Thinking about unobserved things {imagination, cognition} is under voluntary control and depends on physical and cultural reality. However, imagination can be about unreal, possible, untrue, incomplete, and opposite things. Imagination can be about negative statements, recursions, and contradictions [Johnson, 1987] [Morris and Hampson, 1983] [Popper and Eccles, 1977] [Sartre, 1948] [Zeki, 1992].
imagery
Imagery is under voluntary control and depends on physical and cultural reality. Making visual mental images depends on how grouping organizes information, how quickly perceptual units fade, and how quickly and how often mind can remake image. Imagery transfers from one eye to the other [Kosslyn, 1980] [Kosslyn, 1994] [Kosslyn et al., 1997] [Kosslyn et al., 2001] [Kreiman et al., 2000] [O'Craven and Kanwisher, 2000] [Sacks, 2003] [Shiekh, 1983] [Tomita et al., 1999].
People use viewer-centered coordinates in imagery.
comparison: hallucination
Hallucinations are unreal and involuntary, but imagery is under voluntary control and depends on physical and cultural reality. Imagination and hallucination differ.
comparison: reality
Compared to reality, imagination is less intense and changes more easily, voluntarily or involuntarily. They are distinguishable, because people have expectations about environment and body, but imagination has fewer constraints.
biology: brain
Premotor frontal lobe is for imagination.
biology: drug
Drugs can provide atypical imagination states.
biology: EEG
Alpha waves disappear when mental imagery begins.
factors: deafness
Deaf children use imagery instead of sound. They have same ability to solve problems.
factors: hypnosis
Imagination has no relation to hypnotizing.
factors: intelligence
Ability to use imagination is an intelligence factor. More intellectually gifted people have less vivid imagery [Galton, 1883].
factors: mnemonics
Mnemonics all use mental imagery.
factors: out-of-body experience
High imagination favors out-of-body experiences.
factors: personality
Authoritarian personality has little imagination.
factors: reporting
Reports can be about imagined things.
Making variations on themes {creativity, imagination} can find meaningful concept components and make new patterns. Creativity involves using irrational or unrelated ideas to construct something new.
requirements
Creativity requires alternating problem concentration and conscious-control relaxation.
factors
Creative people can be withdrawn, skeptical, preoccupied, precise, critical, dominant, introspective, restrained, solemn, independent, curious, hard-working, enthusiastic, motivated, confident, intelligent, unreliable, dirty, and irresponsible. They can avoid social contacts, avoid personal controversy, have high ego, control impulses, use abstract thinking, tolerate cognitive ambiguity, and be independent in judgment. Creative people tend to think about one problem only. Creative people like new, unsettling, challenging, asymmetric, complex, live, and playful things, and only moderate stress.
People can like new things, challenges, unsettling ideas, asymmetry, complexity, aliveness, to play with ideas, to do uncompleted things, and to analyze themselves and others.
Creativity associates with imagery use, fantasizing, hypnotizability, and absorption [Hadamard, 1945] [Hudson, 1973] [Poincaré, 1952] [Schooler et al., 1993] [Schooler and Melcher, 1995] [Smith et al., 1995].
If people see an object on a screen, and a dim object image projects onto screen, people can detect object more readily {Perky effect} [Perky, 1910].
Reality provides related events, times, and places that locate stimuli received from environment or body {source monitoring}, but imagination is not as constrained by background information. Knowledge of past, present, and future can distinguish imagination, memory, and reality.
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0225