In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman attempts to explain how and why this is. It is a wide-ranging survey too wide, offering a mass of fascinating information about creativity, mental imagery and child development, bloated by superfluous discourses on the origins of life, the Covid pandemic and climate crisis.
But in this Zeman simply reflects the state of play: brain science tells us a great deal about the imagination but can only ever take us so far.
Imagination seems clearly linked to creativity, empathy and the ability to conjure up mental images, yet some highly creative people, such as Pixar's founder Ed Catmull, are aphantasic, innately unable to visualise anything in the mind's eye.
Perception and imagination occupy more common ground than we tend to suppose, Zeman writes. We construct our perceived world from incomplete information, interpreted via inner representations of our environment.
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