Ian Robertson has always been fascinated by how the mind makes images, for that awesome power directly and deeply affects our lives. All of us "visualize" the world differently, and how we do so dictates the way we feel, remember, and think--and therefore our health, memory, and creativity. In this lively, accessible and fascinating book, Robertson explains that most of us employ language as a basis for visualization. In effect, we think in words more than in images. The result is an imbalance between the logical and the intuitive, between imagery-based thought and language-based thought. Opening the Mind's Eye is both an enlightening and stimulating explanation of how we "see," and a compelling argument for extending the mind's powers to improve the quality of our lives. Like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, it combines insight and application.
Ian Robertson has always been fascinated by how the mind makes images, for that awesome power directly and deeply affects our lives. All of us "visualize" the world differently, and how we do so dictates the way we feel, remember, and think--and therefore our health, memory, and creativity. In this lively, accessible and fascinating book, Robertson explains that most of us employ language as a basis for visualization. In effect, we think in words more than in images. The result is an imbalance between the logical and the intuitive, between imagery-based thought and language-based thought. Opening the Mind's Eye is both an enlightening and stimulating explanation of how we "see," and a compelling argument for extending the mind's powers to improve the quality of our lives. Like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, it combines insight and application.
Opening the Mind's Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See
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Overview
Ian Robertson has always been fascinated by how the mind makes images, for that awesome power directly and deeply affects our lives. All of us "visualize" the world differently, and how we do so dictates the way we feel, remember, and think--and therefore our health, memory, and creativity. In this lively, accessible and fascinating book, Robertson explains that most of us employ language as a basis for visualization. In effect, we think in words more than in images. The result is an imbalance between the logical and the intuitive, between imagery-based thought and language-based thought. Opening the Mind's Eye is both an enlightening and stimulating explanation of how we "see," and a compelling argument for extending the mind's powers to improve the quality of our lives. Like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, it combines insight and application.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429979825 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 300 |
| File size: | 641 KB |
About the Author
Ian Robertson is Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Formerlya scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Hughes Hall, he is also Visiting Professor at University College, London, with a further appointment in Toronto. One of the world's leading researchers on brain rehabilitation, he has published numerous scholarly books and scientific papers on the subject. His previous book, Mind Sculpture, was published by Fromm.
Read an Excerpt
Opening the Mind's Eye
How Images and Language Teach Us How to See
By Ian Robertson
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2002 Ian RobertsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7982-5
CHAPTER 1
A Word in Your Eye
The Cool Web
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
— Robert Graves
Western societies have largely lost the ability to think in images rather than words. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book. In his poem "The Cool Web," Robert Graves makes the point very elegantly, and as you'll see if you read on, modern neuroscience backs him up.
Take a moment to think about the last time you ate an apple. When was it? Where were you? What kind of apple was it? It is likely that, as you did this, you relied on both words and images. But for many of you the images would have been pretty bloodless, and you probably re-created that event to a great extent with words — "Oh, I think it was on Sunday, and I was in the kitchen after lunch ... it was a red apple."
Now try to recall this event in a quite different way. Close your eyes and try to see the apple in your mind's eye. Try to visualize its color, the blemishes on its skin — the tilt of the stalk. Now imagine feeling the apple — its texture, little indentations, the odd bruise, the sheer hard, smooth roundness of it. Try to taste it next. Imagine its waxy, brittle skin yielding to your teeth, the sweet, acidy juices flowing over your tongue, the dissolving of the flesh into soft flakes, and the sensation of swallowing. Finally, hear the apple — the juicy crunch as you break it with your teeth, the sound of your own chewing inside your head.
Visualizing eating an apple in this way is very different from remembering it casually as an event. It's as different as someone telling you about the taste of some exotic tropical fruit compared with tasting it yourself. Yet it is the nature of words that they tend to transform experiences into a rather bloodless code that can starve our brains of the rich images that wordless imagining can evoke.
It's artificial, of course, to separate words and images like this. Poems like "The Cool Web" work precisely because the words trigger images as well as other word-thoughts. Yet most of us, most of the time — at work, home, watching TV, reading newspapers, studying, sitting in a traffic jam — don't think in images nearly enough. Why should we? Language is the great achievement of evolution — an essential ingredient in what makes human beings unique on the planet. But there are costs to the way we have grown dependent on the spoken and written word.
Imagery consists of the mental sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and other bodily sensations that we can re-create with incredible vividness in that private, infinite universe within our skulls. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe and it has the most incredible abilities, some of which — like imagery — are underused.
Imagery is important, but in Western culture, language is king. In school we steadily wrap our children's brains in the "cool web of language" — it would be terrible if we didn't, but there is a cost to everything. By neglecting imagery we risk the withering of a whole set of quite remarkable mental capacities. In this book I will give you the scientific evidence to back up these arguments, but I will also give you many exercises in imagery to try out. These exercises are designed to illustrate how the mind's eye works and to help you assess how well you can use it and what effects using it can have on your mind and body.
Children think mostly in images before word-dominated school clouds their mind's eye. That's why this book begins where Robert Graves's poem begins — with the child's mind and its sometimes joyful, sometimes terrifying, image-filled world, untamed by words. Why do most of us lose this powerful way of thinking as we grow up? And why is it we remember so little from before the age of four?
