How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 156

10.2 Eyes Wide Shut: seeing with closed eyes
A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions,
significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object,
event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene
is not actually present to the senses. There are sometimes episodes,
particularly on falling asleep (hypnagogic imagery) and waking up
(hypnopompic), when the mental imagery, being of a rapid,
phantasmagoric and involuntary character, defies perception,
presenting a kaleidoscopic field, in which no distinct object can be
discerned.
The nature of these experiences, what makes them possible, and
their function (if any) have long been subjects of research and
controversy in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and more
recently, neuroscience. As contemporary researchers use the
expression, mental images (or mental imagery) can occur in the form
of any sense, so that we may experience auditory images, olfactory
images, and so forth. However, the vast majority of philosophical
and scientific investigations of the topic focus upon visual mental
imagery. It has been assumed that, like humans, many types of
animals are capable of experiencing mental images. Due to the
fundamentally subjective nature of the phenomenon, there is little to
no evidence either for or against this view.
Philosophers such as George Berkeley and David Hume, and early
experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt and William
James, understood ideas in general to be mental images, and today it
is very widely believed that much imagery functions as mental
representations (or mental models), playing an important role in
memory and thinking. Some have gone so far as to suggest that
images are best understood to be, by definition, a form of inner,
mental or neural representation; in the case of hypnagogic and
hypnapompic imagery, it is not representational at all. Others reject
the view that the image experience may be identical with (or directly
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