- “Writing a book is a long, hard process. So what should I be thinking about instead? What should my self-affirmations be? I should be imagining getting up and working on the book every morning. I should imagine working on it even when I don’t feel like it, and when I’m stuck, and when I think the book is terrible. I should tell myself that I have what it takes to keep at it through obstacles and difficulty. Evidence shows that visualizing the steps you’d have to do to achieve the goal helps. Students who imagined doing well on an exam got worse grades than those who imagined studying for the exam. Imagining the steps and the processes you need to undertake to achieve a goal activates some different brain areas than those activated when you imagine the goal being achieved.
Kathy Gerlach found that imagining goal achievement made people rate the goal higher in desirability and importance. It activated the part of the brain called the “default network”, as well as the reward parts of the brain. In contrast, thinking about the steps you need to do to achieve a goal activates the default network, the control areas, and the emotional areas, to a lesser extent. Imagining goal achievement allows people to experience the positive emotions they’d get too early. The lesson is to imagine what you should be doing to achieve your goals, rather than fantasizing about them being achieved and hoping the universe will do the work for you. That’s a “secret” actually worth knowing. Fantasizing about the future feels good. But even when just generically thinking about their futures, people tend to be very positive. In a study by Ian Newby-Clark, participants were asked to imagine events that were likely to happen in their lives. Their future imaginings were universally positive, and when asked to imagine negative things happening to them in the future, it took them longer to do it.” - “In general, people think that traumatic things that might happen to them in the future will be much more depressing than they actually end up being. In fact, when most people suffer something terrible, like the death of a loved one, they recover rather well. Some even claim that their lives were ultimately enriched by the experience. This is not to discount their grief or sadness at their loved one’s passing, but rather that they were able to cope and evolve psychologically and emotionally. At the same time, that trip to Barbados you’ve been fantasizing about probably won’t feel quite as great as you imagine it will, either.”
- “Because our moral reasoning is so closely tied to our emotions, our stronger emotional feelings about the future result in stronger moral judgments about things in the future, too. Caruso found that good deeds imagined as happening in the future are judged as more good than those in the past, and bad deeds in the future were judged more harshly. For example, let’s take a good act, such as donating 5 percent of your income to a really effective charity such as “Against Malaria” Foundation. When people imagine doing that, they will rate the moral goodness of the act as greater if they imagine doing it next week than if they imagine doing it last week. Predicting how you’re going to feel in the future is called “affective forecasting.” There are other interesting ways we get it wrong. Suppose I asked you to predict how you’d feel if you read about a deadly wildfire that killed a bunch of people. Do you think you’d be more upset if I told you that five people died, or ten thousand people died? If you’re like most people, you’d predict feeling worse if you heard about more people dying. Why? Some death is bad; more death is worse. What’s surprising is that you’d be wrong—people tend to be equally sad for both versions of the story. Elizabeth Dunn had one group of people predict how sad they’d be if they read a story about ten thousand people dying in a fire, and another group predict how sad they’d be if they read a story about five people dying in a fire. The first group’s average predicted sadness level was higher than the second group’s. Then she brought in more people and each one either read the five people or ten thousand people dead versions of the stories, and after had them report on how sad they actually were. That is, the latter two groups didn’t predict how sad they’d be, they just read the articles, got sad, and reported and reported how sad they felt. A startling thing happened: the people who read about ten thousand deaths were no sadder than those who read about five deaths. Our emotions, it seems, are blind to numbers. Even if we can all agree, intellectually, that more death is worse than less death, there is evidence that small numbers are actually more emotionally charged than large ones. People are much more willing to help individuals than to help problems affecting lots of people. In a study by Deborah Small, people were given $5 and the opportunity to donate however much of it they wanted to a charity called “Save the Children.” Some were informed about a single, identifiable victim, and others were given statistical information about the problem of starving children in a particular country. People who learned about one kid gave over twice as much as the people have given statistical information. Statistics are incredibly important. As a scientist, I know that without statistics, it’s impossible to know so many things in this world. You’d hope that statistics, even if they don’t work as well as individual stories, at least don’t hurt. Turns out they do. In Small’s third condition, people were given information about the individual child, as well as statistical information about the country. This group also donated far less than those who only heard about the child. As a scientist who’s a fan of statistics, I thought this would make me really sad, but it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Lots of people say, “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Many people think Stalin said it, but he probably didn’t. Probably lots of people said it. Still, it’s more compelling to think of one person saying it than lots. Kind of appropriate. Students read Anne Frank’s diary because hearing the story of one girl is more impact than hearing a bunch of numbers. The reason we get these strange effects seems to be tied to the somewhat separate reasoning versus emotional parts of your brain. Thinking that hearing about massive deaths making you sadder makes sense. It makes sense to your rational mind, but your rational mind only has tenuous ideas about how your mind actually works (which you already know, because you’re reading a book about psychology rather than just getting the same information by reflecting on how your own mind works). People have theories about how their own emotions work, but these theories are often wrong. So how can we make people care about massive amounts of suffering and death? Numbers are processed rationally, but pictures, like with imagination, are more closely tied to the emotions. Elizabeth Dunn reasoned that you might be able to get a bigger emotional response by showing people pictures of the dead, rather than just telling them how many people died. Some looked at fifteen pictures of people who died, and some looked at 500. As predicted, looking at more pictures of the dead made people sadder.”
