âThe Brain â is wider than the Sky â / For â put them side by side â / The one the other will contain / with ease â and You â beside â,â wrote Emily Dickinson. To all that the world presents to our senses, the mind effortlessly adds things that will not and cannot ever be. We canât help it: imagination is humankindâs unbidden superpower, perhaps the capacity that most distinguishes us from other animals.
In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman attempts to explain how and why this is. It is a wide-ranging survey â too wide, offering a mass of fascinating information about creativity, mental imagery and child development bloated by superfluous discourses on the origins of life, the Covid pandemic and climate crisis. Even then it doesnât quite resolve the mystery of why our imaginative capacity seems to far exceed what is adaptively useful. But in this Zeman simply reflects the state of play: brain science tells us a great deal about the imagination but can only ever take us so far.
The subject itself is multivalent. How much common ground should we expect between the visionary William Blake (for whom âthis world is all one continued vision of fancy or imaginationâ) and physicist Paul Dirac, who apparently struggled to imagine himself into the mind of others and yet was able to dream up antimatter and single-pole magnets? Imagination seems clearly linked to creativity, empathy and the ability to conjure up mental images, yet some highly creative people, such as Pixarâs founder Ed Catmull, are âaphantasicâ, innately unable to visualise anything in the mindâs eye.
Imagination of a sort is central to all experience. âPerception and imagination occupy more common ground than we tend to suppose,â Zeman writes. We construct our perceived world from incomplete information, interpreted via inner representations of our environment, that generate predictions of what is actually out there and how it will respond to our actions. â[Mental] imagery exists to enable us to make more accurate predictions of future events in the interests of effective behaviour,â he says. âIt does so by allowing us to simulate those events in somewhat lifelike ways.â The distinction between the imagined and the real is then blurry: imagined exercise can increase strength, imagined drugs might facilitate cure, imagined pain is still pain.
Our reality is thus what some scientists have called a controlled hallucination: an imagined world more or less correlated with the physical one but apt to lose that correspondence when the associated brain functions are dysregulated by drugs or illness.
Zeman might have found it easier to organise his unruly material around a concept we can call âimaginalityâ â not imagination per se but the cognitive attributes needed for it, just as we might distinguish the acts of making and hearing music from musicality, the faculties we bring to bear for those tasks. The notion of imaginality clarifies how we differ from and resemble other animals. For us it seems a profoundly and uniquely social attribute. Humans have a strong âtheory of mindâ: we typically act on the assumption that others have minds like ours, with their own set of goals and experiences. Other animals show signs of this â some birds, say, hide food in a way that suggests a perception of what others might know and do. But no other creature seems as socially oriented. Young infants are no more physically adept at many tasks than chimps or orangutans, yet they instinctively seek and expect cooperative behaviour from others. âThe human condition is one of incessant mind-sharing,â Zeman writes. âWhen we blush, whether with pride, shame or embarrassment â as only humans do â we are expressing our uniquely human awareness of where we stand in othersâ minds.â
Social imagination perhaps holds the key to the most striking distinction between us and other animals: language. As with many human traits, itâs easy to think up â because we are imaginative â stories to âexplainâ the adaptive value, in Darwinâs sense, of being able to communicate complex ideas and instructions. But some researchers think language arose less for immediate utilitarian ends, but rather to enable us to project an inner world from one individual to another: in effect, to tell stories. In this view (sadly not really explored in any depth here), language is an inherently creative cognitive tool, not just used to coordinate social activity but engendering the Icelandic sagas, The Waste Land, The Archers.
But while The Shape of Things Unseen is good (if a little disorganised) on the science, it is rather pedestrian on cultural aspects of imagination. âFor TS Eliot, in the 1920s, the problem was how to convey his sense of personal and social disintegration in the wake of the first world war: familiar poetic forms seemed to fall short of the aim.â And with his rules for creativity, Zeman seems to be pitching at the motivational business market. There is a thought-provoking shorter book that could have been assembled with some judicious pruning and reorganisation. That might have better conveyed the important message that imagination is not what an artistic elite uses but a universal capacity, essential also to science (âImagination is the discovering faculty [that] penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of science,â wrote Ada Lovelace), as indeed it is to the human condition.
The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination by Adam Zeman is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
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