This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Bence Nanay’s recent book Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience(Oxford University Press, 2023). Today we begin with an introduction from Bence. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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When I give a talk about mental imagery, I usually illustrate what mental imagery is by asking the audience to close their eyes and visualize an apple. That is without doubt one form of mental imagery, but it may give the wrong impression about how rife mental imagery is.

So I will go with a different way of introducing the phenomenon here: I’m writing this during a flight. And much of what I’m doing involves mental imagery of one kind or another.

As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit.  We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination.  There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations.  We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week.  Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings. Today is Bence Nanay with a list on Five things we couldn’t imagine a decade ago.

We interrupt our summer hiatus to bring you this piece, originally published on the Psychology Today blog, by Bence Nanay.

It is easy to make fun of the Aristotelian idea that humans are rational animals. In fact, a bit too easy. Just look at the politicians we elect. Not so rational. Or look at all the well-demonstrated biases of decision-making, from confirmation bias to availability bias. Thinking of humans as deeply irrational has an illustrious history, from Francis Bacon through Nietzsche to Oscar Wilde, who, as so often, came up with the bonmot that sums it all up: "Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason"

My aim is to argue that humans are, in fact, not more rational, but less rational than other animals. Aristotle talked about rationality as the distinguishing feature of humans compared to other animals. I think we can use irrationality as a distinguishing feature. It’s not just that humans are irrational animals; humans are more irrational than any other animals.