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If the human perceptual system is capable of processing information not only in the brain but in the whole body, then artistic creations are the expression of individual impressions independent of an environment. This seems only possible when inner images and inner dialogues can be developed.
While inner dialogues are the realm of poets, psychotherapists, and others, inner images are still very mysterious even they serve as the basis for the individual view of the world.
Inner images and dialogues make it possible to develop very abstract mental processes, which do not have to do anything with the general reality. But as much as a separation from reality can be helpful for unknown realms as well as personal development, without a connection to the information flow of social structures, inner images and inner dialogues get lost in self-constructed fantasy worlds.
This is nothing unusual for artists and poets either. In the ideal case, every creative activity succeeds in becoming one with the inner images and inner dialogues in order to express these freely. In everyday life, on the other hand, inner dialogues and especially inner images are hardly noticed. This technique, which is constantly used to process reality, is very important to create a specific view of the world out of many collected impressions and talks for a most suitable (survival) life. This world view need not be subject to a formalized logic. The truly unique thing about such an internally anchored image of the world is the fact, that in extreme cases a single icon can be used as the basis for mastering any situation in everyday life.
In everyday life, a world view becomes a personalized world vision of individual experiences and is therefore constantly being developed, refined, reviewed, and seeking confirmation. The size and range of a worldview depend not only on geographical parameters but primarily on how far one can personally look into the world and how much one has already seen of the world.
Fig. 8.: "The average person will typically have more than 6,000 thoughts in a single day, new research into the human brain suggests.
The statistic comes from a team of psychology experts at Queen's University in Canada, who say they have developed a never-before-seen way to detect when one thought ends and another begins, as described in a paper published in Nature Communications.
The academic project—which was led by Jordan Poppenk, from the Department of Psychology, and Masters student Julie Tseng—outlines a method of isolating specific moments when a human is focused on a single idea, a phenomenon the researchers described as a "thought worm."
The researchers said the study shows how measuring thoughts can predict a person's personality, estimating the average human will have about 6,200 thoughts per day." --> https://www.newsweek.com/humans-6000-thoughts-every-day-1517963
This Figure from the study shows a) a participant’s mean step distance-vector during one mv-fMRI run, with 95% percentile bootstrap confidence interval ribbon (largely imperceptible ribbon indicates stability over t-SNE iterations). Transition timepoints (green triangles) and meta-stable timepoints (black triangles) are identified by a peak-finding algorithm. b All participants’ transition time points for the same mv-fMRI run, with many peaks overlapping those of the example participant in a. c All participants’ transitions for one rs-fMRI run. Alignment of peaks in a but not c reveals stimulus control over transitions. --> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17255-9
Fig. 10: 10th century CE Greek copy of Aristarchus of Samos's 2nd century BCE calculations of the relative sizes of the Sun, Moon and the Earth (Library of Congress Vatican Exhibit,Vat. gr. 204 fol. 116 recto math06 NS.02).
Fig. 3: Due to the complexity of inner images, the scientific research is rather small. Inner images are in general understood as an umbrella term for experiences, dreams, or visions. The team of Guohua Shen, Tomoyasu Horikawa, Kei Majima, and Yukiyasu Kamitani (https://doi.org/10.1101/240317) tried in 2017 to reconstruct deep images from human brain activity.
Fig. 11: 1493 Woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle. Also Schedel'schen Weltchronik, Blatt 5 verso
Fig. 7: There are also people who do not have any inner images. The Mozilla co-founder, writer, and programmer Blake Ross describe this phenomenon in very personal research on aphantasia here.
Fig. 12: Photo of the pages 90 and 91 with models of the Ptolemaic system of 1550 SACROBOSCO "Tractatus de Sphaera" book, from Mario Taddei ancient books collection. Cf.: Geocentric model and De sphaera mundi
Fig. 4: German neurobiologist Gerald Hüther on the power of inner images. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, https://www.gerald-huether.de/
Fig. 13: Andreas Cellarius, Heliocentric universe, Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660
Fig. 5: The Kanizsa Triangle, representing an amodal supplement, demonstrating the inner image creation of a triangle by the brain. Gaetano Kanizsa, Max Wertheim, Kurt Levin, Wolfgang Metzger, and many more worked on the concept of Gestalt Theorie since the beginning of the 20th century.
Fig.: 14 The Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world (from 2020) is a scatter plot depicting societies on closely linked cultural values, grouped by worldviews, based on the World Values Survey.