- “This is promising, but it seems likely that this won’t scale up very far. For example, it seems unlikely that people would be sadder looking at ninety thousand pictures of dead people versus nine thousand. People are pattern detectors, and when you see lots of similar things, you stop seeing them as individual instances and notice the pattern instead. This is what happens with repeating visual patterns, such as wallpaper and floor tiles…
Our minds are excellent detectors of change, but once a pattern is understood, the individual pieces that make up that pattern fade from consciousness. We get “burned out” when we hear about the same social issues again and again, and they fail to move us. So although imagination is better than statistics for making us feel compassion, the limited nature of sensory imagery, and its inability to really render the scope of huge problems, can leave us feeling flat. It seems there is no way to really make people feel more for two million people than one million“ - “People tend to donate time or money to charitable causes based on how the charity pulls at their heartstrings. This can result in people donating an estimated $7,500 to pay some actor dressed up as batman to drive a kid with cancer around in a Batmobile. Fulfilling a kid’s dying wish positively drips with emotion. We can get teary thinking about this poor kid getting his dream come true. It feels better in our hearts than spending the same amount of money on hundreds of malaria bed nets that will save many lives. But this is exactly the situation we’re in. In our modern era, charities can be evaluated and rated on how effective they are. GiveWell.org reviews studies of charities and ranks them in terms of their effectiveness. With some effort, you can overcome your emotions to help you do the most good you can in this world.”
- “Imagination is also important for figuring out what is going on in the heads of other people. It is a facet of our ability to empathize, but the two can often be at odds. We misunderstand other people a lot. One of the ways we get it wrong is that we reliably underestimate how nice other people are going to be. We like to think of ourselves as good people, but think of everybody else as more selfish. This is shown in one popular experimental setup called the “prisoner’s dilemma.” In it, you and another person can independently choose to cooperate or “defect” (screw each other over). If you both cooperate, it’s best for both of you. But if the other person defects, it’s also better for you to have defected. One study by business researcher Eugene Caruso found that people will typically cooperate about 60 percent of the time. However, this percentage changes when they are asked to empathize with the other person involved with the dilemma. But contrary to what you might expect, because people think of themselves as more good than others, after considering the thoughts of others, the probability of cooperation goes down to 27 percent! Chillingly, empathy does not always help. It’s well known that our emotions are an important part of our moral feelings. You might feel moral outrage, or jealousy, for example. Because imagination can generate emotions, it can also affect our feelings of moral judgment. A moral judgment is when you experience or hear about some scenario in which somebody does something, and then judge whether the person was behaving ethically or not. In experiments, these scenarios use the imagination. People construct imagined situations in their heads based on what they are told, and then they think about them to make some kind of moral decision. For example, philosophers Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe gave people the following scenario: “Imagine a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. This is true from the very beginning of the universe, so what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened next, and so on, right up until the present. For example, one day John decided to have french fries at lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by what happened before it. So if everything in this universe was exactly the same up until John made his decision, then it had to happen that John would decide to have french fries.” Fewer than 5 percent of people thought that people were morally responsible for their actions in Universe A. When we think about acting morally, or immorally, we think about free will and making choices. For many people, a deterministic universe as that described in the text makes moral choices seem kind of impossible. So, the reason, people in Universe A have about as much moral responsibility as a lawnmower does. The example in the text above involves eating french fries. What happens when we make the example a bit more visceral? “In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and three children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.” This gets you in the gut a bit more than the french fries story, doesn’t it? Indeed, when given this scenario, a full 72 percent of people said that Bill is morally responsible for his actions, even in this universe where everything is caused deterministically from what came before. Just changing the action in the story affects people’s idea of whether there is free will or not, and that affects their moral judgment, to the tune of a whopping 67 percentage