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

The Mind's Eye j 285an ability to visualize the tunnel and the vine and armadillo inside it, themen would not have connected a sequence of threading, listening, yanking,breaking, measuring, and digging actions to an expectation of findingan animal corpse. In a joke we used to tell as children, two carpentersare hammering nails into the side of a house, and one asks the other whyhe is examining each nail as he takes it out of the box and throwing halfof them away. "They're defective," replies the second carpenter, holdingone up. "The pointy end is facing the wrong way." "You fool!" shouts thefirst carpenter. "Those are for the other side of the house!"But people do not use imagery just to rearrange the furniture or digup armadillos. The eminent psychologist D. O. Hebb once wrote, "Youcan hardly turn around in psychology without bumping into the image."Give people a list of nouns to memorize, and they will imagine theminteracting in bizarre images. Give them factual questions like "Does aflea have a mouth?" and they will visualize the flea and "look for" themouth. And, of course, give them a complex shape at an unfamiliar orientation,and they will rotate its image to a familiar one.Many creative people claim to "see" the solution to a problem in animage. Faraday and Maxwell visualized electromagnetic fields as tinytubes filled with fluid. Kekule saw the benzene ring in a reverie of snakesbiting their tails. Watson and Crick mentally rotated models of what wasto become the double helix. Einstein imagined what it would be like toride on a beam of light or drop a penny in a plummeting elevator. Heonce wrote, "My particular ability does not lie in mathematical calculation,but rather in visualizing effects, possibilities, and consequences."Painters and sculptors try out ideas in their minds, and even novelistsvisualize scenes and plots in their mind's eye before putting pen to paper.Images drive the emotions as well as the intellect. Hemingway wrote,"Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lackof ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination." Ambition, anxiety,sexual arousal, and jealous rage can all be triggered by images ofwhat isn't there. In one experiment, volunteers were hooked up to electrodesand asked to imagine their mates being unfaithful. The authorsreport, "Their skin conductance increased 1.5 microSiemens, the corrugatormuscle in their brow showed 7.75 microvolts units of contraction,and their heart rates accelerated by five beats per minute, equivalent todrinking three cups of coffee at one sitting." Of course, the imaginationrevives many experiences at a time, not just seeing, but the visual imagemakes a mental simulation especially vivid.