A New Class of Scientific Image? Synesthesia, Francis Galton and Picturing Thought

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 9

A Quick Note on an Interesting Image:
Is this the First Published Illustration of the Mental Imaging of an Active Thought?

I was stumbling through my collection of Nature (A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, London) magazine when I found a fantastic article by Francis Galton  (“Visualized Numerals”, Thursday, January 15, 1880) concerning (in one aspect)  the mental visualization of the act of doing mathematics. That is to say, what images people formed in their brains as they performed mathematical functions--this was even illustrated (!)

Fascinating!  Scholars have pointed to this article as perhaps the earliest scientific effort on synesthesia , but what strikes me is how he tried to describe the intimate or logical function with the visualization of the act....I think that is what makes this effort so spectacular.

I'm not associating memory devices (like the memory palaces of Matteo Ricci or Robert Fludd’s spectacular creations from his Ars Memoriae, or the beautiful schematic of Civlio Camillo’s memory theater,  for example which are more (basely speaking) visual aids for restructuring already-completed thought patterns) with this question; l I'm not so sure that it applies. These are more issues of phylogenic memory, and concerned with memetics and semitoics rather than the actual formation of an idea.

People have certainly written on images in the mind before Galton--the question is if anyone has illustrated what they think this process looks like? I'm also not so sure if this directly relates to Aristotle's elements/colors affirmation or Pythagoras's numerals and colors or Scriabins music and color associations, or Cardano and his color/flavor and the planets associations....

I guess the question is—where does this image fall in the history of the illustration of abstract thought?  I'm not including famous examples of the physical aspects of sight as with Descartes etc; just the image of what people see in their heads as they are formulating thoughts and ideas.

We’ll have more later.  I just wanted to put something up here as people have wanted to see the Galton article and Nature (1880) is not a terribly common thing to find. 

It would also be just plain wrong not to mention two things at this point—the works of Frances Yates , which is a gorgeous and insightful work on memory.  And secondly, I need to acknowledge the work of Barbara Stafford (University of Chicago) who for decades has produced the most beautiful and the most interesting works on what scientific images *are*. 

Here's the entire article by Galton:

   

Comments

[dancing kitchen]

I've always been curious about how others mind pictures enhanced their memory. As a teacher I always have told my students that numbers can tell stories and give mind pictures like words can, in support of my push for mental math. Of course some grasped this easier than others, and honestly I'm not sure if numbers speak to me nearly as clearly as words. Is it lack of practice, or lack of mathmatical schemata or maybe I'm not one with a propensity for synesthesia. Thanks for giving me something to think about!

[john]

Thanks DK. I'm pretty sure that I don't "see" ideas falling into place when I do, well, anything. I certainly don't have any visual synesthesic response to anything. On the other hand Ramanujan didn't see anything--he just knew the answers to impossibly difficult maths questions (having "the angels" whisper their answers to him, which is something else entirely, I guess). A friend of mine who is a "prodigiously gifted" calculating savant(and who applies his capacities beautifully in art) says that he sees columns of numbers floating in his head and then "watches them line up" to get his answers (all done lightning quick). But I do agree in mind pictures generated by numbers, and their is a long, vast, rich history of philosophical exploration behind it. Dennett, Piaget, Pylyshyn, Knight Dunlap (oh god that's an old one), B Russell, lovely lovely Ludwig Wittgenstein and many others have weighed in on *exactly* this issue (mental images of numbers vs. words and etc). And its thorny and difficult and contentious and I'd rather have other people thinking about it (smile), and I'm glad that they do. But I do appreciate your "push for mental math"--it does at the very least accomplish a certain amount of trainable intellectual rigor.