Everyone in one way or another dreams, dreams, but especially does not think about what imagination means to him.
In this article we will consider the imagination, both from a scientific and an artistic point of view, how it works, what are its limits, how to use your imagination to become more creative person and happy person.
What is it: the definition of
The judgment of the imagination first mentioned by the Greek philosopher Plato.
He believes that this is the ability of memory to create soulful colorful images.
This unique ability is creative, thanks to which the soul is able to create and describe not only what was seen, but also what was invented.
This is the process of transforming the ideas of a person, reflecting the reality, and creating on this basis new ideas.
About imagination (fantasy) we think today first of all in the context of art and psychologyconsidering this typically human ability to be almost unlimited.
We are talking about spatial, sound, musical, plastic, mathematical, technical, lush, children's and even a sick imagination; we find a place for it in almost all areas of human creativity.
What do we know about fantasy?
This is the ability of a person to unexpectedly build in the minds of images, ideas that cannot be perceived through the senses, but only with the help of imagination.
It is the source of various manifestations of human spiritual life.
Essence of imagination
Imagination is one of those concepts that inspire us. It is like a play of children, and Einstein claims that this is more important than knowledge, since not all people with high education would notice a small flaw that an average person with imagination sees.
Just in imagination, he has already made a project and knows how to eliminate this shortcoming.
Word used in many waysbut for the most part:
- To refer to creativity in general, saying that someone has a big imagination or no imagination at all.
- To refer to some mental images; either presenting something in my head, for example, how our children's bedroom looked, or mentally humming a song to try to remember the lyrics.
Imagination, quite possibly, is a unique human ability. In essence, this allows us to explore the nature of things that are not in our current environment or, perhaps, not even real.
For example, you can imagine a cup of coffee, seen the day before, or you can imagine an alien spacecraft arriving in Earth orbit.
The essence lies in the fact that the imaginary is generated from the inside, and not perceived on the basis of appearance.
The value and role in human life
Thanks to imagination, you can forget about the gray everyday life, painting them with dreams, because, in the end, everyone must have ideals.
Imagination allows us to move to places we have never been.
Allows us to fly with birds, dance in the clouds, or swim in a glass with a delicious ice cream.
When we are sad and ill, you can go back to the world of fairy tales, eyes closed turn yourself into any hero.
For many people, dreams are the only thing they have and for which they live. Reality is sometimes overwhelming, oppressive.
It does not allow us to realize what we really want and what is important for us. Most often this is unrealistic due to lack of funds, therefore appeal to our wild imaginationto fix it.
As a rule, fantasy developed better in children than in adults. They often tell fairy tales, sometimes it seems to adults that they lie, but this is not so. They have only their imaginary world, in which the children leave every day, finding in it a joy and a fun game.
Fantasy is manifested in adults who are constantly busy, do not have time, are in the rush of everyday life. Continuous work, family does not allow them to breathe, stop, relax and lose themselves in their dreams, even for a moment.
Their fantasy is most often passivei.e. not reflected in practice. It can be dreams that help escape from reality, it can be dreams. Active imagination is always associated with practical activities.
Cultural psychology offers new approach to imagination, which highlights his emotional, social, cultural, contextual and existential characteristics.
In this approach, fantasy and imagination are understood as the ability of a person to distance himself from the “here and now” situation in order to return to it with new possibilities.
For this, socio-cultural means are used, for example, languages, history, art, images etc., a representation of imaginary scenarios, some of which may become real.
Imagination is not considered here as an isolated cognitive ability, but as a means by which people foresee and constructively move toward an uncertain future.
It is in this process of living forward with the help of the imagination new achievements appearand social change becomes possible. Such is the role of imagination in professional activities.
It was the imagination that helped man create airplanes, ships, and submarines. We can safely say that progress is driven by human fantasies.
Functions
Representations as traces of impulses, mind games, are important memory base. Without them, it would be impossible to recognize the current sensations, which are determined by comparison with traces of past impressions.
Human interaction depends on the interaction of imagination, perception and memory. ability to learn speech. If we consider the examples of raising children by animals, then these children have not learned to speak fully.
The tale of Mowgli is just a fairy tale.
In fact, these children There is no way to compare the experience of ancestors with their knowledge.
There is no communication with their own kind, the imagination in this case does not work.
Functions of the imagination:
- representation of reality in man-made images;
- mood management;
- adjustment and stabilization of the educational process, perception, attention, memory, speech, emotions;
- drawing up a specific action plan.
Properties
Imagination is associated with consciousness. If the contents of consciousness, which also encompass experience and ideas, are called ideas and constitute the subject of knowledge, then main task of intelligence is to find laws that govern the environment and the general sensations and ideas.
Human imagination carries not only psychological stress (as in animals), but also performs the most important cognitive operations associated with the synthesis of the human sensory and rational sphere.
TO basic properties include:
- Mental exit beyond the immediate perception of the individual.
- Anticipating and anticipating the future, based on previous performance.
- Recover past memories.
Imagination and organic processes also closely interrelated. In a person with a rich imagination, organic processes may also change. A pulse, a rise in pressure, etc.
