In Our Time - Imagination

Episode Date: November 28, 2002

Melvyn Bragg investigates the creatives forces of the imagination. Immanuel Kant said, "Imagination is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we should have no knowledge whatever but of which we are scarcely even conscious". Imagination has been the companion of artists, scientists, leaders and visionaries but what exactly is it? When did human beings first develop an imagination and why? How does it relate to creativity and what evolutionary function does creativity have? And is it possible to know whether our brains’ capacity for imagination is still evolving? With Dr Susan Stuart, Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Glasgow; Steven Mithen, Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading; Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of London and author of Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Kant said, Imagination is a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatever,

but of which we're scarcely even conscious. imagination has been most obviously the companion of artists scientists leaders and visionaries but what exactly is it and why do all of us possess it? When did human beings first develop an imagination and why? How does it relate to creativity and what evolutionary function does creativity have? And is it possible to know whether our brain's capacity for imagination is still evolving? With me to discuss this is Dr Susan Stewart, lecture in philosophy of mind at the University of Glasgow,

Stephen Meython, Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading, and Samozaki, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of London, and author of Inner Vision and Exploration of Art and the Brain. Susan Stewart, what do we mean by imagination in everyday life? I think there are a number of possible definitions of what imagination might be. There are two very clear ones that Kant gives us. The first is bringing to mind something which is not wholly present. So being able to imagine, for example, my cat lying asleep on the couch at home, a cat that is clearly not in this studio.

And the other definition, which is a much more complex definition, is putting together the sensory experiences I have, perhaps with some application of the understanding, to synthesize or conjoin my thoughts, to create complex thoughts, which I can then put into propositional terms. So those are two definitions that Kant offers us. The second, much more complex, leading to knowledge and perhaps our beliefs. I want to just stop that. Mundane, we can call it, the idea of imagination. You can imagine your cat back at home asleep, if the cat is asleep and so and so forth.

Everybody gets that. Let's just try to unwrap the second one a bit more. Okay, okay. I mean, could you give us an example on the way to that? Yes. For example, I am having a flood. of sensory experience now, what William James calls a bombardment of stimuli.

And in that bombardment of stimuli, I am picking out certain sorts of stimuli, so I'm selecting things which are important and putting to one side things which don't really appear to be of great importance at present. This bombardment of stimuli

is really a flood of sense data, and in that flood of sense data I apply concepts to that flood of sense data. So when you say sense data, you're seeing, you're hearing, you're smelling, and so on, so, strictly the five senses sense data. Strictly the five senses sense data.

But this sense data is organized and unified cancers by applying concepts from my understanding. I got a bit confused between understanding and imagination, though. Okay. Well, the understanding is a complex of concepts which allows me to order things temporarily, we'll say. So I can say that this is an experience which is current and there are previous experiences, which I'm able to bring to mind, but which are not present.

So we'll say for the moment, just to make things a little simpler, that the understanding is this thing which allows us to order our experiences temporarily. Right. And the imagination is the thing which applies, in a sense, unifies, draws together those sensations and creates thoughts. What do you think is the evolutionary function of imagination? That's an enormous question. There are many, many evolutionary functions for imagination.

I suppose that the very... Well, give us two or three, though. The initial one would be enabling us to solve problems, being able to imagine the possible consequences of our actions, being able to imagine the moral consequences of our actions, how we affect others and how we might affect ourselves. So being able to judge whether an action is a good action or a bad action. There's also being able to deceive.

and being able to deceive, you have to be able to imagine what might be going on in somebody else's head. And that's a very complex use of the imagination. It's having a theory of somebody else's mind and being able to tell in some sense whether what you believe they're thinking is different from what you're thinking. And these are evolutionary aids, if I can use it.

I would think so, very strongly, so. Stephen Mytham, have human being, have we always been endowed with imagination? Did it arrive at some time? Do you have evidence for? that? I think if we look at the span of human evolution that we can take back to say five or six million years ago when we shared an ancestor with the Great Apis today, all of those human ancestors, hominids as we refer to them, must have had the type of imagination

that Susan's been talking about. All of them would have had to think about different... Did you say six million years ago? Yeah, six million. Yeah. All of them would have had to have different, would have had to think about different courses of action that they could take and the consequences of those, particularly living in a sort of complex social milieu. You know, if I behave like so-and-so to somebody, how are they going to respond and how will that affect by relationship with somebody else? So that type of imagination, yeah, it's got to be there, not only in human evolution, but I think of many large, especially socially living animals.

