If you picture an object in your mind, like a banana, where is the banana?

Question

Right now i'm looking at something totally different than a banana, but I am picturing one in my mind, how can you see things in your mind if they arent really there?

Answer 1

That is a great question. Really. The banana is in the subtle form of thought. It exists by the power of the mind to conceive of it, but the mind cannot produce it materially. (Argueably. There are those who claim to be able to produce an object by thinking of it.) No one knows where thoughts originate from, but there is undeniable evidence that supposedly "original" thoughts occur simultaneously in different places. Some would say that the imagination or the mind produces thoughts, but that, too, is argueable, since there is no way to experiment with a concept so subtle.

Answer 2

Memory is one of the faculties of the mind which remembers pictures or real bananas. And it can trigger the feelings behind it to tell the difference between the real banana from the picture of the banana.

Answer 3

How can this computer I am on " see " things that I type into it to display on the screen? A rough analogy, but it should get you thinking about distributed representation. You have local representations of the banana; it's dimensions, smell, feel, etc., so putting that together globally is one of the main problems in cognition now. Read Antonio Damasio, Micheal Gazzigniga and Joesph Le Doux, for good reading on where we stand in neurology. The philosophers, Jerry Fodor and John Searle are good for discussions on mind. " How the Mind Works " by Steven Pinker is another source. Get busy; you have a lot of catching up to do.

Answer 4

You are asking yourself one of the "Great" questions of life. Quantum Mechanics has discovered that everything is made up of energy. Yeah, even the solid stuff is NOT really solid. One could say that even our thoughts are energy. However, from a practicle perspective, before the chair was a chair it was a thought or and idea or an image in someone's mind. So your thoughts are like precursors to "real" things. However, isn't a thought real also? And if it is real isn't made up of energy?

Good luck friend!!!

Answer 5

imagination. If you didnt know what a banana looked like, though, could you still picture it? can you picture things in your mind from only someone elses description? like from a book.?

Answer 6

Many things can be sensed in the mind. The problem comes when that sense cannot be differentiated enough from the other thoughts so as to render it objectfully.