The imaginative mind

Abstract

The astounding capacity for the human imagination to be engaged across a wide range of contexts is limitless and fundamental to our day‐to‐day experiences. Although processes of imagination are central to human psychological function, they rarely occupy center stage in academic discourse or empirical study within psychological and neuroscientific realms. The aim of this paper is to tackle this imbalance by drawing together the multitudinous facets of imagination within a common framework. The processes fall into one of five categories depending on whether they are characterized as involving perceptual/motor related mental imagery, intentionality or recollective processing, novel combinatorial or generative processing, exceptional phenomenology in the aesthetic response, or altered psychological states which range from commonplace to dysfunctional. These proposed categories are defined on the basis of theoretical ideas from philosophy as well as empirical evidence from neuroscience. By synthesizing the findings across these domains of imagination, this novel five‐part or quinquepartite classification of the human imagination aids in systematizing, and thereby abets, our understanding of the workings and neural foundations of the human imagination. It would serve as a blueprint to direct further advances in the field of imagination while also promoting crosstalk with reference to stimulus‐oriented facets of information processing. A biologically and ecologically valid psychology is one that seeks to explain fundamental aspects of human nature. Given the ubiquitous nature of the imaginative operations in our daily lives, there can be little doubt that these quintessential aspects of the mind should be central to the discussion. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4197–4211, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Creative constraints: Brain activity and network dynamics underlying semantic interference during idea production

“…On the other hand, an emerging literature has documented a central role of semantic (Beaty et al, 2014; Benedek et al, 2012b; Kenett et al, 2014, in press) and episodic (Addis et al, 2016; Madore et al, 2015, 2016) memory systems to creative cognition. The present work illustrates how semantic memory can constrain creative thought by activating salient conceptual knowledge during idea generation, but it is clear that memory also benefits creativity by providing acquired knowledge and retrieval mechanisms (Abraham, in press). We think that it is useful to briefly consider our study in the context of this broader literature in order to highlight ways in which memory and creativity may interact.…”

What Does Creativity Mean in Safety-Critical Environments?

“…The findings of domain-specific studies (e.g., creative writing, visual art making, melody improvisation, etc.) and psychometric tasks 2 highlight the fact that creativity does not rise from a conceptual void but from an ongoing knowledge base development and personal past experiences (Madore et al, 2016;Abraham, 2017). Individuals accumulate a collection of knowledge and routines, which must be both readily accessible and flexibly organized to meet any situational demand.…”

Semantic Imagination as Condition to our Linguistic Experience

“…10 A recent proposal, hypothesizing semantic memory as the root of imagination and exhorting to further research in this direction can be found in Abraham and Bubic (2015). An attempt to classify the many functions of imaginations in a unified cognitive model is proposed in Abraham (2016). For the researches on several aspects of the imagination and mental simulation in the field of cognitive sciences, see Markman et alii (2008).…”