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The Science of Imagination Explained: Everyday, Creative, and Social Functions in Modern Psychology
Discover how imagination influences your daily life, creativity, and social interactions with insights from Adam Zeman’s “The Shape of Things Unseen.” Learn about the latest neuroscience, the three types of imagination, and how harnessing your mind’s hidden power can boost resilience, empathy, and innovation. Perfect for psychology enthusiasts and anyone seeking to unlock their full cognitive potential.
Ready to explore the hidden science behind your thoughts and creativity? Continue reading to uncover practical strategies for training your imagination, enhancing your mental strength, and transforming the way you perceive the world—based on cutting-edge research and real-life examples from “The Shape of Things Unseen.”
Genres
Psychology, Science, Personal Development, Creativity
Introduction: Imagination’s inner workings.
The Shape of Things Unseen (2025) challenges the myth that imagination is used only in creative endeavours, illustrating how we use our imaginative capacities constantly, whether anticipating, reminiscing, hypothesizing or daydreaming. It draws on the latest cognitive science to show how imaginative thought is embedded in our development, our interactions, and our biological and perceptual processes.
Imagine: a bolt of lightning.
The touch of velvet.
Your first kiss.
The center of the earth.
Imagination is, simply, our most profound and powerful ability. It gives us the ability to travel through time: to decouple from the present, to recall the past, to project into the future. It allows us to untether from reality: to enter novelistic and cinematic worlds, to entertain hypothetical scenarios, to depart from ‘what is’ and to consider ‘what might be’.
We all imagine, instinctively. Now, developments in our understanding of the mind and brain allow scientists and psychologists to explain this instinctual process in greater detail than ever before. This summary is a snapshot of our contemporary understanding of imagination: what it is, how it works, and how we can train its capacity.
Three types of imagination
Let’s go on a road trip. An imaginary one, of course. How you imagine this trip is completely up to you: I’ll leave the type of vehicle you’re travelling in, the weather that you’re moving through, and even the music on the stereo up to you and your imagination.
All you need to know is this: we’ll be making three stops along the way. One stop for each of your imagination’s key functions.
Let’s hit the road.
As you’re travelling, I want you to notice where your mind goes. Is it focused consistently on the road ahead and the scenery around you? Or does something you see – perhaps a roadside diner, a distinctive tree, a road sign – trigger a memory or a feeling? I’m guessing it’s the second. Because the thing is, our minds are constantly wandering.
Time to hop out and stretch your legs. We’ve arrived at our first stop: every day imagination. Though maybe it should be called ‘every minute of the day’ imagination. Seriously. Researchers once conducted a study where participants received random notifications throughout the day asking them to report where their minds were. In 49% of responses, so nearly half the time, the participants’ minds were wandering, meaning they were not fully focused on the task at hand. In fact there was only one activity where participants were consistently focused on the here and now: having sex.
Okay, let’s hit the road again. As you’re moving, a song comes on the radio. It’s about heartbreak. You feel something stir within you. Memories of your own experiences blend with your response to the song’s artistry, evoking a singular emotional response.
We’ve arrived at our second stop: creative imagination. In the Rothko Gallery in Texas, a room lined with canvases covered in black oil paint frequently moves viewers to tears. This isn’t because there’s anything inherently emotional about a bloc of pigment. It’s because the mind has a remarkable ability to participate in creating meaning rather than simply perceiving it. Think of reading a book: the author might tell you the romantic hero has dark eyes, but you might also supply him with curly hair while you read.
We’re nearing our final destination now and the landscape is changing from open road to city streets. The people you see through your window catch your attention. You can’t help but make assumptions about them: the hurried woman might be late for an interview; perhaps the hand-holding couple are on their second date.
We’ve reached our final destination: social imagination, meaning our ability to envision worlds and experiences beyond our own. Social imagination is what allows us to project beyond our own inner life into the inner lives of others; to surmise that the rude barista might have had a bad morning, or to look at a flint arrow in a museum and imagine the life of the person who fashioned it. With that, our tour of the three key imaginative functions is complete.
The visual imagination
Imagine a table with five objects on it: a wristwatch, a pear, a key, a spoon, and a used train ticket. Now, imagine a white cloth covering those objects. You are asked to recall the objects that are now hidden. Easy: a wristwatch, a pear, a key, a spoon, and a used train ticket. But how did you recall them? Did you memorize the list of objects verbally? Or did you visualize them in your mind’s eye?
Visualization takes center stage in our imagination. There’s a reason, after all, that the word imagination has its roots in the Latin word imago, or image. This imaging can be both voluntary – for example, when I ask you to imagine a puppy and your brain helpfully supplies an image of a cute little dog – and involuntary, as with hypnagogic imagery, those wild visualizations that drift into our heads as we’re between wakefulness and sleep. Usually, imagination involves a mixture between the two: we voluntarily follow a train of thought, but can’t always control where our mind wanders.
