Return of the mental image: are there really pictures in the brain?

In the past decade there has been renewed interest in the study of mental imagery. Emboldened by new findings from neuroscience, many people have revived the idea that mental imagery involves a special format of thought, one that is pictorial in nature. But the evidence and the arguments that exposed deep conceptual and empirical problems in the picture theory over the past 300 years have not gone away. I argue that the new evidence from neural imaging and clinical neuropsychology does little to justify this recidivism because it does not address the format of mental images. I also discuss some reasons why the picture theory is so resistant to counterarguments and suggest ways in which non-pictorial theories might account for the apparent spatial nature of images. It seems obvious that we think in either sentences or in pictures. Of these two formats the pictorial has received the most attention in recent years. Famous thinkers are frequently quoted as saying that their ideas did not come to them logically but appeared to them in mental pictures. What exactly this means is far from clear, especially because a little analysis shows that neither language nor pictures are sufficient to represent the content of thought and that most thought is not available to conscious inspection.