The Science of Discovering New Possibilities. Dive into the transformative power of Imagination with “Learning to Imagine,” a groundbreaking exploration that challenges preconceived notions and unlocks the creative potential within us all.

Continue reading to discover how “Learning to Imagine” can revolutionize your understanding of creativity and innovation.

Genres

Nonfiction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Educational Theory, Developmental Psychology, Creativity, Innovation, Self-Help, Science Communication, Intellectual Growth

“Learning to Imagine” by Andrew Shtulman delves into the evolution of imagination, debunking the myth that it is solely the domain of childhood. Shtulman presents a compelling argument that imagination, contrary to popular belief, does not wane with age but rather flourishes through education and reflection. The book outlines how young Children start as imitators and, through learning and experience, expand their imaginative capabilities beyond the probable and typical. It emphasizes the role of knowledge in fostering imagination, suggesting that the more we know, the broader our imaginative horizons become.

Review

“Learning to Imagine” is an insightful and thought-provoking read that offers a fresh perspective on the development of imagination. Shtulman’s approach is both scientific and accessible, making complex concepts understandable to a broad audience. The book is well-researched, drawing on various studies across cognitive development, psychology, and education. It serves as an inspiring call to nurture our knowledge and creativity, affirming the importance of continuous learning in unlocking the full potential of our imagination. This work is a valuable resource for educators, psychologists, and anyone interested in the cognitive underpinnings of creativity and innovation.

Recommendation

Cognitive developmental psychologist Andrew Shtulman dispels the myth that children are masters of imagination. He argues that imagination develops through education, practice and thoughtful reflection. It’s a buildable skill more than an innate quality, and certainly one that does not languish with age. Shtulman shows that children tend to imitate more than innovate. His scholarly treatise explains that people of all ages can enhance their imagination and creative abilities by learning from examples and applying principles and models from various fields, such as mathematics, literature and religion.

Take-Aways

• The belief that children are more imaginative than adults is ill-founded.
• Imagination evolved for practical purposes.
• Learning and knowledge provide the building blocks for innovation.
• People think of creativity as a skill and imagination as an innate trait, but both depend on your knowledge base.
• Examples shape what people consider possible – but also inspire incremental innovations.
• Principles enable abstract imagining.
• Models are linked with, but also separate from, the real, which allows for new sorts of learning and, thus, imagining.
• Imagination is a buildable skill.

Summary

The belief that children are more imaginative than adults is ill-founded.

In stories like Peter Pan, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mary Poppins, children are portrayed as open to wonder and magic, while adult characters are not – suggesting that children have a far more powerful capacity for imagination than grownups. However, a closer examination of children’s pretend play reveals that, more often than not, children lean more toward imitation than innovation. Children pretend to cook and clean – mirroring adult activities – and their creations, like forts and block towers, are kid versions of things they see in the real world.

“Forty years of research on how people reason about novel possibilities reveals that the glorification of children’s imagination is misguided.”

When playing games, children adhere to rules and strongly resist the suggestion of deviating from them. They focus on recreating familiar objects and struggle with abstract concepts when making art. Some children create imaginary friends, but they usually resemble real ones, and their imaginary worlds mimic reality.

Imagination evolved for practical purposes.

Adults face similar limitations when it comes to “unstructured” imagination. When asked to imagine an entirely new animal, for example, people often add minor features to known entities rather than create something completely different. This limitation is, in some ways, by design. Imagination evolved for practical purposes, like planning your next steps or making predictions about what you will encounter in a given scenario, not for creating fantastical ideas.

“When we use imagination to contemplate far alternatives – to innovate or fabricate – we’re not tapping into an innate appreciation for the extraordinary; we’re coopting a tool designed to explore the ordinary.”

Because imagination evolved to consider alternatives close to reality rather than far-fetched scenarios, people use it most often to explore the ordinary, not the extraordinary. Setting goals that are too detached from current realities or predicting outcomes that are too divergent from your past experiences and discoveries – or those of others – limits accuracy and usefulness. Contemplation of past and future possibilities forms your understanding of missed opportunities. It helps you navigate toward potential success and away from failure. But considering only expected events may lead you to ignore improbable ones. Thus, adults, like children, may mistakenly dismiss improbable or unconventional events as impossible or remain overly skeptical after considering a novel but potentially game-changing idea.

