the WORLD INSIDE OUR HEADS
Imagination is an
unlimited resource. Use it.
Imagination is an endless loom that stretches across the
very fabric of our minds, working its way through the intricate twists and
turns of our brains. It is a work of art that sketches itself out across our
personal canvases.
Though some people may persist on lacking it, imagination is
something that you can’t control— it works on your subconscious mind. Our
imagination works involuntarily; churning the gears of the mechanical system
inside us. Every time you dream or have a nightmare, you’re using your
imagination.
Have you ever wondered how imagination works, or the
terminology behind it? Well, there’s no need to imagine anymore, as I have it
all down in the next section!
Have You Ever Wondered…?
Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability to form new images and sensations in the mind that are not perceived through senses such as sight, hearing, or
other senses. Imagination helps make knowledge applicable in solving problems
and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process.
Have
you wondered where imagination comes from, what makes us inventive, why we
think scientifically or create art, and invent tools? Philosophers have argued
for thousands of years about the essence of imagination.
Researchers have long suggested that
human imagination exists thanks to a widespread neural network in the brain. However,
clearly demonstrating that such a "mental workspace" exists has been
extremely difficult with available techniques that only managed to examine
brain activity in isolation.
Imagination affects our decisions the
most of all. An experiment was conducted to check how imagination can affect
your very choices in daily life!
Scientists opened a cake stall and
baked two completely identical cakes. They wanted passers-by to taste each cake
and tell them which one was better. Even if it was a free sampling, they
decided to say that they were pricing one cake at $50 and the other at $10.
Despite the fact that the two cakes
were identical, the customers insisted that the texture of the first or more
expensive cake was richer and tastier than the other. The very prices of the
cakes allowed the consumers’ imaginations to run wild!
Similar experiments have been conducted
over the years to try and get a good grasp on the happenings in our brain with
respect to our imagination, but even scientists aren’t able to come up with a
theory for this abstract feeling that envelopes our minds.
So what exactly is imagination, or at
least a close definition to what it is?
Imagination is considered "a power of the
mind," "a creative faculty of the mind”. The term imagination comes
from the Latin verb imaginari meaning "to picture oneself."
As a medium, imagination is a world where thought
and images are nested in the mind to "form a mental concept of what is not
actually present to the senses."
Our imagination may affect how we experience the world around us more
than was previously thought, for instance, what we imagine seeing or hearing in
our head can alter our actual perception, according to new research by a team in
Sweden.
The finding, published
in the journal Current Biology,
explores the historic question in neuroscience and biology about how our brain puts
together information from all the different senses.
We often never think
that the things we imagine and the things we perceive are completely different,
and that imagination can’t exactly affect our everyday life, can it? Well,
recent research shows that our imagination of a sound or a shape changes how we
discern the world around us the same way hearing that sound or seeing that shape
does! Specifically, these scientists found that what we imagine hearing can
actually change what we see, and what we imagine seeing can change what we
hear.
Here’s an experiment
conducted in Sweden by the Karolinska Institutet:
The first experiment
had volunteers experience the illusion of two passing objects hitting each
other rather than passing each other when they imagined a sound at the moment
the two objects met.
During the second experiment, subjects' spatial perception of a sound was biased towards an area where they imagined seeing the short appearance of a white circle. The third experiment involved the participants' perception of what a person was saying was changed by their imagination of hearing a certain sound.
The results supported perceptually based theories of imagery and suggest that neuronal signals made by imagined stimuli can integrate with signals generated by real stimuli of a different sensory modality to make robust multi-sensory percepts.
During the second experiment, subjects' spatial perception of a sound was biased towards an area where they imagined seeing the short appearance of a white circle. The third experiment involved the participants' perception of what a person was saying was changed by their imagination of hearing a certain sound.
The results supported perceptually based theories of imagery and suggest that neuronal signals made by imagined stimuli can integrate with signals generated by real stimuli of a different sensory modality to make robust multi-sensory percepts.
One question that you
might have is— why do we even have an imagination?
It's likely a necessary architectural consequence of our brains
being able to do everything else. If you have a brain that can visualize
objects in 3-D, feel emotions, remember conflicts between people in your tribe,
do math, and otherwise do all the things that make humans so dominant
evolutionarily, you have to be able to imagine. If you want to come up with
solutions, you need to use some intuition. So being able to come up with new
inventions, or scientific ideas, or social concepts, often requires being able
to imagine a metaphor or look at things in some way beyond the surface level.
Imagination is
more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the
world.
~Albert Einstein
~Albert Einstein
What if we could
fly? That was the question that
must have crossed the Wright brothers’ minds when they made the airplanes that
we use today. I cannot even begin to
imagine a world without travel!
What if we could go into space? This was what cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin must have thought before he launched himself into the sky.
What if we could go into space? This was what cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin must have thought before he launched himself into the sky.
Imagination is what
tells us apart from all other creatures on the planet; something that makes us
distinct.
When you get an idea, you twist and turn it
around until it forms something that you can work with. You bend it like
playdough until you can shape it into something you can use, and you manipulate
it until it can be thrown into the stream of new innovations for the public.
As Walt Disney
said, ‘Imagination has no age, and dreams are forever’.
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