One consequence of the clouding over of the mind's eye is that we only "see" a fraction of what is before our eyes. Most of the time we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what our brains expect rather than the sensations themselves. Much modern art tries to shock or surprise us out of these image-clouding mental habits into seeing more purely with the mind's eye, uncluttered by well-worn categories and labels. When we cultivate imagery and visualization in the mind's eye, we use parts of our brain that are not triggered by verbal thoughts. But the moment we speak or think in words, we sabotage this power of the mind's eye. I'll show you in Chapter 6, for example, how self-professed but amateur wine connoisseurs can't tell wines apart if they talk about the wine while drinking it, but they can if they stay silent and let the taste imagery linger in their mind, unfettered by words.
Neuroscientists can now watch the mind's eye at work in the brain and see how it uses quite different parts of the brain from those we use for other types of thinking and remembering. This research reveals that the right half of our brain — which has a limited way with words — can "know" things but be unable to "say" them. You can, for instance, be good at visualizing the color scheme of your new house but bad at working out in your mind whether the sofa will fit in the alcove: different parts of the brain control these different workings of the mind's eye.
In Chapter 3 — "How Your Brain Creates Images" — I get down to the business of helping you assess how well you can visualize. Are you a verbalizer or visualizer; do you think mainly in words or images? How well can you mentally picture your best friend's face? Or the details of your front door? Can you imagine vividly the sound of a violin playing? How clearly can you "feel" the imagined touch of someone's finger stroking your cheek? We all vary in how vividly we can create mental pictures in all the senses.
The more vivid a visualizer you are, then, on average, the better you will be at — to give a few examples — remembering your dreams, succumbing to hypnosis, and thinking creatively. The good news is that even if you are a poor visualizer you can train yourself to be better: deaf people, for instance, who learn a sign language that forces them to use mental maps and the mind's eye become much better at thinking in images. London taxi drivers have to learn the spatial layout of London perfectly so that they can create the shortest route from any point of London to any other. A key brain area — the hippocampus — is enlarged in taxi drivers who have used their mind's eye in this way for many years, compared with their younger, less experienced colleagues. In other words, you can train your own mind by practicing imagery, and the great thing about visualization is that you can do it anywhere — from the dentist's waiting room to sitting in a traffic jam.
The better you can use your mind's eye, the more creative you are likely to be: in Chapter 5 — "Better Imagery — More Creativity" — you'll see that Albert Einstein went to a school that taught children to think in visual images. At the age of sixteen he used visual imagery to carry out a breakthrough "thought experiment" that laid the ground for the splitting of the atom. He famously declared: "Words or language ... donot seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought ... my elements of thought are ... images."
As we progress I'll challenge your creativity by giving you problems to solve and will show you how using the mind's eye can help you come up with more novel answers. Word-free imagery is the surest way of escaping handicapping cliché and the leg-irons of mind-habit. I'll show you how logical, analytic thinking suits only certain types of problems. For more creative, intuitive-insightful thought, words can act as glue rather than grease in the cogwheels of thought. It is precisely these types of intuitive, creative thought processes that predict success in life better than standard, logical IQ-type tests — at least in people who are already above average in IQ. A famous study of world leaders showed that the higher their conventional IQ, the lower was their level of eminence as rated by independent experts.
In Chapter 6 — "The Landscapes of Memory" — you'll see that you can use words or images, or both, when learning and remembering. Most people neglect the power of visualization when trying to learn, yet when you use both words and pictures to remember information you are using the two halves of your brain and hence learn better. This is particularly important for older people because visual memory holds up better with age than language-based memory, yet older people mostly do not use this brain potential to help preserve their memories. You can train yourself to greatly improve your memory by using imagery.
Chapter 7 is about stress and the mind's eye. Our most extreme emotions — fear, joy, desire, anger, despair — are all linked to powerful images we visualize. I'll show you how, untamed, these images can worsen your anxiety, but when used and controlled they can also rein in negative emotions very powerfully indeed. Visualizers may be more vulnerable than verbalizers to long-lasting stress after a trauma because the trauma lives on in their mind's eye, perpetuated by their visualizing power. But fears are also best tackled in the mind's eye, and you can use visualization to change how you feel and overcome your fears.
Our cravings and miniaddictions are also incubated in the mind's eye. We visualize the sights, tastes, smells, sounds, and touch of what we crave and in so doing cook up a greater desire, reducing our resistance. The more easily you can visualize and absorb yourself in scenes or images, the more at risk you are of both allowing your fears to grow and strengthening your addictions. But you can also use the power of the mind's eye to help overcome addictions, through repeatedly imagining yourself reacting differently to the triggers that stimulate the craving.
