Imagination
Drawing from actual perceptions, imagination employs intricate conditional processes that engage both semantic and episodic memory to generate new or refined ideas.
The use of the word "imagination" in English can be traced back to the mid-14th century, referring to a faculty of the mind that forms and manipulates images.
[14] The psychological view of imagination relates this concept to a cognate term, "mental imagery," which denotes the process of reviving in the mind recollections of objects previously given in sense perception.
Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary language, some psychologists prefer to describe this process as "imaging" or "imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination.
[15] In clinical settings, clinicians nowadays increasingly make use of visual imagery for psychological treatment of anxiety disorders, depression, schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease.
[23] This association, they suggested, lies in the capacity of imagination for image-making and image-forming, which results in a sense of "visualizing" with "the inner eye.
[23][29] Although not attributed the capacity for creations, imagination was thought to combine images received from memory or perception in creative ways, allowing for the invention of novel concepts or expressions.
"[30] In medieval artistic works, imagination served the role of combining images of perceivable things to portray legendary, mysterious, or extraordinary creatures.
[31] This can be seen in the depiction of a Mongolian in the Grandes Chroniques de France(1241), as well as in the portrayal of angels, demons, hell, and the apocalypse in Christian religious paintings.
The Renaissance saw the revival of classical texts and the celebration for men's dignity, yet scholars of the time did not significantly contribute to the conceptual understanding of "imagination.
"[29][33][34] This type of wit was thought to be typically found in individuals for whom imagination was the most prominent component of their "ingenium" (Spanish: ingenio; term meaning close to "intellect").
[17] René Descartes, in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), interpreted imagination as a faculty actively focusing on bodies (corporeal entities) while being passively dependent on stimuli from different senses.
[43] Huarte extended this idea, linking imagination to any disciplines that necessitates "figures, correspondence, harmony, and proportion," such as medical practice and the art of warfare.
[49] In Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (French: Discours Préliminaire des Éditeurs), d'Alembert referred to imagination as the creative force for Fine Arts.
[51][53] The Kantian idea prepared the way for Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics to transform the philosophical understanding of it into an authentic creative force, associated with genius, inventive activity, and freedom.
[64][65] In Zhuang Zi's Taoism, imagination is perceived as a complex mental activity that is championed as a vital form of cognition.
[66] Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology shows that remembering and imagining activate the identical parts of the brain.
The simplest form of imagination, REM-sleep dreaming, evolved in mammals with acquisition of REM sleep 140 million years ago.
The most advanced mechanism of imagination, prefrontal synthesis, was likely acquired by humans around 70,000 years ago and resulted in behavioral modernity.
[79] The philosopher Mark Johnson described it as "[an ability to imaginatively discern various possibilities for acting in a given situation and to envision the potential help and harm that are likely to result from a given action.
"[80] In one proposed example, Hitler's assassin Claus von Stauffenberg was said to have decided to dare to overthrow the Nazi regime as a result (among other factors) of a process of "moral imagination."
His willingness to kill Hitler was less due to his compassion for his comrades, his family, or friends living at that time, but from thinking about the potential problems of later generations and people he did not know.
The term also refers to the capability of machines or programs to simulate human activities, including creativity, vision, digital art, humour, and satire.
Practitioners are also exploring topics such as artificial visual memory, modeling and filtering content based on human emotions, and interactive search.
