What is imagination and how can we develop it?

Science is discovering that imagination plays a fundamental role in our perception of reality and in the elaboration of memories, dreams and thoughts. Intelligence depends on it, just like creativity, and only by promoting it can we move towards a healthier and wiser society.

The writer Gabriel García Márquez once stated: “Life is not what one lived, it is what one lived and how one remembers it to tell it.”

Indeed, what you live and what you remember is imbued with imagination. Source of pleasures and fears, of discoveries and creations, the imagination is not a minor faculty, but essential in our inner life.

What is imagination?

Many philosophers have seen in the imagination a key dimension of mental activity.; On the other hand, psychology disdained the role of the imagination for a long time, considering it as a marginal faculty, which would have nothing to do with other higher ones, such as perception or knowledge.

However, contemporary science is discovering that imagination is a fundamental cognitive function, playing a key role in all forms of mental life, from perception to memories, dreams and thoughts.

Thanks to the imagination we can think beyond the confines of our immediate situation, generating vivid mental contents with which we can reassess the past or evoke a possible future.

Most ideas, however abstract they may seem, are born as images.. In fact, etymologically, the Greek word idea means “vision.” In this sense, to devise is to imagine. But imagination does not only arise from images. It can also be triggered by a verbal description, when reading a novel or a poem, for example.

In any case, without imagination there would be no language.. We learn to read thanks to the imagination, which converts ink marks on paper into evocations of absent things. The transforming power of the imagination is so great that simply reading a written text can deeply move us.

Its relationship with intelligence

Imagination is an essential ingredient of thought and intelligence. Machines can calculate prodigiously, but they have no real intelligence, partly because they lack imagination.

There is no “artificial intelligence”: true intelligence is natural – and cordial: rooted in the heart. Without imagination there would be no creativity: everything would be predictable and boring. Imagination is life.

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Empathy: imagining others

Empathy, the ability to connect with what another person feels, would be impossible without the ability to imagine ourselves living the experience of others.. When I feel empathy, a part of me is no longer here and, through imagination, travels to you. On the other hand, the psychopath and the technocrat are incapable of imagining in the other the interiority that makes them a person. They only see what pertains to their purposes.

That is why psychologist James Hillman pointed out that “an education that somehow neglects the imagination is an education for psychopathology.”

The human being is an imaginative being. Closely related to memories, fantasies, dreams, and perception, imagination belongs to the core of the mind and consciousness. Today we know that imagination mobilizes the same neural capacities as precise vision and cognition, and that it is not located in a specific area of the brain.

Visual imagination is sometimes located at the back of the cerebral cortex, but in other cases not. In fact, people who lose their visual cortex in an accident are blind, but most of them can visualize perfectly through the inner eye of imagination. Yo

They may even have vivid hallucinations, as if his visual imagination was more powerful than before. In reality, multiple areas of the brain come into activity when we imagine. Neurologically, imagination is a multiple, dynamic and non-linear process, all of which may have to do with its spontaneous nature.

How can we understand imagination at a neuroscientific level?

However, the trace of the imagination is not limited to the brain. It has been shown that when a person visualizes an object or a situation, his eyes move as if he were perceiving it and not just imagining it.

When you imagine a skyscraper, your eyes tend to move up and down, as if you were covering its entire height, while if you imagine the passing of a vehicle, your eyes will move horizontally. Something similar applies to bodily movement.

Neurologically and physiologically, imagining an action is similar to performing it.. If you visualize that you lift a heavy object with your arms, there will be electrical activity in your arms, even though you are at rest.

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Imagination and perception are different activities, but they are more related than it might seem. They are part of a continuum that has free and spontaneous imagination at one end and, at the other, the clear perception of something before us.

Between one extreme and the other, in most of our experience imagination and perception converge. We see animal shapes in the clouds or, in a classic example from the Indian philosophical tradition, we can be startled by a snake and then realize it was a rope.

The fusion of imagination and perception What occurs in these cases, as well as in optical illusions, also happens, more subtly, in everyday life. Imagination allows us to relate and interpret what we perceive, thus giving it meaning. Francisco Varela, a pioneer of cognitive science, went so far as to affirm that Ordinary perception is a form of imagination that is limited by what the senses give us..

The world of dreams

Dreams are imagined scenes that are just as vivid (or more intense) than everyday perceptions.. The dreaming imagination can be consciously guided, as in lucid dreaming. On the other hand, as Freud saw, during wakefulness, a good portion of the daily stream of consciousness is continuous daydreaming (an imaginative state between dreaming and perceiving).

The recognition of this fact It is at the base of traditional meditation practices that invite you to stop daydreaming in order to fully inhabit the here and now. Other meditation practices, on the other hand, deliberately use our ability to imagine.

In Tibetan Buddhism, many meditators have experienced a lasting release from ego obsessions. (with the consequent lucidity and joie de vivre) through the repeated practice of sophisticated visualizations. The meditator imagines, before him or in his own body, divinities, symbols or positive energies. It is about making an effort of imagination, and the more real what is imagined seems, the more effective the practice is.

This effectiveness is related with the fact that, neurophysiologically, what is imagined is not far from what is experienced. The advance of knowledge is showing that the border between what seems imaginary and what we consider to be real is more permeable than we thought.

where creativity is born

Not every imaginative act is creative in the deep sense, but all creativity needs imagination.. The creative imagination requires perceptions that stimulate it (without overwhelming it) and a will that guides it (without rigidly controlling it).

Unlike fantasy, which is a wandering combination of familiar images, the imagination has a focus that welcomes it and unites it. The English romantic poets praised creative imagination above all else. In our time, however, we live thirsty for imagination, saturated with data, figures and barcodes.

Television, video games and mass sports have filled a void: that of our ability to imagine, atrophied compared to our ancestors who saw traces of myths and divinities everywhere.

Before modern times, there was no rigid separation between literal truth and imagined reality.. Hamlet and Don Quixote aren’t real? Haven’t they influenced many people through the centuries?

Patrick Harpur, contemporary student of the imagination, argues that “the people and events we imagine are in fact real” – what happens is that their reality is not historical and literal, but mythical and imaginal.

To move towards a healthy and wise society, we need to revalue the imagination

Many of the deciduous structures that surround us they are in decline precisely because of their lack of imagination. The power of the imagination is essential today to renew education, politics and daily life.

Famous quotes about imagination

“Knowledge is limited, while imagination encompasses the world as a whole.” Albert Einstein. “Reality does not exist if there is no imagination to see it.” Paul Auster. “Imagination disposes of everything; creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the whole of the world. Blaise Pascal. “Imagination creates reality.” Richard Wagner. “The world is but a canvas for our imagination.” Henry David Thoreau. “Imagination disposes of everything; creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the whole of the world. Blaise Pascal.