Abstract
Organisms are adapted to each other and the environment because there is an inbuilt striving toward security, stability, and equilibrium. A General Theory of Behavior connects imagery, affect, and action with the central executive system we call consciousness, a direct emergent property of cerebral activity. The General Theory is founded on the assumption that the primary motivation of all of consciousness and intentional behavior is psychological homeostasis. Psychological homeostasis is as important to the organization of mind and behavior as physiological homeostasis is to the organization of bodily systems. Consciousness processes quasi-perceptual images independently of the input to the retina and sensorium. Consciousness is the “I am” control center for integration and regulation of (my) thoughts, (my) feelings, and (my) actions with (my) conscious mental imagery as foundation stones. The fundamental, universal conscious desire for psychological homeostasis benefits from the degree of vividness of inner imagery. Imagery vividness, a combination of clarity and liveliness, is beneficial to imagining, remembering, thinking, predicting, planning, and acting. Assessment of vividness using introspective report is validated by objective means such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A significant body of work shows that vividness of visual imagery is determined by the similarity of neural responses in imagery to those occurring in perception of actual objects and performance of activities. I am conscious; therefore, I am.
Highlights
Organisms are adapted to each other and the environment because there is an inbuilt striving toward security, stability, and equilibrium
We show that reported vividness can be correlated with two objective measures: the early visual cortex activity relative to the whole-brain activity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging and the performance on a novel psychophysical task
We show that variation in moment-to-moment experienced vividness of visual imagery, within human subjects, depends on the activity of a large network of brain areas, including frontal, parietal, and visual areas
Summary
A General Theory of Behavior concerns the “I am” control center for (my) thoughts, (my) feelings, and (my) actions with (my) conscious mental imagery. An alternative method for studying vividness in experimental settings is to ask participants to provide vividness ratings (VR) on a “trial-by-trial” basis corresponding to the subjective experience at each particular moment in time [5] This procedure avoids the problem leveled at the VVIQ that people cannot evaluate their private imagery along a common vividness scale because they have no objective reference points. Searching in familiar terrains of logic and theory of mind while ignoring less familiar terrains of neuroscience and psychology can produce a fragmentary review and false conclusions These problems come to the fore in a recent paper on “imaginative vividness” by Kind [7], in which the author suggests that it would be “best to retire our reliance on this notion entirely”. Conscious goal-setting lends purpose to our every action, striving for equilibrium with desire and intentionality
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