points. Let’s look at another example: suppose a runaway train is about to kill five people. In this situation, is it okay to push an innocent person into the path of a runaway train, killing that one person, to save the five that would have died otherwise? Think about what your opinion on this is before you read on. There are two answers to this question. The first is a rights-based approach, called “deontology,” which favors the rights of the individual being pushed. According to deontology, you may not violate the rights of the pushed person, even if it would save more lives. The other view is a more public-good view, called “utilitarianism,” which says that the act is good because it saves five lives rather than one. Different people give different answers to this question, and many find it difficult to decide what’s right and wrong. One can think about this problem rather abstractly, say, in words, or one can try to vividly picture the scenario. Elinor Amit looked at a bunch of people and ran tests on them to see if they were more visual or more verbal thinkers (visualizers versus verbalizers). She found that their intellectual style predicted their answer to this moral dilemma: the visualizers were more likely to think of it as wrong (the deontological stance), and the verbalizers were more likely to think it right (the utilitarian stance). Asking people what was in their “mind’s eye” when they were deciding revealed that people were more likely to imagine killing the person pushed, rather than imagining the five lives saved. That is, when imagining, they tended to image the harmful means rather than the beneficial ends. So it looks like people who naturally visualize had more rights-based judgments. If the act of visualizing was causing this shift, then, she reasoned, if you interfere with their ability to visualize, the effect should be reduced. She did exactly this. In the experiment, she had them do a challenging visual task while making the moral decisions about pushing someone in front of the train. The task was this: they saw a series of shapes on a computer screen, and for each, the shape they were asked if the shape they were looking at was the same or different from the shape they saw two shapes ago. This interferes with imagination and visual imagery, because it requires holding several shapes in mind at once. This made it much harder to vividly picture the runaway train situation because it kept the visual areas of their brains pretty busy while they were supposed to be making moral judgments. As predicted, the visual interference made people more utilitarian. That is, when she interfered with their ability to visualize, they favored the “greater good” moral stance, and thought it was more acceptable to push the person in front of the train. So it seems pretty clear that visualizing a moral situation makes you think more about rights than the greater good. We also see, from the french fries versus murdering your family example, morals are triggered more by visceral scenarios. But why would this be? To make sense of this, recall the distinction between the old, emotional brain and the new, more analytical brain. The emotional and visual systems are all a part of the old brain. The old brain has more of an animal-based, intuitive morality. This means that it has evolved to have a kind of morally appropriate to respond to situations one is likely to face in a preindustrial society. And one of the hallmarks of preindustrial societies is that it’s difficult to physically hurt someone from a great distance. In one version of the train problem I described above (called “trolley problems” in the literature), two similar situations are compared. In both, a train is headed to kill five people, and you are judging whether to choose to have one person die instead. But in one, you’re pushing somebody in front of the train, and in the other, you’re pulling a switch to redirect the train to another track, where it will kill only the one person instead. So in both, the idea is that you’re sacrificing one person to save five. But people tend to give different answers for these two problems. In general, more people are willing to pull a switch to kill one person to save five than they are to push somebody to have the same effect. One of the important differences between these situations is that pushing somebody means actively putting your hands on them. This is a very visceral thing to do and relates more to the kind of situations our ancient ancestors might have faced. It’s kind of like pushing somebody over a cliff or onto some sharp rocks. Because our ancestors faced similar ones, they evolved to feel that these situations are morally wrong. But there’s nothing in the ancient world like pulling a switch to do anything at all, let alone kill somebody. As a result, for many people, pulling a switch doesn’t feel as bad, even if you (or more specifically, your new brain) “knows” that the effect is ultimately the same—sacrificing one innocent person who would otherwise live. This is one of the reasons offered for why people differ in their moral responses to these hypothetical imaginings, but we don’t know for sure of what’s going on in the brain quite yet. So, the theory goes, because imagination is closely tied to evolved morality, engaging in visual imagery activates more of those old circuits, resulting in an