The Truth Behind Imagination

Introduction

As a kid, everyone had some type of imaginary friend. At the park you would have joyous times with your friend Sarah. Without imagination and creativity, you would not be able to feel such experiences. Imagination is the ability to form images, ideas and sensations. When is it too much imagination though? Imagination is directly correlated with reality. In fact, some extensive forms of imagination may inhibit false concepts of reality. There are other situations where imagination is necessary to cope with reality. Imagination has been a way to bear with disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and more. Sometimes it gets so out of hand that people may develop fantasy prone personality (FPP). For some people, there is no clear distinction from imagination and reality. In truth, reality may be altered by imagination.

The topic of imagination was derived from Lewis Carroll’s novel “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There” (Carroll). This novel is a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The protagonist Alice has a difficult time differentiating fantasy from reality. When looking at herself through the “looking glass” she sees herself differently. In retrospect, this “looking glass” is seen as an alternate reality thus playing into her imagination. When it comes to her looking at the larger context of her life, everything is a blur due to no clear distinction of reality. For example, when she was looking at the mirror, she saw herself in a “different world” that made her seem larger and more focused. Some aspects were emphasized more than others. This then causes the false sense of reality to surface since these may be misinterpretations. Imagination is overlooked in society today and does not receive respect where it is due. Imagination is essential to our lives because it gives people different insights into life. If everyone had a lack of imagination, the world would not be as meaningful as it is today, we would also not be as advanced as we are today. Everything we have today, in some shape or form resulted by imagination. Yes, indeed reality is affected by our imagination by a longshot to the extent that there is extensive mergence between the two.

 

 

Truth Behind Imagination

Imagination is inevitable. The human brain is remarkable and with the hippocampus, imagination is plausible to occur. The hippocampus is thought to be the root of emotion, memory and autonomous nervous system. It is critical for learning, memory and cognition. In the Nature Reviews Neuroscience Journal, it states “we can vividly re-experience past events, simulate future events and imagine fictitious scenarios, in addition to experiencing the environment we currently inhabit. To achieve this, we must be able to construct internal representations of environments on the basis of incoming sensory information and/or prior experience” (Zeidman & Maguire). Without the hippocampus then imagination would not exist. People’s imaginations occur from previous encounters that have happened or just the way they may perceive something. Robert Lanza, medical doctor and philosopher, stated “Biocentrism — a new ‘theory of everything’ — tells us that space and time are not the hard objects we think, but rather tools our mind uses to put everything together. Some things in our lives are not necessarily fact but may be purely an exaggeration of imagination that is now viewed as reality’” (Lanza). We assume the everyday world is just “out there” and that we play no role in its appearance and that they are different. When in fact everything we view has some aspect of perspective. Humans evolved to make sense of things. Every time a stimulus comes to us, our brain does the efficient thing: it responds based on past experience. In doing so, the brain continually redefines normality. It is being shaped, literally, as a consequence of trial and error, by this it is creating a fiction of reality.

Researchers in Sweden have found that our imagination can change our perceptions of reality (Bergland). Your mind can literally play tricks on you by changing illusions of what you think you hear and see into what seems like reality. Mental imagery and visualization can alter how we perceive the world around us. To a large extent, your mind can create reality at a neuronal level. Autism is a disorder that uses imagination as a coping method due to impaired communication and social interaction. In the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, it states “imagination in autism has, however, been examined indirectly. For example, Baron-Cohen replicated the finding of a deficit in production of pretend play by children with autism. Apart from such studies of pretend play, there has been almost no study of imagination in autism. Perceptual veridical mental imagery has been studied in autism, using Shepard and Meltzer type mental rotation tasks” (Scott & Baron-Cohen). This goes back to the idea of having an imaginary friend when you are younger. When there are times where you are bored or feeling a certain way, you may be alone, and this may result in an imaginary friend. With autism due to their hardships socially, they are prone to have an imaginary companion to deal with what they are lacking. Results showed that children with autism were significantly worse than matched controls in their ability to introduce “unreal” changes to their representations of people and houses. Instead, they tended to draw real people or objects. Imagination is essential because it ignites passion, creates a future or even invention, stimulates creativity/innovation and it may be used as an escape due to reality not being ideal.

Also, in a world where we are so technologically advanced, the interdependencies between the media and other social systems shape audience relationships and suggests that during individual mental processing people often lack information, which creates ambiguity (Shapiro & Chock). This creates a sense of not knowing and being lost. Reality is merely an outward expression of what we have chosen to accept and focus on in the world but when we turn our thoughts to that which we want to create in our lives, the possibilities are endless (Serf-Walls).

