Dr Chris Letheby: Merely Believing and Really Believing: Mental Imagery in Personal Transformation

Talk Description: As a teacher of mine once remarked, when we say that teenagers think they are immortal, we don’t mean that they would fail a biology test. Teenagers believe, truly and justifiably, that they will die, but there is also a sense in which they – and perhaps most of us – don’t really believe it. The topic of this talk is exactly this difference between merely believing and really believing a proposition – between knowing it only in our head, as we might say, and knowing it in our heart, or feeling it in our bones. The shift from ‘head’ knowledge to ‘heart’ knowledge has been much discussed but is still not fully understood. A fuller understanding of it could shed light on interesting theoretical questions and be of significant practical benefit, given the apparent therapeutic and transformative relevance of such shifts. In the talk I explore a simple proposal about the cognitive nature of such shifts: that they consist primarily in the activation of mental imagery. My ultimate conclusion is that this proposal gets at part of the truth, but may not be the whole story. Exploring its limits promises to shed further light on the nature of the shifts themselves, and perhaps even on broader questions about cognitive architecture.