Children do tend to exhibit greater curiosity and explore their environments more thoroughly than the typical adult. In one study, researchers asked children and adults to test a series of blocks, which may or may not be “zaffs,” with a “zaff detector.” The detector would light up upon the discovery of a zaff. Once they discovered a pattern – such as a black stripe on the blocks that triggered the detector – the adults quit the exercise. Children persisted with it longer and, thus, discovered more forms of zaffs than the adults identified. Children’s tendency to linger and tinker contrasts with adults’ inclination to conclude and move on. While exploration can lead to new knowledge, a stronger sense of curiosity doesn’t prove children are more imaginative than adults. Physical exploration differs from exploring a mental landscape of ideas.

Learning and knowledge provide the building blocks for innovation.

Children can use or even make a hook to retrieve a toy trapped in a hole, but only if they’ve previously seen someone else do it; they don’t naturally think of creating a hook. Adults also struggle to generate new ideas when solving problems, but they have an important advantage over children: a more extensive knowledge base. Knowledge defines the boundaries of your imagination, often keeping you within known realms but sometimes pointing to new ones. If you know what’s true or how something currently functions, you have a starting point for thinking of “counterfactuals” – alternate ways of accomplishing tasks or using available materials.

Psychologists Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander compare imagination and knowledge to a train and its tracks. Learning from others and making your own discoveries – gaining knowledge – transports your imagination to new realms. The challenge lies in integrating new insights within your existing knowledge.

“Appreciating a groundbreaking idea – example, principle or model – takes time and effort, as does connecting that idea to what we already know. These activities do not strike us as ‘imaginative’ because we think of imagination as a free resource, a trait we are born with, rather than a skill we must develop.”

One of the primary ways that people expand their knowledge and, therefore, their imaginations is by “examples”: learning what others have seen or discovered or experiencing what they have invented – and then applying that in some way to their lives or to the problems they’re trying to solve. Some individuals excel more than others at integrating new possibilities into their understanding. The more familiar you become with a subject area, the easier it becomes to add new ideas. Limited exploration often leads to outright rejection of new concepts.

People also expand their understanding of what’s possible by mastering new abstract “principles” – mathematical, scientific and ethical. For instance, upon learning that dolphins are mammals, your view of marine life might change, but grasping the principle of common descent reshapes your understanding of all life forms. Examples, like seeing someone create a hook to retrieve a fallen toy, open new but specific idea pathways; principles equip you with tools to extend those paths independently.

“Models” – another method for expanding imagination – are even more potent than examples or principles. A model simulates something in the real world, but it allows you to alter critical features of that object and then observe to discover how a given change affects its functioning. Simulations help you uncover the unknown consequences of your beliefs and let you safely explore alternatives to the status quo.

People think of creativity as a skill and imagination as an innate trait, but both depend on your knowledge base.

Studies of creativity tend to frame it as a competence an individual can grow with time and effort. These same studies often use some form of the Unusual Uses Test, whereby study participants are asked to brainstorm as many uses as possible for an everyday object. However, the test is flawed as a gauge of innovation. After all, discovering an unusual use for an object does not equate to designing a practical solution to a problem, and like any other circumstance in which a person is asked to draw on their current knowledge base – rather than add to it and then innovate – test subjects are unlikely to come up with valuable creative possibilities.

“Prior knowledge might constrain the search for novel possibilities, but the search itself requires knowing where to begin.”

Creativity emerges from expanded imagination, which occurs when you grow your knowledge. The Beatles didn’t become a groundbreaking music group in and of themselves. They spent years exploring others’ musical discoveries before generating anything innovative themselves. Bear in mind that if you equate creativity with originality, you will find few acts of creativity that qualify. Only rarely does anyone contribute something original to collective human knowledge – creating breakthrough technologies or founding new cultural or artistic forms. If, however, you define creativity as what occurs when people add to their understanding – via examples, principles or models – and thus begin playing with new concepts, then most humans frequently exhibit creativity.

Examples shape what people consider possible – but also inspire incremental innovations.

A child’s belief in fantasy figures like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy is not sparked in the imagination; parents, teachers and society inform it. When such complicity is absent, children are highly skeptical of unrealistic scenarios, such as the possibility of owning a pet lion. Indeed, when questioned, most children deem even events that are merely improbable to be impossible. Adults, by contrast, can generally conceive of circumstances – presuming that they don’t violate known principles – under which the improbable could occur – imagining how, for example, an everyday person might come to own and care for a lion.

