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

290 I HOW THE MIND WORKSory with bizarre confabulations. Similarly, our voluntary, waking mentalimages might be hobbled to keep them from becoming hallucinations orfalse memories.JVnowing where mental images are says little about what they are or howthey work. Are mental images really patterns of pixels in a 2V2-D array (orpatterns of active neurons in a cortical map)? If they are, how do wethink with them, and what would make imagery different from any otherform of thought?Let's compare an array or sketch to its rival as a model of imagery,symbolic propositions in mentalese (similar to geon models and tosemantic networks). The array is on the left, the prepositional model onthe right. The diagram collapses many propositions, like "A bear has ahead" and "The bear has the size XL," into a single network.The array is straightforward. Each pixel represents a small piece of surfaceor boundary, period; anything more global or abstract is only implicitin the pattern of filled pixels. The prepositional representation is quitedifferent. First, it is schematic, filled with qualitative relations like"attached to"; not every detail of the geometry is represented. Second,the spatial properties are factored apart and listed explicitly. Shape (thearrangement of an object's parts or geons), size, location, and orientationget their own symbols, and each can be looked up independently of theothers. Third, propositions mix spatial information, like parts and theirpositions, with conceptual information, like bearhood and membershipin the carnivore class.Of the two data structures, it is the pictorial array that best capturesthe flavor of imagery. First, images are thumpingly concrete. Consider