General Theory of Religion Antonio R. Damasio on mental imagery. When I use the term image, I always mean mental image. A synonym for image is mental pattern. When I refer to the neural aspect of the process I use terms such as neural pattern or map.
Nonconscious images are never accessible directly.
Neural patterns, on the other hand, can be accessed only in a third-person perspective. If I had the chance of looking at my own neural patterns with the help of the most advanced technologies, I would still be looking at them from a third-person perspective. In short, the process we come to know as mind when mental images become ours as a result of consciousness is a continuous flow of images many of which turn out to be logically interrelated. The flow moves forward in time, speedily or slowly, orderly or jumpily, and on occasion it moves along not just one sequence but several. Sometimes the sequences are concurrent, sometimes convergent and divergent, sometimes they are superimposed.