older, evolved, rights-based moral judgment, and a relative deactivation of the rule-based, cool reasoning that the new brain specializes in. If you think about some moral situation visually, you’re more likely to think about it using evolved morality, as opposed to a more principled, reason-based morality. Those are some examples of how imagining a moral situation can affect your judgment about it. But can you use your imagination to make yourself a better person? Judging others is one thing, but what about how you actually act in the world? If you imagine doing good things, will that encourage you to actually do good things? The answer seems to be yes. Brendan Gaesser found that when he had people imagine helping people in need, they were more likely to intend to help people in real life. And the more vivid the imagining was, the stronger the desire to help people. This seems to jibe with the fact that morality is closely tied to emotion and feelings about morality. Similarly, Arber Tasimi found that children who thought about their own good past behavior (but, interestingly, not others’) acted more generously. It sounds like it makes sense, but it also seems to contradict some other findings. Recall that imagining the steps one takes to achieve a goal (such as studying for an exam) helped people study, but imagining the goal being fulfilled (such as getting a good grade) did not. In fact, it hindered it. Imagining your goal being completed gives you a great feeling that can, ironically, sap your motivation to achieve that goal in real life. Gaesser had people imagining helping others, which presumably involved imagining both the steps involved, as well as the positive outcome of helping. So if they were imagining the outcome, why didn’t this sap their desire to actually do it like it did in the studying for exams experiment? Another reason to think it wouldn’t work is because of something called the “moral credential effect,” which is how your feeling like you are a good person allows you to license yourself to do bad things—or to not do good things. Sonya Sachdeva found that people who wrote self-congratulatory essays chose to donate only about a fifth as much money to charity as those who wrote self-critical essays. Many experiments involving subjects, such as racial prejudice, diet and health practices, and energy consumption, have shown similar “licensing” effects. And, as we see in many studies, imagining doing something is treated the same way by much of your mind, as actually doing it. So when you imagine doing good, we have two reasons to think that it might inhibit your tendency to do good in real life, not the other way around. These studies come from different literatures and seem to come up with opposite conclusions. Moral licensing predicts compensatory behavior, making you act badly, and work from the “moral identity” literature suggests that it makes you more good. What the hell, psychology? I think Paul Conway might have figured out the answer to this paradox. In his study, he showed that thinking about good things you’ve done in a more specific, concrete way (rather than an abstract one), or thinking about good things you’ve done recently, causes a compensatory behavior. That is, it makes you less likely to do good deeds. But if people think about being good in an abstract way, or about good things done in the distant past, it reinforces a moral identity and results in people being more likely to act in a good way. So does thinking about being good make you more good? Well, it depends on how you think about being good! If you think about it in the abstract, or about the steps involved with doing good, or about things you’ve done that were good in the distant past, or about being good as part of your identity, it might help you be a better person. But if you imagine being good vividly, perhaps using mental imagery, or think about good things you’ve done recently, or focus too much on how great it would feel to do good, you are likely to think you’re already “good enough” and choose not to do as many good things. A study by Gert Cornelissen also sheds light on this problem. When asked to imagine having done something good, people with a more outcome-based mind-set were less likely to be good in the future, and people with a rule-based mind-set were more likely to be good. These mind-sets roughly correspond to utilitarian and deontological ethical theories. So thinking about being good can, if done correctly, encourage you to be a better person. There’s also evidence that you can use your imagination to become less prejudiced. Irene Blair found that you can change certain stereotypes simply by imagining people of a certain gender or race, doing or being something that is counter to your stereotype. Across five experiments it reduced multiple kinds of stereotypes.”
- Can imagination impact happiness? The answer is yes, but whether it impacts it negatively or positively depends on how we do it.
Imagine that you are sitting in a car with your children, and you’re hesitant to pull out to the main road. You decide at the last second not to, and just as you have done that, a big truck just passes the main road. This should make you happy as you have missed a terrible car accident, yet you could feel bad because of the anxiety you have by the thought that you could have harmed yourself and your kids.