But I think the way we've spoken about imagination so far is a little bit narrow of how we normally think about it, because we can think about imagination of worlds that can't possibly exist, that don't exist. like the worlds that involve supernatural beings, or worlds like, say, the structure of atoms or the structure of the cosmos that we can't directly perceive. So imagination about those sorts of entities, I think, are much more restricted in evolutionary time.

And it's only with the emergence of our species, monhumans, at about 130,000, 150,000 years ago, that we start seeing evidence in the archaeological record that suggests we've got this more, creative or fantastical imagination present rather than the mundane, I don't mean to reduce it in that sense, but mundane adaptive value imagination

that we've been talking about so far. What's that evidence, so we're saying about 130, 150,000 years ago, you're beginning to see traces of the, or evidence of the sort of intelligent imagination that we are talking about and that people generally accept as the meaning of that phrase. So what's the evidence? Well, in simple terms, we have the first evidence for art at that time.

It's not... 130,000 years ago. Yeah, well, it's evidence in terms of pieces of red ochre mainly. People are using pigment. Now, we don't at that time have paintings and drawings, etc. We don't find those present until about 35,000 years ago. But I think many archaeologists now suspect that's an issue of preservation and cultural circumstances why they don't know to emerge.

When the first art does emerge at about 35,000 years ago, as in the cave paintings of South West France, we have remarkable images. some of which are of beings that cannot exist in the real world. They are images which are half animals and half people. So here we have people using their minds. They're creating thoughts, but entities that they're never seen, they will never see.

It's an animal that lives in the imagination alone. In my mind, the leap forward is using your imagination in a way to come up with ideas about things that cannot exist in the real world. Is that to do with a bigger brain or to do with the social circumstances? What's the reason for this? There might be two reasons, right, isn't there? We might say there's a selective value and be able to imagine those other worlds per se.

I suspect that's not the right answer. I suspect the right answer is that it's a spin-off of another evolved capacity, and I suspect that's language. You know, some of these really highly imaginative thoughts, I think it's very difficult to think they've got any adaptive value at all. I mean, if you believe that there's a supreme being

that can intervene in the world in some sense, So all you need to do is pray or even live a life of celibacy or even sacrifice. These aren't difficult to make good Darwinian arguments as to why those capacities could have evolved. But if they're riding... So why did language evolve? Well, language is, I think, I don't say clearly,

evidently of tremendous adaptive value, being able to communicate one's thoughts better, understand what somebody else is communicating more effectively. And I suspect that once we have language, that has a consequence on the way we think, what we can do with our brains, and we can begin combining ideas in ways that we can never do before. Samayak, do you think that the actual brain itself at the time that Stephen Meissen was talking about,

do you think it changed the way it functioned from compartmentalism to what Stephen has called, he calls it cognitive fluidity, the one compartment moving into another compartment, and two sets of taking on the world interchanging, and by that interchange, creating a far greater number of possibilities. Well, I don't think it changed the way it functions. I think it just developed and made it much more complex and interesting. I would like to define creativity and imagination,

which are almost synonymous, as the capacity to see new relations, which had not been seen before. And that, in a sense, depends upon a greater connectivity in the brain. There are, I mean, if you take the master of the verbal imagination in Shakespeare, let's take one example, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Now, this is a very imaginative turn of phrase, slings and arrows of a warrior, and then you suddenly turn to outrageous fortune. It requires, of course, it's heavily dependent upon memory, but it requires connections which are between the different areas of the brain, which are perhaps not there in every. one. I would like to suggest that imagination and creativity being the capacity to see new relations and new insights is dependent upon a richer connectivity in the brain, but one which so far has

eluded scientific investigation. I think it's not these major bundles that connect areas, but richer connections within, small connections within areas. I think that creativity and imagination are offshoot of one of the main functions of the brain, which is to acquire knowledge. And the capacity to see new relationships is a royal route to acquiring new knowledge. I know both of you, Susan, you want to get in, and Stephen, you have been raising eyebrows, right, left and center, but just to say, can we nail, can any of you just nail, for the purposes of this discussion, what might have happened between 150 and 50,000 years ago