Yet imagination isn’t just imagery. Return back to that cute puppy you were imagining. You might have heard cute panting, thought of warm fur or a rough tongue, and even had the sensation of a puppy wriggling in your arms. Our imagination engages sensory and kinaesthetic dimensions simultaneously.
Imagination is a form of cognition, or thought. Other forms of cognition include our ability to form memories, communicate through language, and direct our attention. Neuroscience has shown us regions of the brain devoted to these cognitive functions. But where does imagination and visualization lie on this map of the brain? Perhaps because imagination is so multimodal, we can’t pin down one region. Instead, imagination seems to activate networks across the brain, integrating information from various sensory and cognitive systems all at once.
We do know that mental visualization activates certain biological connections. Scientists at the University of Oslo performed an elegantly simple experiment, reasoning that if asked to visualize something bright, the participants’ pupils should constrict. Remarkably, that’s exactly what happened, just as they would when seeing an actual bright object, suggesting that mental imagery and visual perception rely on shared neural mechanisms.
Back to those five objects under the cloth: when you visualized them, you activated processes woven deeply into your biology and perception, using the same rich and complex processes that construct your entire inner world. Pretty neat, right?
Imaginative breakthroughs
I’ve got a riddle for you. What single word links pine, sauce, and tree? Now you might get the answer straight away, but more likely your process will look like this: a mixture of methodical reasoning and creative leaps.
These creative leaps lie behind what we’re going to call productive imagination, the creative ‘spark’ that enables innovation. Throughout history, these ‘sparks’ have revolutionized our understanding of the world. One evening in the 1880s, Belgian chemist Friedrich Kekule was dozing by the fire. He had spent the day trying to work out the structure of the chemical component benzene. Now, drifting to sleep, he dreamed of atoms dancing around like snakes. One snake was eating its own tail. On waking, Kekule immediately realized that benzene was structured like a ring. Or, if you prefer, like a snake eating its tail.
Kekule’s random ‘spark’ wasn’t singular. Archimedes’ famous “Eureka!” moment came when he connected his bath water’s displacement to a principle of physics. Alexander Fleming transformed medicine when mold contaminated his bacterial cultures: instead of throwing them out per lab protocol, he observed them, and in the process discovered penicillin.
Productive imagination thrives on what novelist Arthur Koestler termed bisociation: the unexpected combination of ideas from typically incompatible frames of reference. Bisociation can occur when thinkers make chance observations – like Archimedes’ bath – or follow hunches – like Fleming did with his moldy cultures.
Hunches and chance observations don’t simply manifest, though. This path to original thinking paradoxically requires both disciplined work and inspired deviation: the latter can’t occur without the former. Graham Wallas formalized this interplay in his four-stage model of creative breakthrough: in the preparation phase information is gathered, in the incubation phase it is subconsciously processed, a breakthrough moment comes at the illumination point, followed by testing and refining in the verification phase. This sequence mirrors how we might solve our opening riddle. First a phase of methodical consideration, followed by possible frustration, a moment of insight, and finally, confirmation of the answer. Which is “apple”, by the way.
Forming imagination
Meet Maria. She’s very young. So young, in fact, that she’s yet to be born. But already, the embryonic beginnings of her imaginative capacity are beginning to take shape.
She begins life as a cluster of cells. By her third week in utero, Maria’s ectoderm has formed. This is the critical outer embryonic layer that gives rise to her nervous system. At 42 days, some of her cells have begun differentiating into information-transmitting neurons that establish synaptic connections with their neighboring cells. Gradually these synaptic junctions will adapt for specific functions from sensory processing to higher cognition.
Noise, light, sensory overwhelm: Maria has been born.
The six months following her birth are a time of explosive neural development. She’ll form approximately 100,000 new synapses every day. Maria’s imagination builds as she acquires fundamental capabilities. First comes sensation: recognizing familiar stimuli and forming expectations. Next, perception and conceptual formation. She begins categorizing. Furry creatures on four legs are different to shiny objects on wheels. As she categorizes, she builds semantic memory, her mental storage system for meanings, concepts and knowledge about the world.
Joint attention emerges as her mom and dad direct her focus to objects and events. Her mom points to a bird, for instance, and Maria follows her mom’s finger. This shared experience becomes the foundation for imitation, as Maria tries to copy what her parents do. Symbolic understanding blossoms into pretend play. Maria serves imaginary food to parents from empty plates or uses a banana as a telephone.
By age three, Maria’s social sphere expands to include her peers. Until now she has played alongside, but not with, other children. Now, she collaborates imaginatively. Between ages three and six, she cultivates theory of mind, the understanding that others possess different thoughts and perspectives than her own. This supports her grasp of complex concepts like deception, for example, hiding a toy and telling someone it’s lost. Imaginary friends and elaborate pretend scenarios provide safe environments for Maria to test social models before applying them in reality.