In terms of imagining your life to be better than it actually is, this could produce negative feelings because it makes you think about what you may have missed, what you don’t have. Same thing would happen if you contrast yourself to Tiger Woods when it comes to Golf skills. However, if you identify with him, this could inspire your way to success. This presents an opposite effect to when we think about the future. If we think about what could have been – especially the near misses: the plane that we’d just missed by 5mins, the job offer that we almost got, this will make us feel less satisfied with our lives. However, if we practise gratitude – things that we believe happen to us because of change, because of the actions of others that we were not expecting, we are likely to feel good about our lives. Studies show that those that keep journals about gratitude are likely to be happier, have better sleep, exercise more, be pleasant to people around them and are more likely to be helpful than those who just journaled. This is the case even when some of that gratitude is based on imagination, not facts. - We often create imagined worlds just to help us better understand what people are saying. We do it when we read stories, stories that could sometimes take us away from our surroundings and make us live it. This is called a transportation experience and is closely related to the Flow concept.
People seek these transportation experiences when they want to change how they feel – eg: they feel bad and so they read a happy story. They can also do it when they relate to the story – it is easier to experience transportation if the season of the story matches the actual season. Many parts of our minds believe that what is happening in the story is real, and it will be made more real when we experience transportation and it could affect our life – those reading romantic stories are less likely to use a condom because they were so taken by the moment.
Reading creates Flow experience more than any other activity.
Reading fiction makes us more empathic. It improves our social skills by making us more aware as to what people around us are feeling. - Daydreaming: it is an unintentional process of not paying full attention to what is happening around us and instead focusing on the thoughts that occur to us. It is fanciful in some way and usually unrelated to whatever activity we’re currently engaged in in the real world. Two types of mind wandering: zoning out which is unintentional. This is different from tuning out which is intentionally keeping your attention away from what is happening around you. We usually daydream for about 8-14seconds with the mean being a lot higher than the median, suggesting that there are times when we daydream for a much longer period of time.
mind-wandering happens when the brain is at rest and tries to find something occupy its unutilized processing resources
When we daydream, much of the energy the brain consumes is devoted to that as opposed to the energy it spends controlling us walking while daydreaming. The brain is a power-hungry machine: it consumes 20% of the calories while it weighs 2% of the body. One theory as to why that happens is that the brain continues to process things after they happen. - We daydream mostly of the future. It involves visual imagery and self-talk that is not loud.
Daydreaming gets a bad rap, and there is evidence that supports why it can be bad. However, worrying thoughts use similar parts of the brain as does daydreaming but they’re not daydreaming. Exercise and being social can help with such thoughts. Daydreaming impacts performance on reading, maintaining attention as well as general working memory and intelligence. - Sometimes having a bit of a distraction is better so that the brain can focus on what is at hand. This is because we are wired to be engaged in mildly-challenging tasks. If we’re not, we will have unutilized processing power that we’ll use daydreaming to use. If we sit in a boring lecture and don’t doodle, we will tune away almost completely than if we were allowed to doodle – the combo of partial listening and the doodling occupies the mind enough.
- Purpose of daydreaming: it offers a way for us to plan our future, to virtually go through it and figure out what needs to occur to make things happen. Example: say you want to plant something. You forget about it but then a conversation with a friend the day after about her wanting to plant lettuce reminds you of your goal. You start then daydreaming about what you’ll need to do to make that goal happen.
We don’t daydream about goals that we can’t achieve. Eg: those with prostate issues that impact their sexual performance had less sexual daydreams. - Mindfulness: being aware of the environment around you, and of the thoughts that cross your mind. People are happier when they pay attention to the task at hand, even when it’s not fun.
Thinking about the future though can bring some happiness. Eg: anticipating a trip can boost happiness – only modestly though. Planning for a party can make us happier than having a surprise party. - mindfulness meditation: works on reigning in the “monkey mind” that people have, the one that bounces from one thought to another quickly: thinking about bills, dinner, arguments, and on an on. Mindfulness meditation encourages us to acknowledge thoughts as they cross our minds, but not to engage in them.
- Imagination as Mental Training, Healing, and Self Improvement:
When we imagine something, the same message sent to the body is created but it’s interrupted by another part of the brain. When you imagine yourself doing something, you can see it in first person: your image would look like what it would look like if it were, or you can imagine in 3rd person: watching a video of yourself doing the action. - You can use mnemonic to ease up remembering numbers – people have a hard time remembering numbers and abstract concepts.
0 for Z or S, 1 for t or th, or d sound, 2 is n, 3 is m, 4 is r, 5 is l, 6 is ch, sh, j or a soft g, 7 is k or a hard g, 8 is f or v, and 9 is p or b. Importantly, there are no digits for vowels. - Memory palaces is another mnemonic memory technique.
