Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

284 | HOW THE MIND WORKSobjects sewed up the case: the brain rotates shapes around anoptimal axis in three dimensions, but no more than three dimensions.Mental rotation is clearly one of the tricks behind our ability to recognizeobjects.Mental rotation is another talent of our gifted visual systems, with aspecial twist. It does not merely analyze the contours coming in from theworld, but creates some its own in the form of a ghostly moving image.This brings us to a final topic in the psychology of vision.IMAGINE THAT!What shape are a beagle's ears? How many windows are in your livingroom? What's darker, a Christmas tree or a frozen pea? What's larger,a guinea pig or a gerbil? Does a lobster have a mouth? When a personstands up straight, is her navel above her wrist? If the letter D is turnedon its back and put on top of a J, what does the combination remindyou of?Most people say that they answer these questions using a "mentalimage." They visualize the shape, which feels like conjuring up a pictureavailable for inspection in the mind's eye. The feeling is quite unlike theexperience of answering abstract questions, such as "What is yourmother's maiden name?" or "What is more important, civil liberties or alower rate of crime?"Mental imagery is the engine that drives our thinking about objects inspace. To load a car with suitcases or rearrange the furniture, we imaginethe different spatial arrangements before we try them. The anthropologistNapoleon Chagnon described an ingenious use of mental imagery bythe Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon rainforest. They had blown smokedown the opening of an armadillo hole to asphyxiate the animal, andthen had to figure out where to dig to extract it from its tunnel, whichcould run underground for hundreds of feet. One of the Yanomamo menhit on the idea of threading a long vine with a knot at the end down thehole as far as it would go. The other men kept their ears to the groundlistening for the knot bumping the sides of the burrow so they could get asense of the direction in which the burrow ran. The first man broke offthe vine, pulled it out, laid it along the ground, and began to dig wherethe end of the vine lay. A few feet down they struck armadillo. Without