The practice of using mental imagery to influence behavior has been practiced for thousands of years particularly in eastern religions such as the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. It’s hard to determine when humans first realized the mind body connection but suffice it to say that it has been common knowledge for a long time.
Western cultures appear to be the slowest in adopting many of the meditative practices accepted as common place elsewhere. However, extensive use of imagery still abounds in all western thought. Being a scientist by nature I have often wondered what kind of real scientific studies have been done to link the cause and effects of creative visualization and behavior. As it turns out, the story of the evolution creative visualization in western thought is quite interesting.
Early in the 20th century there appeared to be a strong influx of eastern thought into the western culture. This may have originated from several sources. It’s likely that as the industrial revolution developed in the 19th century world travel and trade exposed the working populations more to these cultures than ever before. As the 20th century dawned many thought leaders began to incorporate and “westernize” beliefs about mental imagery into their philosophies.
Authors such as Wallace D. Wattles and Napoleon Hill popularized the notion that thought and imagery proceeded behavior and that creative mental imagery could be used for self improvement, goal setting, and financial achievement. However, Wallace Wattles bases his contentions on deductive reasoning and faith while offering little real world proof of his contentions other than a few testimonial examples. Napoleon Hill did study many successful people in a broad based study but fails to isolate the variables responsible for his observations in an exhaustive statistical manner.
Part of this failing may stem from the fact that just as their work was getting popular recognition, the Behavioral Psychology moment took hold in the US and then in Europe. Radical Behavioralism was antagonistic to the importance of mental imagery. In fact, in 1913, John B.Watson an American Physiologist, published a widely read article titled the “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views” It is often referred to as the “The Behaviorist Manifesto”. In this article he concisely states his position on introspection and mental imagery as follows:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation.
Later in footnotes to the article (Watson 1913b) he goes even further to explain his position on the value of mental imagery and cast doubt on the very existence of mental imagery, a position he was to state more forcefully in later work, where he stigmatized the concept (together with all other remotely mentalistic concepts) as a thoroughly unscientific, “medieval” notion, inextricably bound up with religious belief in an immortal soul, and, as such, barely one step away from “old wives tales” and the superstitions of “savagery” (Watson, 1930). He described personal reports of such things as memory images of one’s childhood home as “sheer bunk,” nothing more than the sentimental “dramatizing” of verbally mediated memories (i.e. conditioned tendencies to say certain things, either out loud or sub-vocally) (Watson, 1928).
These views dominated western psychology until nearly the 1960s. Research on the value of mental imagery slowly began to revive particularly in the area of sport performance enhancement. Since the 1960s much research has been done on mental practice (e.g., Richardson, 1967; Ryan & Simons, 1982; Feltz & Landers, 1983; Driskell et al., 1994; Nordin et al., 2006), and, although its effectiveness remains controversial (Budney et al., 1994; Weinberg, 2008), it is, in fact, now very extensively used in high level sports and athletics training (Murphy, 1994; Morris et al., 2005; Jedlic et al., 2007). It has also taken hold in the medial field for increasing the effectiveness of Cancer Therapy and Physical therapy (Linda Warner and M. Evelyn McNeill, 1988).
In spite of the shortcomings in the early work of Wallace D. Wattles, Napoleon Hill and others, my studies have convinced me that there is strong evidence to support the positive effects mental imagery on personal development and financial success. I support the development of creative mental image techniques for this purpose. I have been especially impressed by the work of Bob Proctor and Bob Doyle in the area of the “Law of Attraction”. Further, there are many intriguing new tools being developed using today’s technology to assist in developing strong mental imagery for self development purposes.
I recommend you explore this topic more through this video interview where Ryan Higgins of Mind Movies interviews Bob Proctor and Bob Doyle.
