“TThe Brain – is wider than the Sky – / To – put them side by side – / Each other will contain / with ease – and You – next to –, wrote Emily Dickinson. To everything that the world presents to our senses, the mind effortlessly adds things that will not and never can be. There’s nothing we can do about it: imagination is humanity’s uncontrolled superpower, perhaps the ability that most distinguishes us from other animals.
In the form of invisible things, Neurologist Adam Zeman tries to explain how and why this happens. It is a vast survey – too vast, offering a mass of fascinating information about creativity, mental imagery and child development, inflated by superfluous talk about the origins of life, the pandemic of Covid and the climate crisis. Even so, this doesn’t really solve the mystery of why our imaginative capacity seems to far exceed what is adaptively useful. But in this, Zeman simply reflects the state of affairs: brain science tells us a lot about imagination, but can only take us so far.
The subject itself is versatile. To what extent should we expect common ground between the visionary William Blake (for whom “this world is only a continuous vision of fantasy or imagination”) and the physicist Paul Dirac, who apparently had difficulty imagining himself in the minds of others and yet was able to dream of antimatter and unipolar magnets? Imagination seems clearly linked to creativity, empathy and the ability to evoke mental images. Yet some highly creative people, like Pixar founder Ed Catmull, are “aphantasic,” inherently incapable of visualizing anything in the mind.
Imagination, in some way, is at the heart of all experience. “Perception and imagination have more in common than we tend to suppose,” Zeman writes. We construct our perceived world from incomplete information, interpreted via internal representations of our environment, which generate predictions about what actually exists and how it will respond to our actions. “(Mental) imagery exists to allow us to make more accurate predictions of future events in the interest of effective behavior,” he says. “This allows us to simulate these events somewhat realistically.” The distinction between the imaginary and the real is then blurred: the imagined exercise can increase strength, the imagined medications could facilitate healing, the imagined pain remains pain.
Our reality is therefore what some scientists have called a controlled hallucination: an imagined world more or less correlated with the physical world but susceptible to losing this correspondence when the associated brain functions are dysregulated by drugs or illness.
Zeman might have found it easier to organize his unruly material around a concept we can call “imaginality” – not imagination per se but the cognitive attributes necessary for it, just as we might distinguish acts to make and hear music musicality, the faculties. we contribute these tasks. The notion of imaginality clarifies how we differ from and resemble other animals. To us, this seems to be a deeply and uniquely social attribute. Humans have a strong “theory of mind”: we generally act on the assumption that others have minds like ours, with their own goals and experiences. Other animals show signs of this – some birds, for example, hide their food in a way that suggests a perception of what others might know and do. But no other creature seems so socially oriented. Young infants are not physically more adept at many tasks than chimpanzees or orangutans, but they instinctively seek and expect cooperative behavior from others. “The human condition is one of incessant sharing of ideas,” writes Zeman. “When we blush, whether from pride, shame, or embarrassment – as only humans do – we express our uniquely human awareness of the place we occupy in the minds of others. »
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The social imagination perhaps holds the key to the most striking distinction between us and other animals: language. As with many human traits, it is easy to invent – because we are imaginative – stories to “explain” the adaptive value, in Darwin’s sense, of the ability to communicate complex ideas and instructions. But some researchers believe that language arose less for immediate utilitarian purposes, but rather to allow us to project an inner world from one individual to another: in effect, to tell stories. From this perspective (unfortunately not really explored here), language is an inherently creative cognitive tool, not only used to coordinate social activity, but giving rise to the Icelandic sagas, The Waste Land., The Archers.
But while The Shape of Things Invisible is good (if a little disorganized) on the scientific side, it’s rather pedestrian on the cultural aspects of imagination. “For TS Eliot in the 1920s, the problem was how to express his sense of personal and social disintegration in the aftermath of the First World War: familiar poetic forms seemed to fall short of the mark. » And with his rules of creativity, Zeman seems to be aimed at the motivational business market. There is a shorter, thought-provoking book that could have been put together with judicious pruning and reorganization. This could have better conveyed the important message that imagination is not something used by an artistic elite but a universal capacity, essential also to science (“Imagination is the faculty of discovery (which) penetrates into invisible worlds that surround us, the worlds of science,” wrote Ada Lovelace), as is also the case for the human condition.