Loss of imagniation

[blazeofglory]

Life without imagnation is unthikable.
Think of momnets when you live with sheer realities and you respond to things that abound around you and you can not go in imagination beyond that tangential point. You will be rooted to ground realites and beyond that your mind can not reach.

And there can be no poets at all. Of course there can be works prose, for prose are more crude, less sublime and has stuff of more of realities and less of imaginations.

Maybe you wiould not have your gods, the garden of Eden, paradise and the rest of celestial things.

The most sufferer will be children fo they will not have the kinds of books they read full of imagination, myth, magic, legend and the like. The recent fad we see everywhere sweeping across thru countries wherever people are so obssessed with Harry Potter will be unimaginable.

Imagine moments you live with things or realities that have to do just a bit more than animals for you can not think of thinks beyond boundaries or lines.

Who will be the one to lose the most?

I think poets and children.

Poets revel in imaginary domains and create pyramids of creative things. Greek mythologies written in verse forms by Homer and the Mahabharat and the rest of the Puranas were in verses.

Children in thier formativ eyears will b ebound to a world of realities only and see things that bore them soon and life will be so unexciting.

Add some ideas about a world witout imagination. or comment.

[PeterL]

What is imagination? It is nothing special, just the ability to extrapolate from the known to something that doesn't appear to exist in the physical universe. Young children do that, because they don't know the limits of the physical universe. Adults do that, because they have to make things happen that haven't happened before. Animals also imagine. They imagine things like there may be some good food over yonder hill.

I think it is silly to ask who would lose the most if imagination, because humans couldn't survive without imagination.

[Vertrauen]

I think the imagination is a unique capacity of the human individual. It is a creative force, and a powerful one at that. There is such a thing as the "deadening" of the human imagination where one becomes so accustomed to reliance on imagery alone (i.e. television) that the process becomes difficult to say the least when one's imaginative powers require exertion without images given passivley to the viewer. Thinking and talking are impossible without the imagination. Even scientists cannot avoid the idioms, metaphors, similies, etc. of figurative thought. The sun "rises," the electron "jumps," etc. etc. The human mind is so constituted as to communicate and convey abstract thought (unknown and unfamiliar concepts) via the colorful and familiar "language" of imagination. Imagination is a faculty of man as important and vital as his rationality, and the two functioning together can produce wonderful things. Were the imagination to be stripped away, humans would lose an integral element of humanity and cease to be human in that state.

[PeterL]

Imagination, planning, and similar mental activities are done by animals other than humans. A few months ago there was an article somewhere about a gorilla that used a tree limb to sound the water depth while fording a stream. That was the first time when a gorilla was seen doing that. Dreaming up the idea that one could feel the bottom of a stream with a piece of wood takes imagination. There is evidence that other animals use imagination, but the evidence isn't clear.

If people, or other animals, don't need to invent new things, ideas, or whatever, then they don't need imagination, so they can let their minds drift in images that are thrown at them.

[Midas]

Some thoughts on IMAGINATION

'The world is but a canvas to the imagination '(Thoreau)

'Loss of imagination,' hardly a very imaginative theme for a thread? Yet, it can have value. Is it not a bit like saying - 'loss of oxygen'. Well, there could be life without oxygen on some other planet, but it would be totally so unlike our life that it would be difficult (impossible?) for us to imagine.

There is no reason, except being low on imagination, to believe that all in the animal kingdom would not possess the attributes of each. The difference being in the development, or lack of development, of these characteristics in each, depending on how a particular life form has adapted to life.

A quick example is that if dogs with their acute sense of smell were able to examine people, they would probably conclude that we lacked a sense of smell. A dog, they say, does not only smell the soup, but can distinguish every ingredient in it.

It was Einstein who held that 'imagination is more important than knowledge'. Why would he say this?

Well, for one, he knew there is absolutely NOTHING that man (and I use this in a general term for people) has brought into being (except creation of another life) that was not the result of imagination. (And I am not sure whether a little creativity coming from imagination is not required for the way we engage in procreation.)

There were many people with the education, and intelligence of Einstein, and Newton, where they were lacking was in their ability to sharply focus their imagination on their pursuit and to visualise it into existence until it became a reality, When a person is able to do this, it creates the persistence necessary to carry on no matter how many failed attempts experienced. I agree there is possibly, sometimes a chance element that intervenes also.

Many people saw steam coming from a kettle, or pot ever since one human thousands of years before had had the imagination to create a fire, and use it to cook food, and boil water, but it took one with a well developed imagination to see how it could be used for 'power' and from this we get the train which opened up travel like never before.

Everything we create has first to be dreamed (imagined} by someone, before the rest of the process can be put into motion. Imagination at some level is important to the thought process, it is necessary for survival. Perhaps if we analyse our thoughts carefully, we find that all thought is imagination (visualisation). The visualisation does not have to be another person's reality. People blind from birth 'visualise' but in terms which relate to them personally.

In animals, its use is confined, or so it would appear, to this particular instinct. Humans moved away from the rest by use, and consequently development of imagination - like muscles, more developed in some than others - probably by developing more sophisticated means to aid our survival, sparked by the primal instinct.

To go back to what could be the real value of this thread, to me it is in making us aware of the importance of imagination.

We are all born with a highly developed imagination. It is needed for us to understand, and evaluate, all the input that is continually assailing our senses in order for us to adapt and grow, and survive. Understanding its importance, therefore, should encourage us to maintain it at high level through use - and one way is to read, especially books that stretch the imagination. If we don't want to lose it, use it.

Without a highly developed imagination would A J Rawlings now be one of the world's self made richest women ? So, a good imagination pays.

Unfortunately, it can be a force for our good, or our bad. If used incorrectly, and without applying logic and reason, we can see things which are not there but which occasion FEAR. When we fear, it can freeze out ability to reason. Fear of failure is one of the worst of fears. This holds us back from creativity and decisiveness. We become the slave of circumstance instead of its master.

'You see things; and you say, "Why"? But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?" '(G.B.Shaw)

(Once again, I do not claim to have the definitive answers in areas where the mind is concerned. All I have is a highly charged imagination and an active thought process)

[XY&Z]

Imagination is exercising our mind. Without it we are not alive. No man can live without daydreaming. That would not be human being then. It would be robot.
Every live person have need to imagine things. Like someone said it before me, kids do it best. They have no limitation on possibilities. And my favorite quote is "Everything you can imagine is real by Pablo Picasso. And this leads me to believe that is true. How come we can imagine something it didn't exist before and we make it real? Sometimes we need material that is out of this world, but then what? Maybe there is another person making that exact material for us. You never know. And you don't.