Phantasia

I read a fascinating essay about the role of imagination in expanding human experience and how actors are a conduit for the audience to travel through the art they are witnessing.

That's loosely the inspiration for this post, although you will find it to be slightly different.

Plato viewed the power of imagination, or phantasia, as a distraction from reality. (Plato seems strange).

Aristotle, though, placed it front and centre in the human process of learning, on par with perception and the ability to think. He equated this to a sixth sense that is slightly different to our other sensory experiences.

Contemporary science argues that, without imagination, it will be difficult to build mental models of our environment and develop associative memory.

Thousands of years of evolution have conditioned us to reduce our external environment to something that is comprehensible to our minds, and phantasia plays a significant role in helping us achieve that.

It also expands our perception of reality.

What tethers imagination to our lived experience is this ability to lean into the environment and make sense of what is around us.

This brings me to something fascinating.

Affordances of the environment exist whether or not they are perceived. Which means it takes imagination to take advantage of them.

-- It takes creativity to open a wine bottle with a shoe

-- A footballer might have the skill to execute a Hollywood pass, but might lack the vision (which is a constant lament I have about Hendo)

-- A pioneering founder has a contrarian take that is the love-child of cognition and imagination

Being present enough in our realities is half the work done. Human imagination will do the rest.