We'll also see the part that visualization plays in health and immunity. Dramatic changes in your immune response — the ability of your body to fight disease — can become linked to particular triggers in your environment. In other words, your immune system can learn to weaken or strengthen according to the situation you are in. Take people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer: they can start to feel sick even at the sight, smell, or thought of the clinic where these nausea-inducing drugs are given. Visualizers' brains learn these kinds of links more readily than nonvisualizers'. But they can also learn to use imagery to overcome these problems and to help fight illness. Visual imagery can help treat skin conditions such as psoriasis — the mind's eye can alter how the cells in the body react. Imagery can also be used to help control several different types of illness, including migraine — even in children. And people given imagery training before major surgery recover better afterward and have less pain.
Imagery can greatly enhance athletic skills and strength through shaping brain circuits. In Chapter 9 — "Visions of Olympus" — we will see how visualization is used by almost all the world's leading athletes. Tiger Woods was taught by his father to visualize the ball rolling into the hole as he hunched over concentrating on his putt. The people who are best at practicing their sport in their mind's eye tend to be the best achievers in anything from archery to tennis. You can even increase your physical strength purely by visualizing yourself doing the exercises.
Chapter 10 tackles the mysterious phenomenon of hypnosis. Recent neuroscience research has shown that hypnosis does indeed produce a change in brain functioning, particularly in the right half of the brain. If you "see" a nonexistent red apple under hypnotic suggestion, your brain will behave as if it is really seeing a red apple. Hypnosis can also reduce pain by changing your brain's response to the painful stimulus. Hypnosis relies heavily on the brain's capacity for imagery. The more vivid an imager you are, the better a subject of hypnosis you will tend to be.
What about the images that fill our dreams? This is a question for Chapter 11. There are two main kinds of dreams: those during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, and those during non-REM sleep. In REM dreams, your capacity for imagery is unleashed because of the changed brain chemistry of sleep, and also because the brain's managers — the frontal lobes — are switched off.
Finally, in Chapter 12 we'll see how images are central to many religious practices and beliefs, and the key to some of the most profound experiences in our lives. Practices like meditation produce distinct changes in the brain corresponding to what people experience during these exercises. Different states in the brain can correspond to profoundly different types of consciousness.
Imagery-based thought, emotionally evocative and often creative if used sensibly, can help you discover new strengths and overcome old weaknesses. We need to cultivate a balance between logical, language-based thought on one hand, and intuitive, imagery-based thought on the other. That is what I hope this book will help you achieve.
CHAPTER 2The "Watery Clasp" of Language
It is 15,000 B.C., chill dawn in a glacial wilderness. A young Cro-Magnon man crouches in the snow-flecked heather, staring fixedly at a deer. It stands etched on the luminescent mist, wide-eyed, nostrils flared to Paleolithic man's rank scent.
His smoke-blackened fingers dig unconsciously at the unyielding, frozen soil. Heart pounding, eyes flickering back and forth over the animal, his body is taut with their duet of mutual stillness. A mind full, quite full, of just this single image visualized at the crossroads of death and survival.
A hissing arc of birch and flint, the dull thwack, a scarlet, gorgeous spurt, and the stone-deflected scream as it rears and falls. It scrabbles for purchase in its own vivid and mist-suspended remnants, which in just one small corner of the conscious universe stay high and gold and vivid.
Half-crouched with the burden of this image, he makes his way down the stone-strewn slopes, leaving the others with their bloody loads. He crawls past the women's questioning eyes and deep, deep into the darkest spaces of the cave. His eyes burn with the strain of carrying it.
Hunched and cramped in this unfrequented corner, the wall glows in a slit of light exhausted by its long penetration through the dark. His eyes spill the resurrected deer onto the wall, and with the reverence of hunger, he traces with sharpened charcoal the tense, still lines of this projected image of its final earthly moment.
A Glimpse into the Paleolithic Mind?
In southwestern France and northern Spain, the present-day Basque people who live there are the direct descendants of a genetically distinct line of humanity. The Basques' direct ancestors may well be Cro-Magnon man, the Paleolithic authors of the earliest known artistic pictorial depictions by mankind.
In the deep, dark caves of Lascaux, Altamira, and other sites in these Basque regions, exquisitely painted and engraved outlines of deer, bison, and other animals appear with breathtaking lifelikeness. Beside them, though, matchstick humans prance awkwardly like the doodles of an infant. Why were these prehistoric artists so bad at drawing humans, but so good at drawing deer and bison?
Julian Jaynes of Princeton University suggested twenty years ago that these animal paintings weren't really "art." Rather, he argued, they might be a mechanical tracing of a vivid mental image projected by the eyes and brain of the draftsman onto the dim cave walls. This type of image — known as eidetic imagery — is present in as many as 1 in 10 present-day children, but hardly ever in the modern adult. It's a special kind of mental imagery, not properly understood, where a near-photographic image can be stored in the brain and projected onto a wall or screen like a slide.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Opening the Mind's Eye by Ian Robertson. Copyright © 2002 Ian Robertson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,1. A Word in Your Eye,
2. The "Watery Clasp" of Language,
3. How Your Brain Creates Images,
4. Do You Think in Words or Pictures?,
5. Better Imagery — More Creativity,
6. The Landscapes of Memory,
7. Vistas of Stress,
8. Healing Pictures,
9. Visions of Olympus,
10. Hypnosis: The Imagery Game,
11. Dreams and Images,
12. Images of God,
Notes,
Index,