Processes and mechanisms
In perception, a person takes information from the outside world, such as light or sound waves, and finds meaning in it using memory and perception processes.
In imagination this it works the other way around. The image is created from memory.
What is not obvious is that this important, fascinating phenomenon can be studied scientifically. Despite the fact that we cannot read images directly from people's brains (for now), there are still scientific means to find out what is going on in someone's head.
Things belonging to the stretched nature are primarily perceived by the senses of the body, where their ideas are combined with new impressions. and then fantasies appear.
Man cannot gaze at the infinity of nature; the eye focuses on some fragment of it, for example, on the glass in the window frame of the bus.
Flashing images in front of the eyes would be completely out of place if they had not projected rays of light onto words, cut them into pieces and caught an ever-changing image, and then connected this with sounds or specific words.
Mechanisms of imagination:
- agglutination - creation of a new image from parts of other images;
- metaphor - it is the transfer of the name from one thing to another, from gender to species, from one thing to another according to the principle of analogy. The basis for the metaphor is a comparison of similarities between objects and words;
- hyperbolization - increase or decrease of the object and its parts;
- fixation - focus on the special features of the subject;
- typification - classification of signs of several objects, the use of typical and homogeneous.
This is perhaps most clearly in a dreamwhere our minds stamp all virtual reality for us to experience us when we sleep.
But imagination is used in a number of cognitive processes, including planning, hypothetical thinking, presenting things in the past or the future, understanding the language, and, of course, in design and art in engineering and art.
Experiments related to the emission and absorption of light, the reflection and scattering of its rays, illumination or shading of an object, finally, good-neighborliness and the mutual influence of colors, have revealed a number of previously unknown visual illusionsaffecting our image of understanding images that appear on the retina.
Learning about its construction and taking into account the action of the lens that draws the image, in the end, it became clear how much in our worldview depends on the power, the play of light and shadow.
Theories briefly
There are many different interpretations of the concept of imagination, described by ancient philosophers. Antique theories, especially Aristotle and stoic, find a source of fantasy in the flesh, in its structure and in connection with the immediate environment, and not in the image.
Aristotle believed that imagination provides the existence of memory, he attributed the imagination to all animals, as organisms that have feelings.
Imagination plays a special role in Spinoza's ethics. Similarly, for Epictetus, it is a source of attachment for the body and mind. According to Spinoza's reasoning, their interaction allows the mind to free itself from passive states and achieve happiness. In ethics, imagination can be found wherever there are images.
In the philosophy of modern times, the concept of imagination plays a significant role.
Descartes perceives two, complementary concepts - material extension and thinking.
But the method by which the images of imagination act as intangible ideas of the mind, remained for him unclear.
The fundamental person for substantiating the concept of imagination in the new philosophy is Kant. First of all, he clearly shares the reproductive and productive imagination. In other words, the difference between creation and creativity.
Content and physiological basis
Psychologists have long been explore creativity, especially children. Very often, by the drawings of children, it is possible to determine what is hidden deep in the subconscious, their fears, experiences.
The development of abilities of a child of preschool age does not proceed according to the principle from the lowest to the highest, from the worst to the best. It is viewed here the process of mastering knowledge and skills handed down from generation to generation.
This potential is embodied in the system of universal abilities of other people who have reached the top of their kind of activity. It can be scientists, artists, musicians, as creative individuals.
And there may be builders, bakers, tailors, as experts in practical activities. Then you can turn to the past and recreate a picture of the life of our ancestors.
The general history of mankind could not do without the involvement of sensory knowledge of artifacts and without trying systematization of specific data.
However, only a description of the physical features of objects that came from distant eras was not enough to guess their purposewhat they are intended for, and on the basis of this to understand how their users lived.
When interpreting historical facts available to historians only randomly, through imagination this not entirely understandable human ability of the mind, requiring for itself ideas previously accumulated in memory.
There are a few types of imagination:
- real reality. Let's say a person tries to imagine Antarctica, which he himself did not see, but which actually exists;
- portraits of historical figures, for example, as primitive man or the Roman emperor Nero looked like;
- characters from fairy tales: Ivan Tsarevich, Kaschey the Immortal, the devil;
- ideas about the future of the world, for example, what could be a spaceship or a plane in the year 3000.
Violation
Without fantasy you cannot create a talented work of art it would be impossible to launch a man into space. If people did not have the imagination, then one would not know the best friend who changed the hair color.
But an overly developed fantasy can turn into a maniacal nonsense, completely implausible. Fantasies in this case are perceived as the norm of real time.
Imagination may become pathological, creates a certain model of behavior that a person considers the norm.
These can be fantasies associated with escaping from reality into your own world, where everything is beautiful. Then a person can no longer distinguish between a dream and a fantasy from reality.
Or the second option: fantasy bordering a lie. In this case, the person wants to appear before others better and more beautiful than he really is. Similar phenomena apply to mental disorders.
Dreams and fantasies are something good that must accompany every person. But if you too believe in your dreams, forgetting about reality, then there is a risk to get false conclusions.
It is necessary to remember that the imagination was not the main goal in life, because a person begins to believe in unreal things and loses faith in himself.
About the properties and functions of the imagination in this video:
