The Nature of Imagination
by Tim Brunson, PhD
Few words in the English language garner the level of mystic, misunderstanding, and misuse as the word imagination. Used by bards, song writers, and self-help gurus to represent an expansion of the mind beyond the limits created by perception and programming, it is bantered around both as a complement and criticism. While Albert Einstein proclaimed that it is more important than knowledge, still scientists – to include those of a medical ilk – continue to cast suspicion on the value of a vivid imagination. Yet, as it is in many ways the centerpiece of the clinical hypnotherapy, it deserves a serious explanation and exploration.
All animals are capable of misperceiving a threat. However, it is the primate who seems to be the most capable of using the frontal lobes' ability to anticipate and simulate. This faculty of imagining helps us form mental visual, auditory, and kinesthetic illusions that are the direct creation of our abilities to convert perceptions into understanding. Our greatly enhanced capability to create an imagined "reality" merely by our thoughts is indeed a unique human characteristic.
