Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming new images and sensations when they are not perceived through sight, hearing, or other senses. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental faculty through which people make sense of the world, and it also plays a key role in the learning process. A basic training for imagination is listening to storytelling (narrative), in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to "evoke worlds". It is a whole cycle of image formation or any sensation which may be described as "hidden" as it takes place without anyone else's knowledge. A person may imagine according to his mood, it may be good or bad depending on the situation. Some people imagine in a state of tension or gloominess in order to calm themselves. It is accepted as the innate ability and process of inventing partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind, percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary language, some psychologists have preferred to describe this process as "imaging" or "imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination. Imagined images are seen with the "mind's eye".
Imagination can also be expressed through stories such as fairy tales or fantasies.
Children often use narratives or pretend play in order to exercise their imagination. When children develop fantasy they play at two levels: first, they use role playing to act out what they have developed with their imagination, and at the second level they play again with their make-believe situation by acting as if what they have developed is an actual reality that already exists in narrative myth.
Read more about Imagination: Description, Psychology of Imagination, Imagination and Memory, Imagination and Perception, Imagination Vs. Belief, Imagination As A Reality
Other articles related to "imagination":
... Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability to form mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses ...
... Active Imagination is a path of cognition that uses the imagination as an organ of understanding ... Disciplines of active imagination are found within various religious and spiritual traditions ...
... up a better balance between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western culture ... Surrealists' emphasize the intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures ... of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" rose directly from French Surrealist thought and practice ...
... Users of hallucinogenic drugs are said to have a heightened imagination ... Imagination, because of having freedom from external limitations, can often become a source of real pleasure and unnecessary suffering ... A person of vivid imagination often suffers acutely from the imagined perils besetting friends, relatives, or even strangers such as celebrities ...
... mimetically the opportunity to include the forms of the work of art in her imagination ... Imagination Wulf’s research shows that mimetic processes are enabled through imagination ... The imagination is a conditio humana ...
Famous quotes containing the word imagination:
“Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)