Example: picture your childhood home and picture yourself going through it in the same sequence each time – important so you don’t have to guess yourself. Start adding things in the house as you begin your journey in it and in the order in which you want to remember them. Example: at the entrance, you can add plastic teeth case to remember that you need to call your dentist. Once you enter and you look to your right to the jacket closet, you can have parchment paper-covered door to remember that you’ll need to order parchment papers. - You can use imagination to help you get a better value for your dollar. Picture you wanting to buy a milkshake for 10 dollars but the same exact milkshake is sold 5 blocks away for 5 dollars. Most people would go for the cheaper one. Though they wouldn’t walk 5 blocks if they’ll save 5 on a 500 purchase. The amount of time spent is the same and so is the benefit obtained by it.
When deciding on whether you’d want to do something yourself or pay to have it done, think about how much money you make an hour and whether it’s worth your time doing it. - You can use imagery as a proxy to make you happy – imagine the situations that make you happy. However, you could also will yourself into happiness directly without the imagery. While there is no scientific evidence to this, it has worked for the author.
- Sometimes the physiological response we have towards something might make us mistake one feeling for another. In an experiment where some men were asked to cross a safe bridge while others were asked to cross a risky bridge, both groups were approached with an attractive female who asked them to fill a questionnaire. Men who were crossing the risky bridge gave responses that were more sexual and tried more to ask the female out. This is because they subconsciously mistook their increased heart rate and breathing for sexual attraction.
- Emotions were developed to help us react appropriately, so it was not a requirement that we be aware of it. Further, our ability to be conscious of our emotions might have come to us later in the evolutionary cycle than having unconscious emotions, suggesting that these unconscious emotions are more primal and fundamental than the conscious experience of them. Also, subliminal and conscious also have different brain signatures.
- Rapping off the cuff or coming up with lyrics in your head are both forms of creativity, but writing lyrics in your head requires more creativity because it relies on the construction of memory which is a form of imagination
- Imagination and creativity are mildly correlated. We can improve our creativity by practicing our imagination. For an imagined world to resonate, it would need to have elements from the real world so that the comparison of the two and noticing the unusual becomes easier.
- When you try to find a solution to a problem in your life, try imagining first how things in your life might be different – tweak variables and see. How you imagine too makes a difference. If you imagine how your day might have been without the delicious lunch you had, that is called subtractive imagination. Additive imagination is the opposite. So when you’re trying to solve a problem, look at the picture in your head and add to it. Additive imagination aids in creativity. But subtractive imagination is good for analytical problem-solving tasks. Subtractive imagination helps when trying to find an association between two things. Imagining how things would be without certain elements help you more likely find the relationship between “age”, mile and sand.
- Imagination can help us with analogies. Picture a scenario where an army needs to take a fortress. Army leader had an original plan to go over one of the many bridges leading to the fortress. This is more efficient. However, the leader of the army protecting the fortress decides to plant mines over all bridges. However, he set them up such that the mines would explode only when there is a lot of people going over the bridge. This is to allow normal traffic in an out of the fortress without setting off the mine.
The leader of the attacking army would have to divide the army into sub-groups and have each sub-group get to the fortress by going over a different bridge.
Now imagine this scenario too: a patient has an inoperable tumor. There is a laser beam that is sure to kill the tumor but would kill all good tissues/cells it passes through.