In her earliest days, Maria’s capabilities allowed her imagination to flourish: now her imagination gives her new capabilities, from empathy and narrative comprehension to social intelligence and counterfactual thinking. Like Maria, we are shaped by our imaginations, and our imaginations shape our worlds.
Imagination gone wrong
Imagine returning home to find your loved one replaced by an identical imposter. Someone who looks and behaves exactly like them, yet somehow isn’t them. It’s the stuff of science fiction. Unless you suffer from Capgras delusion. Then it is your lived reality.
What is a delusion? In essence, it’s imagination gone awry. Delusions are fixed, false beliefs that remain resistant to contrary evidence and exist in a disconnect from their sufferer’s social and cultural context. Where delusions take hold, the boundary between the real and the imaginary is dissolved, creating a troubling new landscape of perception.
The field of cognitive neuropsychiatry explores how these boundaries become blurred within the brain. Capgras syndrome provides a fascinating window into this phenomenon. Research has shown that individuals with damage to facial recognition areas may not consciously recognize loved ones, yet still display measurable physiological responses, like increased skin conductance indicating emotional arousal, when seeing familiar faces. Neuropsychiatrists have hypothesized that Capgras might represent the inverse: when normal facial recognition does not trigger the expected emotional response.
This insight led to the two-factor theory of delusions. The first factor is the specific content of a delusion, like failing to experience emotional recognition when seeing a spouse’s face. The second factor involves a breakdown in belief evaluation systems, typically associated with frontal lobe function, which allows the delusion to take hold despite evidence to the contrary. While the content of delusions varies tremendously, from John Nash’s belief he would become emperor of Antarctica, to France’s King Charles the sixth’s conviction he was made of glass, this second factor, the failure to properly evaluate beliefs, appears universal across delusional disorders.
Building on this two-factor hypothesis, modern neuroscience suggests the predictive coding theory to explain why delusional thinking can become embedded. It works like this: our brains constantly generate predictions about our sensory environment. When we encounter something unexpected, the resulting “prediction error” triggers an update to our internal models. In psychosis and delusional states, this system malfunctions in two critical ways: either the brain generates excessive prediction errors, causing ordinary events to seem surprising and meaningful, or it fails to properly incorporate these errors, refusing to update beliefs. Delusions may represent the mind’s attempt to create coherent explanations for these persistent, unexplained prediction errors, through the creation of narratives that, bizarre as they may seem, resolve that internal cognitive dissonance.
Imaginative potential
You’ve heard of the placebo effect, right? It’s one of the most fascinating phenomena in medicine: patients experience real physiological improvements simply because they believe they’re receiving treatment. Our imagination can literally alter our physical reality and reduce pain. Yet this is merely the beginning of imagination’s transformative potential.
Take music. More specifically, take the trombone. Studies of trombonists have shown that when they mentally rehearse their pieces, vividly imagining the movements, sounds, and sensations of playing, they significantly improve their actual performance. What’s more, combining physical practice with mental rehearsal produces superior results compared to physical practice alone.
And there’s more to it than playing the imaginary trombone. Imagination can actually build physical strength. Researchers at the University of Iowa conducted experiments where one group performed isometric strength training with their little finger, while another group merely imagined pushing against an obstacle with that finger. After several sessions, both groups demonstrated increased finger strength. The physical training group showed more significant gains, but the imagination-only group also experienced measurable improvement without any actual exercise.
More seriously, imagination can also play a crucial role in healing psychological trauma. Therapies for PTSD utilize imagination through techniques like image rescripting, where patients reimagine traumatic scenarios with different outcomes and prolonged exposure therapy which entails mentally revisiting trauma in safe environments.
Modern approaches are even attempting to prevent PTSD before it develops. Traumatic memories consolidate through imagination, where they can calcify into intrusive images that play on a loop for PTSD sufferers. So new interventions try to circumvent this imaginative process before it can start. For example, patients who’ve experienced potentially traumatic events, like car accidents, play Tetris while discussing the incident with therapists. This visual-spatial task distracts from the imaginative formation of intrusive visual memories, significantly reducing the risk of developing PTSD.
These findings highlight a deeper truth: our imaginations are not only sources of creativity but also tools for resilience. We can harness them to enhance our abilities, build inner strength, and even support emotional healing. As research continues to explore the contours of human imagination, its extraordinary potential becomes ever more apparent.
Conclusion
In this summary to The Shape of Things Unseen by Adam Zeman, you’ve explored the many dimensions of imagination – its everyday, creative, and social modes – and its wide-ranging functions, from fueling breakthroughs to supporting social and cognitive growth. Imagination has the power to expand our abilities in profound ways, yet when our internal regulatory systems falter, it can just as easily lead us into delusion.
We’ve also delved into its neurological foundations, uncovering how imagination draws on brain networks that overlap with memory, perception, and emotion. This vast spectrum of imaginative capacity reveals the extraordinary variability of human inner experience, and the subtle yet powerful ways our imaginative lives shape how we think, connect, and understand ourselves.