The short answer is “yes, of course”
The longer answer takes a journey into the realm of biology and psychology academia.
Endogenous or stimulus-directed attention
It has been evidenced that the Visual cortex is the first point at which most of the visual information from the visual field is processed and redirected to the relevant areas of the brain. Small amounts of visual field information is sent to the optic chiasm for the purposes of regulating the sleep/wake cycle and influencing optical movement.
Neurons that respond exclusively to stimuli moving upwards, other stimuli that only respond to stimuli moving downwards, and even more neurons that only respond to stimuli moving left to right and other neurons only responding to stimuli moving right to left. This then means that there is a topographical map of the visual field represented on the primary visual cortex (Kosslyn, Ganis, & Thompson, Mental imagery: against the Nihilistic hypothesis, 2002), in terms of colour, movement, size, etc. otherwise referred to in NLP as visual submodalities.
After processing at the primary visual cortex, evidence shows that visual information separates into two distinct streams referred to colloquially as the what(object recognition) , which travels towards the temporal lobe for processing and object recognition and the where(movement and spatial) stream which moves up the posterior parietal lobe results in knowing where an object is in space.
When an NLP practitioner asks their client to ‘think back to a time’ when they felt ‘confidence’, noticing what they can ‘see’ as they ‘do this now’. The use of suggestion in combination with rapport enables the client to use their mental imagery elicited from long-term memory, through the application of stimulus driven attention that is influenced by mental imagery, which in turn affects the physiological state of the client leading to a sequences of dynamic states the client references as ‘confidence’. According to Kosslyn et al. (2002), visual memories are stored within this pathway in a non-topographical form.
Kosslyn et al.(2002) put forward that mental imagery of a shape is formed when memory is activated using goal-directed, top down attention which then results in a “pattern of activation”(p.1) in topographically mapped areas of the visual cortex. Kosslyn et al.(2002) point out that one mental images are created they are processed similar to patterns of activation that are observed during actual perception.
In a study carried out by (Finke & Kosslyn, 1980) subjects were asked to make judgements about two small dots that they either imagined or observed. Evidence from the study suggested that peripheral activity in visual imagery was limited by similar neural constraints as those found in actual perception. This provided further evidence to the influence that visual imagery can have on human cognition and related systems.
Moulton & Kosslyn(2009) put forward a theory regarding the function of mental imagery stating that the function of it is to allow individuals to create mental simulations and predications based on experience. It was posited that this function allows the human to ask “what if”, resulting in simulations that make explicit the possibly consequences of being in a situation of performing a particular action (Moulton & Kosslyn, 2009). The problem with this, if it is the case, is that humans sometimes use this function to activate patterns of asking what if, based on internal perceptions of threat which then activate worry, which is said to be the cognitive component of anxiety (See Derakshan, Smyth, & Eysenck, 2009).
For more information on Submodalities or to discuss,
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Darren Shaw
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