I know it's a big question but that's what you're here to talk about I mean what might have happened to make the whole game completely different I mean I'd very much agree it's an issue of connectivity it's some potential arises in the brain whereby previous domains of thought or areas of thought

which had once been quite isolated with each other How do we know they'd been quite isolated? Well we can look at if we look at say some of our immediate ancestors like Homer Hodlbaegenses or even close relatives like Neanderthals. We can see in separate domains of their lives like, say, in toolmaking or hunting and gathering

or in their social worlds, they seem as intelligent as creative as imaginative as us today within those separate domains. They make brilliant tools and it's desperately difficult to live in those ice age environments. But what they don't seem to be able to do is draw that knowledge and ways of thought together in any sense. So like the hunting weapons aren't designed,

and a really effective way to be specially geared for one sort of prey, or they don't use material culture as beads or decoration to communicate in the social domain. Now, with modern humans, we can see that they're mixing up ways of thinking their knowledge in those separate domains. So I think it isn't an issue of connectivity without doubt. What I'd question is whether that is always of adaptive value, because I think, you know, coming up with ideas,

the one I had earlier about supernatural beings and all I need to do is pray to this being and my life will be fine. I don't think that's particularly adaptively value. May I come back to two points, two very separate points. The first is Samu's point. I would like to agree entirely with what he says about creativity and imagination. In fact, when you come to Adam Smith,

he in a piece of work on astronomy he says that the philosopher, and there he means natural philosopher, so the scientist, the philosopher, is a person who has a very skilled imagination, and there's somebody who can see the connections between things which have before seemed very familiar. So he says, to see something between these connections, he says, and he says that the philosopher is there to disturb the indelior,

of the mind. And we need philosophers for this. It's lovely, yeah. The indolence of the mind. Later we see with Coleridge and Wordsworth in the preface to the lyrical ballads, they're saying a very similar

thing, that we have to remove the film of familiarity, and it's the poet in this case for Coleridge and Wordsworth that can do this. And I mentioned Kant at the beginning because Coleridge is terrifically influenced by the German idealism, particularly particularly Kant and Schopenhauer

and these sort of people. So there's a... I agree completely this idea of the extra connectivity, the new connections that are being made. Is it possible to come back to this point about the adaptive function of having a belief in something like a superior being? I think there's clearly an adaptive,

an evolutionary requirement for this sort of thing because one of the things that I think imagination gives you is a feeling of hope. It gives you a feeling of possibilities. So there may not be possibilities which you, there may not be actualities. There may not be things which you can perceive in your day-to-day life, but you have a feeling that things could get better, things might improve. And with the possibility of the improvement, you have a feeling of hope. And I think there's a very clear need for something like a belief in a superior being adaptively, I'm talking about evolutionarily, because

Because it's that which gives you this feeling of hope. But I don't imagine Steve's going to agree with me. Where do I go? Just go quickly. I mean, I think you can look at it in a completely different way. And it's not a feeling of hope, it's a feeling of utter depression and helplessness. But just remember that if we've got five or six million years of evolution, for the vast majority of that time of larger-brained humans,

there's no evidence at all of any belief like that at all. It's a very recent time, just in the last 100,000 years, that people seem to have started believing that sort of entities. So it's very difficult, I think, to argue that there's extraordinarily strong selective value for these sorts of beliefs and thoughts because the majority of ancestors got to buy extraordinary... But maybe once this thing,

that when his compartment started breaking down, and a tool was a tool, and a bead was a bead, did you didn't wear the tool as a bead to cross over from the functional to the social, and the elaboration from that did not go on. Once those began to break down, just a torrent of connections, multiplied, and a lot of them are, in inverted commas,

useless in terms of getting across the room. I agree absolutely. I wouldn't call them useless. Adaptive value, the increase in connections between areas has gotten adaptive value because acquisition of knowledge has gotten adaptive value. Now there are some kinds of knowledge, for example, or some kind of imagination, for example, perhaps a painting, which you might say does not have an adaptive value.

It actually happens to be a byproduct of the kind of what, organization that the brain has in order to be able to acquire knowledge, which gives it a great adaptive value. So you're saying imagination is knowledge-driven, and the painting contained certain sorts of knowledge which stimulate the imagination because it's in itself in the making of it was stimulated by the imagination.

So you have the process. Music's the best, isn't it? Music collect sounds and turns into music and when we listen to it, we feel the emotions that were collected in the first place. But may I just go back to the question of superstition in religion? I think one of the functions of the brain being the acquisition of knowledge, the brain tries to make sense

of things. Where it cannot, as in what, why are we here and where is the universe without its limits, it then often resorts to superstitious belief. That's also part of the apparatus of...

Or imagine it's a belief, maybe is that a better way? He's imaginative in this context a better word than superstitious belief. And why does it resort to it? Why does it rise to it? You're loading that, so. I am loading it. Well, imagine things.

All right. Can I ask you, do you think that it's a part of the brain that produces imagination? We have this thing going on, inflamed in the heads of everybody all the time. They can live their past, they can even only live their present, they can live their future by many, many acts of the imagination,

who's behind them, who's in front of them, whether the room's the same room, whether the bus is going to write, things like that, not so little. And as soon as said, and then the bigger things that are going on, The multiple lives that we're all living all the time, being in several different places at once, making particles look sort of small for I compared with the way we can sort of travel over things.

