Mental Imagery In Christmas Music

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With Christmas holidays just around the corner, it seems apposite to look into the underlying factors that allow for mental imagery to form from non-verbal stimulation (i.e., listening to a song). When listening to the song 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' by Brenda Lee, a specifically vivid memory from a childhood Christmas comes to mind. I recall the Christmas when my family and I went to a tree farm to pick out our Christmas tree. After finding the one we thought was paramount to all the others, we took it home and started to decorate it. There was Christmas music blaring throughout the house as we were decorating. My sister and I, too young at the time, never considered making the tree look visually pleasing; we were throwing tinsel…show more content…
205, 2013). Mental imagery is a nonverbal response that relies on nonverbal stimulation (e.g., listening to a song), and therefore depends on the nonverbal system. The nonverbal system uses top-down processing to depict the visual experience of my aforementioned childhood event. This system, although convoluted, can be explained on a very rudimentary level; nonverbal stimuli activate the sensory system, which utilizes imagens (information-containing units) to generate a nonverbal response (i.e., mental imagery). Moreover, the song is interpreted by the sensory system, which projects onto imagens that generate the mental image of my family and I poorly decorating the Christmas tree while listening to Christmas music. Pavio argued the right hemisphere is advantageous in processing nonverbal information. However, the hypothesis of hemispherical representation has been challenged using neuroimaging studies, specifically fMRI, and cannot be subjected to simplistic notions of right brain/left brain attributions of cognitive functions (Smilek et al. p. 206, 2013). In fact, there are questions regarding bilateral activation during retrieval (Curtis et al.,
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