Imagination

Kanwisher and Kathleen O'Craven of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Canada used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of volunteers as they looked at images or imagined them with their eyes closed. The obtained fMRI images "revealed a striking similarity between regions activated during imagery and those activated during perception".

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Wonderful fruits of our imaginations can be seen everywhere and in everything we do. Detaching "our description of the world and ourselves within it" from the "real time" (our transient now) it may carry us into future or past like the time machine of H. G. Wells. With some of its elements modified it may create wonderful worlds that will question "our reality" prompting some adjustments.

Daniel Margoliash and Amish Dave at the University of Chicago recorded the firing patterns of neurons in the brains of young Australian zebra finches. He found that patterns the birds produced while they were awake and singing were repeated with very slight variations while they were asleep. "The young zebra finch appears to store the neuronal firing pattern of song production during the day and reads it out at night, rehearsing the song, and perhaps improvising variations." (Silent Song)

New Scientist

Imagination has a moody wife - dream. She sometimes takes us beyond the boundaries of the comprehensible leaving us perplexed and in trouble to remember. However, both of them are probing, testing and adjusting "our numerous descriptions of the world and ourselves within it". And sometimes it is hard to say: do we have submarines because Jules Verne dreamed about such things or Jules Verne dreamed about such things because they were in his future. (Is it possible that the "or" is superficial here?)

The importance of imagination and dreams in our daily lives as well as in science, art, business... cannot be overstated. It drives our lives and shapes our future. Its importance in science is well presented and documented in the book - "Insights of Genius" by Arthur I. Miller. A genius might be a bit better at it, but everybody uses his imagination and dreams with a various degree of success. Whatever we do (or not do), casts a shadow of imagined (expected) outcome next to it. (We may not be aware of it - but it is there.) Sometimes it is wrong and we feel confused or embarrassed. Most of the time its nearly there, but sometimes its a bulls eye and we are at the top of the world.

Imagination should not be taken as wishful thinking. Our imagined "description of the world and ourselves within it" also needs coherency - and this requires focus, meticulous examination of each detail and practice above all.

Imagination is greater than knowledge. It tests the limits of our knowledge through its excursions beyond - opening our eyes to wonders we never saw before and broadening "our description of the world that surrounds us and ourselves within it".

It could also wander through "our description of the world and ourselves within it", picking up interesting bits and pieces, playing with them and arranging them in different patterns until they click together in a beautiful way that makes sense.

Nowadays, our capacity to imagine seems to be decreasing - so much so that our cultures seem to be stagnating despite accelerated technological advances. The imagination was also too often suppressed in the name of "reason" inhibiting our ways to find "new answers" for "old questions". I would suggest that we need to learn to imagine as children and evolve this capability of ours as we live. Our children are too much exposed to TV and computer games that leave little if any room for imagination. The foundations ancient sages established with their poems that expressed coherent views of the "world and ourselves within it" are shaken and we have nothing to mend these "gaps". "Our descriptions of the world and ourselves within it" are increasingly incoherent and full of "gaps" while the primeval ocean of too often contradictory information threatens to shatter them entirely. (I hope and the indications are that this will change soon.)