A report by Andrea Blomkvist
The relation between imagination and perception is a topic which has drawn the attention of philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists for some time now. However, unlike some topics where interest wanes with time, interest in this theme has clearly intensified. This much was evident from our most recent installment of the Northern Imagination Forum, with the theme “Imagination and Perception”, which was held online on the 20th of January 2022 and which drew over 40 participants from across the world. Our speakers – Fiona Macpherson, Nadine Dijkstra, Ophelia Deroy, and Elisabeth Camp – delivered highly relevant and stimulating talks on various aspects of the theme, such as the phenomenology of visual imagery and visual perception, the neural basis of reality-monitoring, how to explain experiences of extraordinary perception, and how artworks in different media deploy imagination to express perspectives.
Read More
A post by Andrea Blomkvist
Philosophers always ask their readers to imagine things, and this piece will prove no exception: imagine the seaside. You probably imagined something like seeing the waves rolling in. But my bet is that you also imagined some of the following:
Hearing the seagulls overhead
·The smell and taste of salt in the air
The feeling of sand on your feet
If you imagined any of these, you used different kinds of mental imagery corresponding to the different sensory systems. Imagining hearing the sound of seagulls uses auditory imagery; imagining tasting the salt in the air uses gustatory imagery, and so on. Though we do sometimes imagine using only one kind of imagery, they often come together as multisensory imagery (Nanay, 2018). But despite this interconnectedness, one kind of imagery has predominantly captured the attention of researchers: visual imagery. In this blog post, I will argue this has wrongly skewed the study of the mind, and I use aphantasia as a case study to bring this point out.
Read More
A post by Andrea Blomqvist.
Why is it that some things are easier to imagine than others? A substantial part of the answer can be formulated by looking at the cognitive architecture of the human mind (i.e. the structure of the mind), which is what I will to do in this post. Here, I will explore how the cognitive architecture of our affective system influences the ‘affective forecasting’ system - the capacity we use when we try to accurately imagine (or forecast) our future moods and emotions in order to make decisions. When we affectively forecast, we do something more than just trying to imagine the phenomenal character of a mood or emotion; we try to imagine the phenomenal character that we actually will experience in a future scenario. For example, to decide whether or not to move to a new city, you can use imagination to figure out how you are going to feel when you are there; or, as in L.A. Paul’s example, to decide whether or not you want a child, you can try to imagine what having a child will be like and how that will make you feel (Paul, 2004). We can also use it in more mundane cases, like imagining how you will feel if you do badly in an exam, or if you are rejected by a date (Wilson and Gilbert, 2000; Levine et al., 2012).
Read More