a few people make the association between the first and second scenarios. It is really hard to gloss over the differences between the two situations and discover the analogy by seeing the similarity between the laser and the army. - Because our mental images are based on our memories of perceptions, our imagination is limited to things that we have experienced. One of the fathers of modern genetic science was not able back in 1916 to imagine how materials in the body would provide code for inheritance “The properties of living things are in some way attached to a material basis, perhaps in some special degree to nuclear chromatin [chromosomes]; and yet it is inconceivable that particles of chromatin or of any other substance, however complex, can possess those powers which must be assigned to our factors or gens [genes]. The supposition that particles of chromatin, indistinguishable from each other and indeed almost homogeneous under any known test, can by their material nature confer all the properties of life surpasses the range”
- “We evolved to deal with situations in what biologist Richard Dawkins calls the “Middle World.” This means that we only really have to deal with medium-sized objects. In physics, the set of “medium sized objects” range from things bigger than drops of water to planets. Granted, this is a pretty wide range of things. But there are lots of “objects” in our universe that are not medium-sized. Our common sense, and our perception, is exquisitely tuned to make sense of Middle World, which is why our common sense breaks down when faced with the science of the very small (such as quantum effects), very large (the behavior of galaxies), very slow (forest growth, tectonic plate movement), or very fast (relativistic effects as something approaches light speed). For example, in quantum mechanics, it’s possible for a particle to be in two places at once. This makes absolutely no sense in Middle World, so we tend to have a knee-jerk skepticism to the very idea that it’s possible at any scale. Quantum mechanics appears to be full of paradoxes, because it violates common sense—but common sense is a product of what we were evolved to be able to see”
- “For example, solid objects are made of atoms, and atoms are, for the most part, “made of” empty space. If an atom were the size of a sports stadium, the nucleus of an atom, where most of the mass is, would be about the size of a house fly in that stadium. But our experience of an object, such as a rock, is of solidity. Why? Because our hands can’t pass through it. If we were the size of subatomic particles, Dawkins muses, we would perceive rocks quite differently: what appears to constitute “reality,” for a given species, is what it needs to be. We perceive rocks as solid because when we interact with them, they behave as though they were. When we step in a puddle, our foot goes right through. This is not so for some small insects, who stay on top of the water because of surface tension. Humans don’t really think of surface tension because it’s mostly irrelevant to how we interact with liquids. We’re too big for surface tension to matter. Because we understand the world in this way, we store information about our world accordingly, and our imaginations reflect it. Try as we might, it’s very difficult to imagine, say, the ten spatial dimensions of the branch of physics called “string theory.” We can imagine three dimensions just fine, but have trouble even with four, let alone ten. When we imagine, we tend to imagine Middle World things. It’s easier.”
- “Whether or not there are things in the universe so strange, so unlike Middle World, that we cannot even conceptually conceive of them is an open question. If there are, then we might have to wait until we have some superior intelligence (perhaps human intelligence augmented through technology or genetic engineering, or have artificial systems that don’t have our same constraints), before they can be understood.”
- 65% of kids have imaginary friends that they interact with, and sometimes they like more than real friends in the real world. Many parents don’t know that their children have imaginary friends. Kids could visualize life in inanimate objects – chest of drawers, and they can still differentiate between the inanimate object which is the chest of drawers while still seeing the friend they see in it.
- Technology has made some advances in the ability to read the human mind. It will be easier to decode the lower-imagination thoughts such as interpreting – using brain signals, what the person is looking at, or what it is they saw recently, but will be more difficult for higher imaingation-thoughts which would differ greatly from one person to another.
- Wisdom of the crowd: asking about people some numerical magnitude: weight of a ball, distance between two objects, height of a building. In these cases, the average answer people provide is very close to the actual answer.
- Virtual Reality is when the input is not real. Augmented reality is when you can see the real world but with computer-generated imagery projected onto it. Eg: seeing images of people but with their names appearing on top. Imagination is kind of virtual reality, because you block your view of reality and imagine an alternative one.
- The pictorial theory of mental imagery holds that the images we see in our head are not actually images but rather neurons in a neural tissue, change firing rate to represent things like colors and edge of objects. This mental image can be then use “looked at”, not with eyes but with visual attention and perceptual processes you use for light, but instead focus on a mental image.
- Reperception: when you make a discovery through imagination. You imagine the letter D and flip it so that it sits on its flat face. You can then imagine a J right under it. The shape generated is an umbrella. People do not have that knowledge from memory but instead it’s discovered at the time.
- Spatial imagery is 3-dimensional unlike visual imagery.
- “Congenitally blind people appear to be able to do tasks that would require spatial imagery, but not specifically visual imagery. Visual and spatial tasks seem to use different brain areas, and brain damage to different parts of the brain can impair one and not the other.13 Engaging in visual perception interferes more with visual imagery than spatial imagery, and engaging in spatial or motor tasks interferes more with spatial imagery.14 Another way to think about spatial imagery is with this exercise. Look up from your book and imagine, as vividly as you can, a woman standing in front of you, wearing a very bright red dress. Now imagine that she walks around you so that now she’s standing behind you. In your imagination, don’t change the point of view—that is, don’t imagine her behind you as though the “camera” were behind you, and you’re in the picture—keep “looking” forward. What most people experience is that when the woman goes beyond their visual field (that is, outside of where they can actually see), the image changes in character. The color is gone, and it’s more like knowing that she’s there, but not really seeing that she’s there. This, for many, is the difference between visual and spatial imagery.“
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