mental-imagery based processes are used. To quote Einstein, for example: ‘Words or language… do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought… my elements of thought are .. images’. Indeed, Einstein attended a school founded by the Swiss educational pioneer Pestalozzi, who based his educational philosophy on the assumption that the foundation of all knowledge was imagery. Pestalozzi argued that scientists and artists re-create the world by making images. It was on the basis of a thought experiment based on the image of a cart chasing a point of light on a light wave that led Einstein to reject Newtonian assumptions and postulate a fixed velocity c for the speed of light. In this paper I’ll further examine recent cognitive neuroscience research on the nature of creative thought processes.
1. Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin |
