Mental Imagery Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience

Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution, and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental imagery doesn't show up in--in some way or other. The hope is that if we understand what mental imagery is, how it works and how it is related to other mental phenomena, we can make real progress on a number of important questions about the mind.

This book is written for an interdisciplinary audience. As it aims to combine philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand mental imagery, the author has not presupposed any prior knowledge in any of these disciplines, so any reader can follow the arguments.

Bence Nanay, Professor of Philosophical Psychology and BOF Research Professor, University of Antwerp

Bence Nanay is currently BOF Research Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. He received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at Syracuse University as a professor before moving to Europe. He is the Director of the European Network for Sensory Research. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles on the philosophy and psychology of perception. His work is supported by a large number of high-profile grants, including a two-million-Euro grant from the European Research Council. He also won the Bessel Prize of the Humboldt Foundation for his work on perception.

Foreword
Part 1 Mental imagery
1. Mental imagery in psychology and neuroscience
2. Mental imagery in philosophy
3. Varieties of mental imagery
4. Unconscious mental imagery
5. The unity of mental imagery
6. The content of mental imagery
Part II Perception
7. Mental imagery in perception
8. Amodal completion
9. Perception/mental imagery mixed cases
10. Attention and mental imagery
11. Top-down influences on perception and mental imagery
12. Temporal mental imagery
Part III Multimodal perception
13. Multimodal mental imagery
14. Sense modalities in mental imagery
15. Sensory substitution and echolocation
16. Synesthesia
17. Pain
18. Object files
Part IV Cognition
19. Language
20. Memory
21. Boundary extension
22. Mental imagery versus imagination
23. Emotion
24. Knowledge
Part V Action
25. Desire
26. Pragmatic mental imagery
27. Motor imagery and action
28. Cognitive dissonance
29. Implicit bias
30. Clinical applications of mental imagery
Part VI Appendix
31. Mental imagery in art
Afterword