Imagination
Imagination, also called the faculty of
imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. Imagination is the work of the mind that helps create. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and
understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world,
and it also plays a key role in the
learning process
A basic training for imagination is listening to
storytelling (
narrative),
in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to "evoke worlds."
Imagination is the faculty through which we encounter everything. The things that we touch, see and hear coalesce into a "picture" via our imagination.
[citation needed]
It is accepted as the innate ability and
process of inventing partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world.
[citation needed] The term is technically used in
psychology for the process of reviving in the
mind,
percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary
language, some psychologists have preferred to describe this process as "
imaging" or "
imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination. Imagined images are seen with the "
mind's eye."
Imagination can also be expressed through stories such as fairy tales or fantasies. Most famous inventions or entertainment products were created from the inspiration of someone's imagination.
One hypothesis for the evolution of human imagination is that it allowed
conscious beings to solve problems (and hence increase an individual's
survival fitness) by use of mental
simulation.
Children often use
narratives or pretend play in order to exercise their imagination. When children create
fantasy they play at two levels: first, they use
role playing to act out what they have created with their imagination, and at the second level they play again with their make-believe situation by acting as if what they have created is an actual reality that already exists in narrative
myth
Description
The common use of the term is for the process of forming new images in the mind that have not been previously experienced, or at least only partially or in different combinations. Some typical examples follow:
Imagination in this sense, not being limited to the acquisition of exact knowledge by the requirements of practical necessity, is, up to a certain point, free from objective restraints. The ability to imagine one's self in another person's place is very important to social relations and understanding. Albert Einstein said, "Imagination ... is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
In various spheres, however, even imagination is in practice limited: thus a person whose imaginations do violence to the elementary laws of thought, or to the necessary principles of practical possibility, or to the reasonable
probabilities of a given case is regarded as
insane.
The same limitations beset imagination in the field of
scientific hypothesis. Progress in scientific research is due largely to provisional explanations which are constructed by imagination, but such hypotheses must be framed in relation to previously ascertained facts and in accordance with the principles of the particular science.
Imagination is an experimental partition of the mind used to create theories and ideas based on functions. Taking objects from real perceptions, the imagination uses complex IF-functions to create new or revised ideas. This part of the mind is vital to developing better and easier ways to accomplish old and new tasks. These experimental ideas can be safely conducted inside a virtual world and then, if the idea is probable and the function is true, the idea can be actualized in reality. Imagination is the key to new development of the mind and can be shared with others, progressing collectively.
Regarding the volunteer effort, imagination can be classified as:
- voluntary (the dream from the sleep, the daydream)
- involuntary (the reproductive imagination, the creative imagination, the dream of perspective)
Psychology of imagination
Psychologists have studied imaginative thought, not only in its exotic form of
creativity and artistic expression but also in its mundane form of everyday imagination.
Ruth M.J. Byrne has proposed that everyday imaginative thoughts about
counterfactual alternatives to reality may be based on the same cognitive processes that rational thoughts are based on.
Children can engage in the creation of imaginative alternatives to reality from their very early years
Imagination and perception
From the work of
Piaget it is known that
perceptions depend on the world view of a person. The world view is the result of arranging perceptions into existing imagery by imagination. Piaget cites the example of a child saying that the moon is following her when she walks around the village at night. Like this perceptions are integrated into the world view to make sense. Imagination is needed to make sense of perceptions.
Imagination vs. belief
Imagination differs fundamentally from
belief because the subject understands that what is personally invented by the mind does not necessarily impact the course of action taken in the apparently shared world while beliefs are part of what one holds as truths about both the shared and personal worlds. The play of imagination, apart from the obvious limitations (e.g. of avoiding explicit self-contradiction), is conditioned only by the general trend of the mind at a given moment. Belief, on the other hand, is immediately related to practical activity: it is perfectly possible to imagine oneself a millionaire, but unless one believes it one does not, therefore, act as such. Belief endeavors to conform to the subject's experienced conditions or faith in the possibility of those conditions; whereas imagination as such is specifically free. The dividing line between imagination and belief varies widely in different stages of technological development. Thus in more extreme cases, someone from a primitive culture who ill frames an ideal reconstruction of the causes of his illness, and attributes it to the hostile magic of an enemy based on faith and tradition rather than science. In ignorance of the science of pathology the subject is satisfied with this explanation, and actually believes in it, sometimes to the point of death, due to what is known as the
nocebo effect.
It follows that the learned distinction between imagination and belief depends in practice on religion, tradition, and culture.
Imagination as a reality
The world as experienced is an interpretation of data arriving from the senses, as such it is perceived as real by contrast to most thoughts and imaginings. Users of hallucinogenic drugs are said to have a heightened imagination. This difference is only one of degree and can be altered by several historic causes, namely changes to brain chemistry,
hypnosis or other altered states of
consciousness,
meditation, many hallucinogenic drugs, and electricity applied directly to specific parts of the brain. The difference between imagined and perceived reality can be so imperceptible as to cause acute states of
psychosis. Many mental illnesses can be attributed to this inability to distinguish between the sensed and the internally created worlds. Some cultures and traditions even view the apparently shared world as an illusion of the mind as with the
Buddhist maya or go to the opposite extreme and accept the imagined and dreamed realms as of equal validity to the apparently shared world as the
Australian Aborigines do with their concept of
dreamtime.
Imagination, because of having freedom from external limitations, can often become a source of real
pleasure and unnecessary
suffering. Consistent with this idea, imagining pleasurable and fearful events is found to engage emotional circuits involved in emotional perception and experience .
A person of vivid imagination often suffers acutely from the imagined perils besetting friends, relatives, or even strangers such as celebrities. Also crippling
fear can result from taking an imagined painful future too seriously.
Imagination can also produce some symptoms of real illnesses. In some cases, they can seem so "real" that specific physical manifestations occur such as rashes and bruises appearing on the skin, as though imagination had passed into belief or the events imagined were actually in progress. See, for example,
psychosomatic illness and
folie a deux.
It has also been proposed that the whole of human cognition is based upon imagination. That is, nothing that is perceived is purely observation but all is a morph between sense and imagination.
Imagination preceding reality
When two existing perceptions (
thesis and
antithesis) are combined within the
mind, a third perception (called
synthesis) is formed. At this point, perception only exists as part of the imagination and can become the inspiration for a new
invention or
technique.
