Imagination As we advance in technology there is an area that doesn’t get much attention, and that area has to do with the human imagination. We probably wouldn’t be where we are now if it wasn’t for our imaginations. There is direct proof of some of this. Take the invention of the modern submarine for example, Jules Vern wrote about a very similar one, way before any existed. His famous novel 20,000 leagues under the Sea used his imagination to design a submarine in 1869 which was eerily similar to ones we use today. It was so good some believed he was a prophet rather than a science fiction writer. We can look at the pyramids in Egypt and just picture a pharaoh saying to his builders he wanted a spectacular structure so he would be remembered, and a builder saying let’s build a huge pyramid. This building must’ve been in the imagination of the builder before it was ever attempted. It may turn out to be human imagination is more powerful than even the technology we use. If we find other life, will they use their imaginations? Perhaps we didn’t always have imaginations and that is why we live so long in caves. Maybe some switch in our head or from somewhere else turned our imaginations on and made us what we are today. There must be a reason why we went so long in the primitive state before getting into advanced technology. If we would have had active imaginations, we would have come a lot further than we did. Is there a big difference between intelligence and imagination? The word seems to be tied in to creativity and mental imagery. There are several definitions for imagination such as the ability to confront and deal with reality by using creative power of the mind and resourcefulness. It is also defined as the ability to form mental images of things that are not present to the senses and are not considered to be real, and also attention, interest, or enthusiasm. Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge. You can see they mean entirely two different things. Does this mean a person who is not very intelligent might have a great imagination? Yes, it does mean that and if one’s imagination is great enough, they could be responsible for an incredible invention. We don’t know if people in the past who did incredible things were extremely smart, but we do know they must have had tremendous imaginations. Take the invention of the Roman aqueducts, somebody must’ve thought to themselves we could transport water over thousands of miles and even send it up hill if we did it right. They used their imagination and because of this Rome was able to spread out over many lands, because water is a necessity and without it you can’t have settlements. Gustave Eiffel had quite an imagination when he built the Eiffel Tower. It was the tallest structure when it was built in 1889 and remained that way until 1929 when the Chrysler building was built in New York City. It must’ve taken some imagination back then to think you could build the tallest structure in the world. Imagination is not limited to building structures however. Imagination can apply in any field and most of us have it. One way to prove this is to think about our dreams. Dreams are nothing more than things we imagine while we are asleep. Did you ever hear anybody say something and somebody else reply this was only a figment of their imagination? It is possible to imagine things which have never happened and this can be a form of mental illness or can be caused by many other things, such as lack of sleep. There have also been people accused of having no imagination. It is very rare, but it is said there are people who literally have no imagination because of a condition they have known as Aphantasia. These people are physically unable to visualize images. This condition was not identified until the 1880s. It didn’t even receive its name until 2015. There was a sixty-five-year-old man who recovered from heart surgery and complained he could not picture things in his mind. This was in 2003 and he became the center of a study. He was tested while being attached to a MRI machine. First, he was shown pictures of famous people and asked to identify them and his brain lit up in the right places but then the pictures were taken away and he was asked to think about what they look like picturing their faces and their names in his brain and the areas that should have been lit up, went dark. He just couldn’t do it. It is lucky for us this condition is not very common and is said to only affect 1% to 3% of all people. How do we know if people in the past were much more affected by this condition than we are today? This could have been our problem all along. Many scientists have wondered why we had such long periods of no creative activity as far as advancement goes and this could have been the answer. There could have been a much higher rate of this condition than we ever suspected. It may be that it has lessened over time making many more of us creative because we had better imaginations. I haven’t seen this discussed very much, but I don’t think it is so outrageous to talk about it, do you? We have no way of knowing what people’s brains were like in the past because human brains don’t survive and not only that we cannot tell by looking at a brain whether it had this condition are not, we would need a live brain to test. It might also be interesting to see if certain animals have imaginations. If they do and have never used them this would present another mystery wouldn’t it? I think most of us have used our imaginations in one way or another without concern for our I.Qs. Take a simple thing like house hunting. Most people have imagined what their ideal house will look like before they look for one. They usually just don’t go in there blindly and have some sort of plan in mind are ready. If they didn’t have much of an imagination most people would probably just grab the first house they saw. There is no doubt today most of us are creatures of imagination and while most of us don’t use it to invent things we still have our imaginations working in other ways.
|
