Show MENTAL IMAGES Material Pictures Contcjnporanoous With Thought Impressed Upon the Brain HA man conversing in earnest says Emerson in his essay on Nature if ho watch his intellectual processes will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind contemporaneous contempo-raneous with every thought which furnishes fur-nishes tho vestment of the thought This power of forming mental images appears to vary in strength amoug individuals indi-viduals to a considerable degree Naturally Natu-rally we should expect to find it powerful power-ful in ooets and artists Charles Dickens Dick-ens has himself told us that he actually saw his creations as he wrote and 1L Taiiie mentions a painter who only looked look-ed at an object while he sketched its outline and was able to fill in the colon from the imago of it in his mind OT > the other hand there are people of equai intelligence who being unable to see I such mental images themselves have doubted their existence and Mr Francis Fran-cis Galton has shown that habits of abstract ab-stract thought such as men of scienco and philosophers indulge in are apt to weaken the capacity of forming mental pictures Mr Kirlcpatrick of Winona Minn an experimental psychologist has made a series of observations oa this phenomenon I phenom-enon with the help of his classes The scholars were asked to write down just what came into their minds when certain cer-tain familiar words such as book tree church wero called out and tho answers were carefully investigated He found that the majority of tho students stu-dents formed distinct images of the objects ob-jects corresponding to tho words and the rest formed indistinct images with a few exceptions who seem to have indulged in-dulged in philosophical abstractions The word book for example called up visions of a Bible a dictionary a novel in all but a few scholars who thought of food for the mind or the thoughts of some person fho word tree was represented by some kind 01 tree more especially the illustrious cherry cher-ry tree which George Washington cut down The word church usually evoked a picture of some church in the vicinity but some of the hearers thought of a religious organization It is ov ident from his results that most people arc visuali23rs in thinking while a few are nonvisualizers The tendency tenden-cy to form distinct images was very conspicuous among the female students and in both sexes it reaches an abnormal abnor-mal development about the ages of 14 and 15 or during the period of adolescence adoles-cence which it has been otherwise observed ob-served is also one of exceptional good health and rapid growth The tendency is further checked or fostered by the occupations oc-cupations in life Cassells Magazine |