Psychology & Psychiatry

Imagine: Our attitudes can change solely by the power of imagination

Sometimes in life there are special places that seem to stand out to us—a school playground, perhaps an old church, or that inconspicuous street corner where you were kissed for the first time. Before the kiss you had never ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Imagination can influence perception

Imagining something with our mind's eye is a task we engage in frequently, whether we're daydreaming, conjuring up the face of a childhood friend, or trying to figure out exactly where we might have parked the car. But how ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Myths about psychopaths busted

(Medical Xpress) -- New research challenges the belief that psychopaths are born not made, and suggests psychopaths may even be able to change their spots.

Psychology & Psychiatry

Imagination can reduce pain

If you imagine in advance that something is not going to hurt, this could mean you experience less pain. This discovery was made by health psychologist Kaya Peerdeman during her Ph.D. research on the placebo effect. Ph.D. ...

Neuroscience

Imagined movements can alter our brains

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) work on the principle that measurable changes in electrical brain activity occur just by thinking about performing a task. Signals can be read, evaluated, and then converted into control signals ...

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Imagination

Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world, and it also plays a key role in the learning process. A basic training for imagination is listening to storytelling (narrative), in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to "evoke worlds."

It is accepted as the innate ability and process of inventing partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world.[citation needed] The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind, percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary language, some psychologists have preferred to describe this process as "imaging" or "imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination. Imagined images are seen with the "mind's eye."

Imagination can also be expressed through stories such as fairy tales or fantasies. Most famous inventions or entertainment products were developed from the inspiration of someone's imagination.

Children often use narratives or pretend play in order to exercise their imagination. When children develop fantasy they play at two levels: first, they use role playing to act out what they have developed with their imagination, and at the second level they play again with their make-believe situation by acting as if what they have developed is an actual reality that already exists in narrative myth.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA