#5 homo imaginatus

Hidden in Plain Sight: Imagination is our USP, your inner weirdo, the science of qualities, imaginology

homo imaginatus

From a social technological point of view, the one mental capacity that might truly set humanity apart from AI & other species isn’t a skill set or knowledge-base, but more a quality of mind. Imagination is our most valuable and most distinctive attribute. We are human because we imagine. Welcome to the new human era of what renowned science writer Philip Ball considers "homo imaginatus."

imagination is the core of what human brains evolved to do

Here's something ChatGPT can't do (yet): Imagine. It seems that we humans have a "kind of evolutionary bonus that keeps us entertained " and that's our imagination.

In a riveting essay on Aeon, acclaimed science writer Philip Ball takes us on a historical, philosophical, neuroscience-logical journey of understanding—and lack of understanding—the human imagination. He posits that "Imagination is the essence of humankind. It’s what our brains do, and in large part it may be what they are for."

"Imagination might be the very epitome of how our minds work: not as a series of isolated modules, but as an integrated network in which higher-order capacities arise from lower-order ones. Many species have aspects of musicality (such as pitch discrimination or rhythmic entrainment) but only humans have genuine music, so many species have what we might call imaginality. Yet we alone might possess imagination."—Philip Ball, “Homo Imaginatus,” Aeon.

We all possess the potential for imagination, whether through visualization, association, language/writing, rich (interior) world-building or social empathy. Imagination is valuable because it creates a safe space for learning. Neuroscience shows imaginative thoughts correlate with a well-defined pattern of activity in the brain, involving various parts of the cortex and the hippocampus. Known as the default mode network (DMN), it’s also engaged when we remember past events (episodic memory); when we imagine future ones; and when we align with another person’s perspective.

In his book Kinds of Minds (1996), the philosopher Daniel Dennett claims that the mind is a generator of expectations and predictions: it ‘mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future.’ (Explore more of Dennett’s philosophy in an archival interview with ALICE.)

So in this daunting age of AI and machine learning, perhaps we, the wise homo sapiens, need to start leveraging imagination as our USP, for our present, and to imagine the impossible into new possibilities.

SOURCE: Philip Ball, Aeon (we highly recommend the read!)

tap your inner weirdo

Weird people have what's called “cognitive disinhibition,” and there's a science to it.

Most people have what's called a sense of "latent inhibition." Their brain is pretty good at filtering out information that’s not immediately relevant to a particular situation and enables them to focus on a single situation. Latent inhibition is useful (sometimes vital) for a lot of things, but not creativity.

In her study, Shelley Carson, Associate of Psychology Department, Harvard University found that creative people are roughly seven times more likely to have a low level of latent intelligence, and a higher level of cognitive disinhibition (the term she coined) than non-creative people. People who exhibit high levels of cognitive disinhibition generally have multiple, often trivial things playing on their mind all at once.

Carson says that key to creativity is the ability of a person to tune in to everything around them—to let everything they experience, see, hear, smell, and touch mix within their mind until something new and original can be made of it all.

Turns out that people who define themselves as weird tend to be more creative because weird people operate outside the borders of socio-cultural expectations. A recent study which looked at the difference in creativity between American and Chinese doctoral students, found that cultures that advocate for individualism tend to have a more creative population than cultures that advocate for collectivism.

Canva advocates that "as much as group thinking can be harmful to creativity, the ability to seek out other weird individuals is one of the very best ways to produce creative ideas. So get out there and wear your weirdo badge with honor. Besides, why would you want to be normal when it’s the weird people who can change the world?"

At ALICE, we are all proud weirdos... are you?

SOURCE: Canva

the science of qualities

A science of qualities has the objective of exploring and expressing the principles of continuous creativity in natural processes. According to Brian Goodwin (1931-2009), a founder of theoretical biology and the former Professor Emeritus at the Open University And Schumacher College in UK, everything is always coming into being and we need to experience the world as process.

One way to explain the science of qualities is to think of your wellbeing. Goodwin (LINK) explained to ALICE in 2007: "Health or wellbeing is essentially a word that relates to qualities. It’s a quality of feeling that you experience and you know what it’s like to have a sense of wellbeing."

This relates to our way of living, which Goodwin shared in an interview with Daniel C. Wahl, one of his Masters students: "We live our lives in terms of qualities, more than quantities. It’s the qualities that really give the texture and the qualities to our lives and our relationships." Goodwin believed that "things are moving in a way that ...combine the elements of intuition, feeling, sensing, thinking."

But it is the ‘qualities' of continuous creativity that can define our reality, as Goodwin shared with ALICE:

"The way I now experience reality, it’s something that is in constant creation, it’s constantly renewing itself...it’s true of ecological systems, …it’s true in quantum mechanics you’ve got coming into being all the time of elementary particles from the vacuum, the void, and they come and go all the time. Everything is constantly in the process of creation. And that, for me, is reality. So then the question is, how do we come into balance with that continuous creativity of the cosmos? Because balance means not just reflecting this but somehow responding appropriately to whatever the changes are or whatever the creative movements are that are going on around us. We need to be part of that ."—Brian Goodwin, 2007 ALICE interview.  

SOURCE: Daniel Christian Wahl, Resilience.org

imaginology

"We need a new kind of approach to learning that shifts imagination from the periphery to the foundation of all knowledge" states Stephen T Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He posits a profound view of that it is time to initiate Imagination Studies at every level of education, primary school through university.

“Studying the imagination – its creations, its processes (creativity), and its underlying cognitive structures – is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, more importantly, Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason, and tesselate facts and values" writes Asma.

Asma explains that our minds are awash in stories and images. We also view ‘real life’ largely through imaginative constructions that are rarely acknowledged. Imaginative cognitions can happen in parallel with real-time perception or they can run offline before and after real-time perception. This means that humans simultaneously experience a real ‘now’ and an imaginal ‘second universe’ that, phenomenologically, are combined in present experience. Usually imagination makes us more awake to the potentials in lived experience.

Sharing many examples and theories, Asma makes a great argument that imagination needs to be moved from the periphery to the centre. And quite boldly he believes "we need to accept the fundamental trippy weirdness of imagination, the sheer play of it, and not always reduce it to functional adaptation. There must be room for the surreal, the fantastic, the idealistic and even the nonsensical."

SOURCE: Stephen T Asma, Aeon

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