If presented with sufficient evidence – directly observable or explained – to accept the possible reality of something improbable – be it an idea, technology or phenomenon – people’s imaginations ignite. They begin to “tinker” with the idea or thing, and, over time, innovations evolve. The modern sewing needle, for example, evolved into its current form over hundreds of years.

Principles enable abstract imagining.

Children initially rely on simple forms of causation when thinking about the natural world. They later learn more complex principles like emergence – the many elements that lead to and cause a thunderstorm, for example. After learning broader principles of causation, people can apply them to various ideas. Knowledge of the effects of germs, for example, can help learners overcome the initially alluring notion that going out in the cold underdressed causes a cold. With practice, learners can also apply principles through analogies to expand their imaginations. Ernest Rutherford, for example, discovered “atomic orbitals” by contemplating the principles of the solar system.

“Principles may connote monotony and rigidity, but they actually inspire novelty and creativity. A principled imagination is a productive imagination.”

In mathematics, children start with counting, basic estimation and pattern matching, eventually mastering concepts that require imagination, like fractions and symmetry. At first, children deny even the possibility of fractions. As they experience concrete and tangible evidence – containers half full or three-quarters full, for example – they begin grasping abstract ideas such as simple fractions and percentages.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the realms of ethics and morality. Children initially believe that something that results in a wrong should be punishable, even if it happened by accident, and that if a person intended harm to another but failed, no wrong was committed. Neither can children separate fairness from equity. For example, if three friends have six crates to stand on to reach apples on a tree branch, even if they don’t need two crates to reach the apples, they won’t consider giving their shorter friend more crates. Only with time and guidance do children learn to take other’s perspectives and assess other people’s mental states. Again, this act of imagination follows a process of learning and acquiring knowledge.

Once they have been shown how to do a thing, children assume a hard line. They cling to the process they know, even when shown a better process without flaws or unnecessary steps. To overcome their rigidity, children need guidance in comparing observations and using their imaginations to abstract general principles. For adults and children, imagining new processes and behaviors outside social norms takes effort and contemplation. Norms and processes do evolve, however. For example, many people today accept same-sex marriage (a new moral norm) but reject underage marriage (an old moral norm).

Models are linked with, but also separate from, the real, which allows for new sorts of learning and, thus, imagining.

Children often reject pretend scenarios that defy real-world norms. They prefer play that enhances their understanding of real-world objects and situations. Pretend play is a form of modeling. It requires imagination, but it doesn’t demand innovation. Children can learn from play, but they learn best when instruction precedes play and when play is guided rather than self-directed.

“Children spend much less time pretending than is commonly believed, and when they do engage in pretense, it is typically for the purpose of rehearsing real-world activities, particularly the work of adults.”

Fiction is another kind of model that can help both children and adults to expand their imaginations. Children tend to prefer nonfiction or realistic fiction to fantasy. When encountering magic in stories, they expect it to follow real-world causal principles. Even the Harry Potter and Narnia series, though rich in fantasy, ground their stories in the recognizable – characters live in houses, have parents and deal with problems that have some basis in the real world. Fiction helps children learn about the consequences of choices and teaches “social reasoning” – understanding and empathizing with others’ feelings and points of view. And it gives people, in general, a chance to learn what it means to challenge norms or go beyond their comfort zones without needing to suffer any real-world fallout.

In the realm of religion, children also tend to shy away from the fantastical. They typically see God as a human figure who eats, sleeps, burps and sneezes. They don’t believe that God can perform impossible feats, like turn a dog into a cow. To fully engage with abstract religious concepts, such as an omnipresent spirit, requires people to stretch their sense of possibility.

Imagination is a buildable skill.

Learning new concepts and applying them in the world in ways that push the boundaries of what you consider possible is hard work. You must cultivate this skill if you want to use it well. Imagination, conceptualized as a skill rather than a trait, dispels several myths – for example, that ignorance fuels imagination or that structured learning causes children to lose their inherent brilliance. Yet research shows unguided learning often yields poor results, with students discovering little beyond their preexisting knowledge or misconceptions.

“Education can be a slog, and learning can be uninspired, but there is no substitute for knowledge when it comes to expanding imagination.”

While education might routinize behavior and teach known solutions, that doesn’t mean it impedes innovation. By expanding your knowledge, education expands your imagination. Realizing novel ideas demands that you first acquire foundational knowledge. People learn best from instruction combined with subsequent free exploration – the instruction sparks curiosity, which leads to productive imagining and creation.

About the Author

Andrew Shtulman is a cognitive developmental psychologist renowned for his research on conceptual development and change, especially in science education.

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