IMAGINATIVE MINDS
An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Additional Resources

Atypical imagination and brain mechanisms

Imagination does not work in the same way or to the same degree for all people. Within the ‘normal’ population, some people may have particular powers of empathic imagination or human insight; others may be particularly ingenious at solving practical problems. Some pursuits such as art and music, conform with our intuitions about what it is to have creative imagination. But creative thought is also involved in many less obvious domains such as cookery, gardening, designing computer programmes. People vary not only in their field of interest, but also in their level of creativity. Of course, judgements about what is or is not creative vary depending upon the context of the judgement. What counts as creative to one individual or group of individuals may not do so to others. Nonetheless, psychologists treat creativity as a measurable trait or capacity. Creativity tests compare one individual with another on characteristics widely agreed to be associated with creativity, such as flexibility, inventiveness and ‘divergent thinking’, the thinking style associated with finding novel and unusual solutions to problems.

Beyond the normal scope of variation, there are people whose imagination is markedly atypical or unusual. This category includes people who are widely accepted to be exceptional - geniuses such as Mozart or Picasso for instance. It also includes people, for instance those with autism, in whom imagination appears unusually limited. Whether the mental processes reflected by such extremes of imagination differ only in degree from the average, or whether there are also differences of kind is not fully understood. Either way, such atypicalities may provide powerful sources of insight into the fundamental workings of the mind.
Comparisons of brain activity in people with typical and atypical imagination may also shed light on the brain mechanisms involved, though this field is in its infancy.

Of particular interest is the claim of an association between exceptional creativity in fields such as literature, poetry, art and music and certain forms of mental disorder. This is taken up under ‘Madness and Creativity: is there a link?’, while the following section considers the distinctive pattern of imagination impairment in Imagination and Autism Spectrum Disorders. Finally the section on Synaesthesia deals with a rare condition in which the mind/brain almost certainly functions in a qualitatively distinct way such that having one sensory experience ( e.g. hearing a sound) is coupled with another, such as seeing a colour. Whether this constitutes a form of imagination, or contributes to imaginative capacities such as the use of metaphor is a matter of lively debate.

© Ilona Roth, 2004