This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Jim Davies’ recent book:  Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power (Pegasus Books 2019).  Today we begin with an introduction from Jim.  Commentaries and replies will appear on Wednesday and Thursday.

You Can Improve Your Imagination. But Probably Not Your Imagery.

It’s easy to think of visual imagination as being nothing more than mental imagery, but we have what we might call “conceptual imagination” as well, that doesn’t really have much to do with the senses. Imagine a triangle. Now add one side to make a square. Now add so many sides that there are 2001 of them. The picture of it in your mind’s eye would (or should) look just like a circle, because the details are too fine to make out with the resolution of your mental imagery  (Dennett 2013, 290). So how is imagining a 2001-side polygon different from imagining a circle? Because you know that it’s a polygon, not a circle. Now change the polygon so that it has one fewer sides (2000 sides). It doesn’t look any different in the image! Both a 2000-sided polygon and a 2001-sided polygon will look just like circles in your mental imagery. The difference is only in your belief about the polygon. These beliefs are part of your imagination, too, even if they don’t particularly look like anything. This is one example of how you can have a non-sensory imagining.

There are lots of states of the world that don’t particularly look like anything: owning a bike, having lots of money in your bank account, being interested in something, having a goal to think more positively, wanting to eat peanut butter, being part of the in-group at work, and so on. Often, our imaginings are a combination of mental imagery (sensory imagining) and conceptual imagining.

If you’re like most people, when I ask you how many windows were in your childhood home, you will do a mental walkthrough of the house, counting the windows as you go. But if I ask you whether the roof of a house is above the basement of a house, you can probably do that without making a mental picture. You might make a picture, but you probably don’t need to. 

People differ a lot in how well they can make mental images. Some people have very vivid imagery, and others seem to have none at all. Although most people can get songs stuck in their heads, and see things in their dreams, there are some people, called “aphantasics,” who don’t ever have those experiences (Zeman, 2016; see also here). But can people make their imagery even better? Considering that practice and training seem to make people better at just about everything in this world, we would expect that practicing doing mental imagery might make your images more vivid or detailed.

There are some tantalizing suggestions that we can improve our imagery’s vividness. One is that some kinds of imaginary companions can be generated through learning and effort in the community of people who create tulpas (Veissière, 2016). The idea is that a person, called a host or a tulpamancer, will use mental exercises to eventually generate a being with whom the host can interact in their imagination. It actually got popular in the West by adult fans of the My Little Pony franchise (known as “bronies”), who wanted to create pony tulpas to interact with. They can be thought of as deliberately created, semi-permanent, nonpathological hallucinations. They are thought to have their own sentience, separate from the host’s. Some tulpamancers actually believe that their tulpas are supernatural in some way, but many believe it’s just a psychological construct.

Longer-term imagination practice seems to also be able to create hallucinations. Tanya Luhrmann, in her anthropological study of American evangelical Christians, found that many used practices of guided imagery that involved a focus on sensory detail (2004). With practice, your imaginings can get more vivid, and you get more absorbed in them. Eventually, a person can hallucinate images of gods or other scenes of spiritual importance—even Dr. Luhrmann did. The religious interpretation is that you are practicing to have spiritually attuned consciousness. An alternative explanation is that through practice of vivid imagination, hallucinations of emotionally meaningful imagery results. Resembling what can sometimes happen with drug-induced hallucinations, a single spiritual experience can cause, or strongly reinforce, a lifetime of faith.

Similar effects have been found in Amazonian shamans, who will sometimes describe relationships with hallucinated jaguars. Generally, these shamans are more practiced and experienced. Over time, their hallucinations become more precise, multisensory, and can even occur on demand.

Why does this work? Imagining something makes you better at detecting it in the world—what we might call priming, or an imagery gain. For example, if you imagine a tone, you are more likely to hear that tone in the real world. Suppose there is a tone that is so quiet that you can barely hear it (Aleman, & Vercammen, 2013). People who imagine the tone will be better at hearing it than those who don’t. This gain, though, can also result in hallucination, for the same reasons that using a camera in low-light conditions often results in little blips and artifacts (we might think of these as low-level camera hallucinations). These religious traditions, through the use of guided imagery, might be priming the perceptual system so much, turning up the “gain,” that people think they’re actually seeing what they imagine.  Turning up the gain in this way probably makes people expect culturally appropriate things: the Amazonian shaman hallucinates a jaguar, a rural African might hallucinate about ancestors, and a Christian might hallucinate the Virgin Mary. 

But there’s actually very little in terms of well-done experimental evidence. Some studies that claim to show an increase in vividness do not look at cross-domain changes. For example, they might have people imagining different combinations of cubes, and then test them on how well they can imagine combinations of cubes (Ben-Chaim, Lappan, & Houang, 1988). But can imagining different combinations of cubes make you better at imagining architecture? Or three-dimensional configurations in geology (Titus & Horsman, 2009)? Studies that look at cross domain imagery or even rarer.

There are good studies that failed to find evidence of training effects. One rigorous study (Rademaker & Pearson, 2012) took advantage of a phenomenon known as binocular rivalry (Keogh & Pearson, 2011). In binocular rivalry, when one eye is seeing one colour, and another seeing another, people will often experience only one of those colours. Which one depends, in part, on which one of your eyes is dominant. The researchers had people practice vividly imagine colours, and then brought them back and tried to see if imagining colours interfered more with binocular rivalry than it used to. They found no effects.

This is strange, because people can get better at almost anything with practice. Why not imagery?

It might be that none of these studies had people training for long enough. It could be that the lower-level visual areas that make imagery vivid or not vivid are more “hard-wired” than the higher-level imagination abilities, and we can’t change them. But this leads to the hopeful possibility that the higher-level parts of imagination—conceptual imagination, and the ability to design the thing that would be turned into an image, can be improved with practice. And this is where imagination starts to bleed into our conceptions of creativity.

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Parts of this article are adapted from Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power by Jim Davies. 

References

Aleman, A. & Vercammen, A. (2013). The “bottom-up” and “top-down” components of the hallucinatory phenomenon. In R. Jardri, A. Cachia, P. Thomas, & D. Pins (Eds.) The neuroscience of hallucinations. (pp. 107--121). New York, NY: Springer. Page 117.

Ben-Chaim, D., Lappan, G., & Houang, R. T. (1988). The effect of instruction on spatial visualization skills of middle school boys and girls. American Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 51-71.

Dennett, D.C. (2013). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. New York: WW Norton. 

Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. (2011). Mental imagery and visual working memory. PloS one, 6(12), e29221.

Luhrmann, T. M. (2004). Metakinesis: How God becomes intimate in contemporary US Christianity. American Anthropologist, 106(3), 518-528.

Veissière, S. (2016) Varieties of tulpa experiences: The hypnotic nature of human sociality, personhood, and interphenomenality. In A. Raz and M. (Eds). Hypnosis and meditation: Towards an integrative science of conscious planes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pp. 55—76. 

Rademaker, R. L., & Pearson, J. (2012). Training visual imagery: Improvements of metacognition, but not imagery strength. Mental Imagery, 23.

Titus, S. & Horsman, E. (2009) Characterizing and improving spatial visualization skills. Journal of Geoscience Education, 57(4), 242-254. 

Zeman, A. (2016). Aphantasia: 10,000 people make contact over visual imagery. The Exeter Blog. Post of November 8; retrieved May 2, 2017 from https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/exeterblog/blog/2016/11/08/aphantasia-10000-people-make-contact-over-visual-imagery/