Liverpool graduate Georgie Brighouse awarded prestigious John Lennon Memorial Scholarship
Georgie Brighouse has been awarded a prestigious John Lennon Memorial Scholarship to pursue PhD research on ‘The spectrum of capacities for mental imagery and its effect on mental healthcare’. She will be working with Dr Laura Gow and Professor Thomas Schramme. Here she reflects on her journey to doctoral studies and explains her research plans.
“I feel very fortunate to have acquired my Bachelor's and Master's degrees here at University of Liverpool, and to be able to continue and pursue a PhD with the John Lennon scholarship is an honour. I have always loved Philosophy, particularly Philosophy of Mind, and I am deeply interested and passionate about my research project. I look forward to advancing in my studies and hopefully making a valuable contribution to this school of thought.
My project will look at some of the relations between mental imagery and mental health. It is well understood that different individuals have different levels of mental imagery. The majority of the population have phantasia; they have conscious mental imagery. Some individuals have hyperphantasia, meaning their mental imagery is extremely vivid, so much so that it seems just as real as, and almost indistinguishable from, their regular perceptions. A very small fraction of the population has aphantasia, meaning they have no conscious visual imagery whatsoever. While psychiatrists and clinicians have long recognised that a subject’s voluntary sensory imagination might intersect with aspects of mental health they have not considered how these techniques would affect people with no visual imagery.
I will argue that the vividness of an individual’s conscious sensory imagination is a pivotal factor to consider in mental healthcare. For example, symptoms such as flashbacks or intrusive thoughts could be particularly disturbing for individuals with hyperphantasia, as they would be extremely vivid and may feel the same as their real experiences. And individuals with aphantasia may have difficulty accessing diagnosis and treatment due to the fact that a lot of mental health conditions are characterised by imagery-based symptoms (such as PTSD) and many mental health treatments (including cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT) involve a recurring reliance on imagery-based approaches.
Mental health has always been an important issue but in the last decade especially, it has become far less stigmatized as awareness has increased. As such, it will be an interesting and very relevant topic to research. Having struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember, and recently discovering that I am most likely hyperphantasic, I look forward to discovering more about how mental imagery can be analysed and manipulated to make sense of both my own personal experiences, and the experiences of others, who may also be struggling simply due to a lack of understanding about mental imagery. Knowledge of aphantasia could make a crucial difference in mental healthcare, particularly for diagnosis and treatment.”