Subhasmita Mahapatra - MENTAL IMAGERY

MENTAL IMAGERY

Traditionally, Emotion was not thought of as a cognitive process but now new level of research is emerging considering Emotion as a major context in Psychology. The human emotion can be conscious, unconscious, concrete, abstract, intuitive and conceptual which works on different contexts like memory, association, concept formation, pattern recognition, action, mental imagery etc.

Mental Imagery is a representation in a person’s mind of the physical world outside that person. It is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. And the term IMAGERY does not get limited to just Visuals as a sensory input, it can be in the form of Auditory, Olfactory and so forth.

Mental Imagery was once used to understand someone’s intentions but later on it was rejected considering it as hallucination or dream or just imagination and creativity. Some researchers collide it with perceptions while some people consider it as a great pathway to understand cognition using different strategies like Mnemonics, Mentalese etc. The first experiment of psychology by Wilhem Wundt was done on cognition using Mental Imagery as a crucial part of it. It is a controversial debate in which it was completely rejected in 20th century but now it is emerging again as a great sense of practice and it is applied now in Sports psychology, healing chronic pain and for motivation.

In order to make people understand the concept of Mental Imagery, it was essential to communicate the information through an interactive medium which would be easy for the readers to understand the psychological terminologies and interesting enough to engage them through out the journey of reading. Hence Comics would be the best medium to represent such rich context into a simpler form.

This concept has been inspired by Walter Nickell (Nick) Sousanis who is a scholar, art critic, and cartoonist; a co-founder of the TheDetroiter.com, he is also the first person at Columbia University to write a dissertation entirely in a comic book format. He believes that comics are powerful teaching tools and has developed courses on comics at Teachers College and Parsons. Sousanis' artwork has been exhibited in such venues as Microsoft Research in Seattle. His book Unflattening won the 2015 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, taking top honor as book of the year.

Apart from Nick Sousanis's Unflattening book, there were some other Artists whose artistic style has been inspiring for this project. They are considered as the pioneers of the Comic Art. Some of them are:

Out of these Artists, some of their work were considered final for the inspiration due to the following reasons:

Francesco Francavilla: He is famous for the Comic Book “The Black Beetle”. His retro styled work and how he used very specific colors to portray the comic strips. Also it was very interesting to see how he has used different types of shots like closed shots as well as wide shots.

Jae Lee: His work in Hellshock and Inhumans where he uses vertical movements and monochromatic colors and he goes very deeper into emotions. The expressions look very intensive.

Skottie Young: His comic style is now trending all over the globe. His best work is in “The Wonderful World of Oz” in which his characters look very cartoonish yet simple. I relate my kind of work when I see his Comics. His comics genres are also very different. Its very new and refreshing unlike other comics which uses same kind of style.