 

Society and Imagination

After having some scientific reasoning as to why and how we imagine and the basic requirements, society is also affected by imagination. According to Carl Phillips, an American writer and English professor at Washington University wrote in the New England Review stating “Thinking versus imagination. Imagination as thinking when the latter refuses groundedness, that is, when it resists the limits of the empirical world and allows for a world in which ‘mere’ belief is enough to affirm a thing as actual–more specifically, to affirm the metaphorical as actual” (Phillips). This relays the idea of having your imagination as a reality, but how does this get incorporated to society? Phillips delves into the human mind never being able to be satisfied. As a result of this, the mind uses imagination to create a safe place or an area where there is possible satisfaction. Wallace Stevens, an American modernist poet wrote “Crude Foyer” and it exemplifies how imagination has an impact on our literature. His poem was thoroughly examined by Carl Phillips and it was concluded that imagination creates a sense of restlessness, thus having a turn in our literature. The way we make an image of figmentation in our literature also. If restlessness equals imagination, is stillness a form of thinking, the kind of thinking that, in its being stuck in the literal, translates as false happiness? Everyone wants to be satisfied and, in that sense, it creates a feeling of everything being fake or a phantasm.

In the Youth Studies Australia journal, it states “Rather, in drawing on conversations with two different groups of young people aged between 20 and 25 in Queensland, we explore how two contrasting types of risk–technological and embodied–come to be highlighted. As the article reveals, the two groups placed a very different emphasis on each of these forms of risk” (Pavlidis & Baker). After getting the data, it showed how the public opinion was affected by perception and to an extent of imagination. Imagination and perception go hand in hand since you base your perception on your imagination. Not only this but being in such a modern day with so many advancements, our imagination has a role in everything. Without our imagination these technologies and advancements would have never been found. Someone along the lines looked at a substance and believed it could have been more and in turn, the advancements were created. Not only this, but without imagination the world would be bland rather than it being full of life as we know it.

However, some limitations to this would be that it would be difficult due to countless people being ignorant. They would believe there is no significance to this but when they learn how it is vital to understand the differentiation of the two, they may be more lenient to learning about it. Another limitation would be that it costs money to inform people. This also goes into play with people being ignorant, people may not want to fund for this due to it being insignificant in comparison to other issues. Likewise mentioned before, if there was a somewhat understanding of imagination by a mass of people, that mass of people may indeed pass on their knowledge to make others more conscious about the issue. Another solution to this would be to fund more research towards the people on how it affects populations of people. Multiple experiments may be conducted to find a correlation on people that have high imagination that distorts reality with the possibility of similar experiences, background, etc. An additional plausible experiment would be to see in a vast population if people are aware, how they may feel and even see their events in life. Depending on their occurrences in life it may be put together to see a possible relation of how it affects people or in turn what imagination may do to make the reality better or even worse in some instances. Some limitations to this would be that it is also money but there would also need a demand for human test subjects. Despite people not being injected with random medication, it is more a psychological evaluation and people may not want to be a part of this experiment due to it being insignificant towards them. It would just take a group of people to share out the idea and this would eventually make people more embrace the idea.

 

Conclusion

All in all, imagination does in fact have an effect in our world today. There is such a fine line of distinction where they just so happen to merge in the end. People should firstly understand the difference between imagination and reality. By this, people will be in the loop or what they want which would be their imagination and in reality, what they have. The way we perceive events or occurrences is directly from our imagination. Imagination does have a major effect on us to the point where it creates a false reality that we live in; it’s up to us to decide how much of a “blur” we want to live in.

Works Cited

Bergland, Christopher. “Imagination Can Change Perceptions of Reality.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201306/imagination-can-change-perceptions-reality.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Enhanced Media Publishing, 2017.

Chock, T. M., & Shapiro, M. A. (2004). Media dependency and perceived reality of fiction and news. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 48(4), 713-721

Enayati, Amanda. “The Power of Perceptions: Imagining the Reality You Want.” CNN, Cable News Network, 2012, www.cnn.com/2012/04/11/health/enayati-power-perceptions-imagination/index.html

F. J. Scott and S. Baron-Cohen, “Imagining Real and Unreal Things: Evidence of a Dissociation in Autism,” in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 371-382, July 1996, doi: 10.1162/jocn.1996.8.4.371

Gopnik, Alison. “The Work of the Imagination.” Science, vol. 292, no. 5514, 2001, p. 57. Gale OneFile: Health and Medicine

Lanza, Robert. “Are Dreams an Extension of Physical Reality?” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 17 Nov. 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/are-dreams-an-extension-o_b_699075.html

Pavlidis, A. and S. Baker. “Who Participates?: Differing Perceptions of Risk by Young People and the Impact on Strategies for Youth Participation.” Youth Studies Australia 29 (2010): 27-34.

Phillips, Carl. “Thinking Versus Imagination.” New England Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 33–38., doi:10.1353/ner.2016.0011

Serf-Walls, L.. “5 Reasons Imagination Is More Important Than Reality.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/lamisha-serfwalls/5-reasons-imagination-is_b_6096368.html

Thulasidas, Manoj. “Perceptual Effects in Relativity and Astrophysics.” Physics Essays, vol. 22, no. 4, 2009, pp. 517–533., doi:10.4006/1.3230499