Review of The Mechanism of Thought, Imagery

Abstract

Reviews the book, The Mechanism of Thought, Imagery, and Hallucination by Joshua Rosett (1939). This book consists of two parts, (1) the fundamentals and (2) the mechanism. In discussing the fundamentals the author is chiefly concerned with the physiology and neurology of emotions and "the expression and subjective experience of emotions." Here he cites the familiar experiments of Sherrrngton, Cannon, Bard, Barenne, Head and Holmes. The second part of the book which is concerned with psychological phenomena will be of interest to students of both normal and abnormal psychology. It includes discussions of attention, hallucination, epilepsy and sleep. In many ways this is a thought-provoking book. There is a good discussion of what probably happens in epilepsy and in sleep. It gives a very clear and complete exposition of the functions of the autonomic nervous system in producing emotional responses and the relation of the autonomic to the central nervous system. An extremely valuable technique is used in following a complete explanation in each chapter with a summary of the important points. The book would have been improved if the references were more up-to date. The vocabulary used makes the book a difficult one for psychologists to read, but is undoubtedly clear to physiologists. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)