Why We Need the Imagination to Help Us With Emotional Uncertainty
Among the rarified capacities of the human species, none has seemed of greater consequence to creativity and higher level mental functioning than the imagination. But in the world of psychology, as in philosophy, art, and literary studies, there has been little consensus about what this grab bag of affective and cognitive processes boils down to at bottom. How do we find a definition of the imagination sufficiently broad to take account of what happens when we dream or create make believe scenarios, as well as what happens when we problem solve? Is there a connection between the non cognitive features of imagination, such as when we feel someone else's pain, mirror their reaction, or adjust an emotional state to enter into a congruent emotional state, and specific cognitive abilities, such as deliberating, projecting images, combining ideas, formulating non actual representations, and the like? It takes an intrepid mind to wade through the debates and formulate an account that can begin to clarify the mess. Enter Radu Bogdan, who teaches philosophy and cognitive science at Tulane University, proposing a fresh methodology. He argues that we should look to the underlying competence that makes imagination possible by examining the selection pressures at work at each stage of human mental development. By observing the sequence of steps that lead toward the imagination, putting them in the right order, and analyzing what function they serve discretely and consecutively in adapting to the cultural and then social problems of childhood, we can explain why we have evolved an imagination and how it works. Aligning himself with cognitive scientists, Bogdan reaffirms the proposition that we cannot learn what imagination is simply by examining its performance outputs (for example the images, reenacted experiences, and fantasies that come to mind) just as " the competence for vision cannot be reconstructed from its outputs the conscious visual images or their contents " (56 57) Rather than resorting to traditional approaches that start from intuition, introspection, or conceptual examination, which are hopelessly decontextualized from our evolutionary origin,