ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses an explanation on the overall development and preservation of mental representations, which contain image-schemas. It discusses their affective, relational, neurological, action-based, social, and cultural embeddings within working memory, which make possible their emergence, and activation either in perception or thought. Thus, it describes the perceptual process, which involves the interactions between cortical and subcortical circuitries, from the identification of sensory inputs to their recognition, emphasising that the perception of an object or the remembrance of images and/or words that refer to it engage the same areas for its phenomenological experience. Hence, mental representations are shown to be personalised and resistant schemas of interpreting reality, of superimposing a quasi-propositional belief [or set of beliefs] extracted from assembled conditioned learning upon the externality of the individual. In this way, this chapter highlights the approximation of belief to imagination in this mainly non-conscious ‘imaging’, and the importance of applying conscious cognitive efforts to incite fluidity in mental representations, gathering more information from the flux that marks the here-now activation of them, that may show in it a difference from the accumulated ‘past’, what holds the potentiality to transform mental representations, and converge them into something new, updating their meaning.
