How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 160

Shepard and Metzler found the opposite: a linear relationship
between the degree of rotation in the mental imagery task and the
time it took participants to reach their answer.
This mental rotation finding implied that the human mind — and the
human brain — maintains and manipulates mental images as
topographic and topological wholes, an implication that was quickly
put to test by psychologists. Stephen Kosslyn and colleagues showed
in a series of neuroimaging experiments that the mental image of
objects like the letter "F" are mapped, maintained and rotated as an
image-like whole in areas of the human visual cortex. Moreover,
Kosslyn's work showed that there were considerable similarities
between the neural mappings for imagined stimuli and perceived
stimuli. The authors of these studies concluded that while the neural
processes they studied rely on mathematical and computational
underpinnings, the brain also seems optimized to handle the sort of
mathematics that constantly computes a series of topologicallybased images rather than calculating a mathematical model of an
object.
Recent studies in neurology and neuropsychology on mental
imagery have further questioned the "mind as serial computer"
theory, arguing instead that human mental imagery manifests both
visually and kinesthetically. For example, several studies have
provided evidence that people are slower at rotating line drawings of
objects such as hands in directions incompatible with the joints of
the human body, and that patients with painful, injured arms are
slower at mentally rotating line drawings of the hand from the side
of the injured arm.
Some psychologists, including Kosslyn, have argued that such
results occur because of interference in the brain between distinct
systems in the brain that process the visual and motor mental
imagery. Subsequent neuroimaging studies showed that the
interference between the motor and visual imagery system could be
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