If it were the case that imagination could initiate neural growth
(learning) to the same degree as experience then the question arises: how could
we ever distinguish between cognitive development drawn from experience and that
drawn from entertaining but infeasible flights of fancy? If there were no
difference between the ways we learn from experience and the ways we learn from
imagination then how could our cognitive architecture ensure that imagination
didn’t simply fill our minds with a deluge of impractical nonsense? To set too
much store by the inventions and indulgences of the imagination would surely
risk laying down all kinds of meaningless neural networks and worse still,
this would probably happen without the slightest conscious awareness. But how
is this not the case and how do our minds avoid such self-deception?
It might be suggested that there must be some kind of limiting mechanism
or filter at work that inhibits neural development on the basis of imaginative
thought, but this need not be the case. There need be no such mechanism because
- as Sartre, Ryle and others have surmised - imagination is the exercise of already formed knowledge – of prior memories,
ideas and beliefs. Just as perceptual experience leaves its most indelible imprint
when it is most repeated, most profound or most surprising, so too, we might suppose,
does imagination. But unlike perception,
which frequently presents us with the surprising and the unpredictable, our thoughts
and imaginings are rarely truly unexpected. If imagination consists of the
interplay of what we already know, then the only means by which we might
encounter the unexpected – and from which we might learn – is through the previously
untested recombination of this knowledge and the careful pursuit and resolution
of incompatible ideas and beliefs. As it happens, we are not especially skilled
at this - as research into Cognitive Dissonance clearly shows.
Skills are acquired either
by genetic inheritance or by active engagement with the world and never simply
by imagining. So for example, it is not possible to become capable of drawing
something by the agency of imagination alone because a capability is not
something that imagination can ever bestow or confer. Imagination is the means
by which we sharpen our skills of representation
but it is not the means by which we acquire such skills – or skills of any
description. Indeed, imagination would be better understood as being nothing
other than the means by which we
contemplate, anticipate and refine our skills of representation.
It is because
representation is so fundamental to learning that imagination plays such a
vital role in the improvement of skills. To acquire a skill is to be able
to demonstrate it - it is to be capable of representing it to others. And these
capabilities of demonstration and mimicry - of teaching and learning - have
been of inestimable use to us as a species. It might be argued that to carry
out a learned action is not necessarily to represent it. This is true. However,
to carry out an action in the presence of onlookers is for it to be available
in representational terms; as the means by which an action is ‘performed’ and
as the procedure by which something might be accomplished.
To watch an action is to
become capable of representing it. But, crucially, it is not necessarily to be
able to represent it either faithfully or fully. Why else would we ever ask:
"Can I have a go?" if the capacity to represent something (to have
committed it to mind so to speak) was sufficient in and of itself?
Despite the fact that
imagination cannot enable skills it can, and frequently does, allow us to
improve them. It has long been known that the use of visualisation techniques
in sports training can bring about measurable improvements in performance. To
imagine how you could better swing a tennis racket is to imagine how you would
represent the motion as a performative act. It is to deliberately engage many
of the same cognitive structures as would be exercised if you were to actually perform
the action. And, as many studies have shown, repeatedly exercise of these cognitive structures through visualisation causes them to become increasingly
consolidated and increasingly stable.
In 2011 the results of a
study were published evaluating the benefits of a variety of visualisation techniques
for the rehabilitation of stroke patients. The study found “No evidence of the
benefit of mental practice with motor imagery in stroke.” In other words, no
matter how hard or regularly the stroke patients tried to imagine improvement
in their impaired motor skills they were unable to bring about any measureable improvement.
On the other hand, when visualisation techniques were combined with physical
therapy, then measurable improvements did occur and visualisation helped
significantly. This research lends strong support to the idea that imagination is
not an enabler of capacities but is instead an important means for reinforcing
and focussing skills that have already been acquired.
Imagination is an
enormously important capacity – not just for capabilities that we think of as
being mental, like thinking for instance - but also for our abilities to act
deliberately and skilfully in the world. In fact it might be said that
imagination is the very precondition of our being able to act in such skilful ways.
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