Now, can you have, can you identify by prodding away bits of the brain that are the imagination? I don't think anyone has succeeded in doing that so far, but there are various hints and they are powerful hints. I think there are two or three different kinds of imagination, two different kinds, two or three different kinds of connectivity. First of all, you have, I believe, a richer connectivity within an area, for example, someone who's imaginative in expressing paintings in different colors, new and exciting combinations. Secondly, there is a connectivity between areas so that one may be combined, say, mathematics with music or various other attributes. But I think, and then, of course, there is a thinking process, which is almost certainly involves the frontal lobes, which somehow has a bearing and probably connections, indeed does have connections with all these individual areas.

However, I think, I mean, one of the characteristics of the brain is that it is highly modular. In other words, there's a compartment for talking and there's a compartment for hearing, and one for colour and one for forms and so on. So these bits you can identify, draw up. Internal phrenology, that kind of thing. Internal bumps, all right.

Phrenology, why not, why not? phrenology, so it's good enough. It's internal areas you can draw circles around them in the brain and pinpoint them with great accuracy. Now, I think that it is because of this modularity that you cannot say that someone has got great creative power imagination period. Somebody who's very creative in mathematics is not necessarily somebody who's very creative in music. Although they haven't been able to remember. Well, I've chosen the wrong example perhaps. Someone who's very, very creative in literature is not necessarily somebody who's a very good painter. There are, of course, exceptions.

Michelangelo is one where he excelled in poetry and architecture and painting and sculpture. But they are on the hell rare. I think the sort of keeping creativity within bounds is much more common. Can I ask, Stephen, can you just try to tell us why, what function metaphor has it all this? And why it is so essentially, what I've read it, why do you think that the metaphor is so? Well, I think when we, you know, a lot of these, what we're talking about making connections, often another way of expressing that is we're saying that it's the capacity to use metaphor, which is so powerful.

Now, again, if you look at human evolution, once we would have said, well, it's got to be language per se which delivers its creativity. But, you know, as we've understood the fossil record better, it looks like many human ancestors and relatives like neonatars had pretty good language capacities. They certainly could make complex, but. utterances. So we're left thinking, well, if it's not language per se, maybe it's one particular aspect of language. And I suspect it's that ability to create metaphor, to use metaphor.

And spoken language, it doesn't necessarily create that, but it delivers it and makes it much more explicit and enables you to use metaphor much more effectively. And it's that doing that, which is both an expression of this increasing connectivity and facilitates creating more connections. So are we talking about the brain actually growing and changing as a physical thing, or are we talking about this lump inside our skull, being much the same for a long time, but various parts of it being activated by, as it were, the development of language. Well, I'm very cautious about saying, oh, it comes from changing things with the brain. I think what's happened is we're using possibly much of the same brain matter,

but we're using in different ways. We're getting more out of the brain than we used to be able to do. But we also live in a much more complex environment. Socially, culturally, morally even, we live in. in a much more complex environment. I mentioned deception earlier on. So this is supply and demand almost? Well, it is, I imagine.

I mean, I don't imagine anyone around the table would disagree that with a greater variety of stimuli, you're going to have a greater variety of response. And you have to imagine a more complex response to different circumstances. You've actually, one of the underlying things, subtexts if you've been pompous, about what you've been saying is,

creativity, imagination, good thing. Isn't there another way of looking at it, that the darker side has been terrible. And people have imagined, you've talked about Behoven and paintings and all that, but we have imagined concentration camps and gas attacks and

hydrogen bombs and that comes out of our imagination too. I mean, would we, I think something you wrote, am I right? It's worth considering whether we'd be better off without it. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the flip side of it, really. I mean, you know, we're talking about imagination, connectivity and creativity

as being for the good. And we say, well, without this, we wouldn't fed Shakespeare, we wouldn't fed Darwin, etc. But many of the bleak ideas that structures the world today are products of the same sort of connectivity. And the example I've used is racism. You know, if we connect the idea of a person to the idea of a physical object that's got no rights,

it can be treated in any way one wants, and put those together, you end up with racist ideas towards people, you can kick them around, you can do whatever you like to them. And it doesn't matter, because they're just like a material object. So I think connectivity, just as it creates all these good ideas, creates all these bad ideas,

and it creates some of the horrors of the world today, and we might want to sit back and think, well, would it have been better back in the Stone Age with our highly modular minds and not having any of this creativity? Do you think there was this big change, so many thousands of years ago, that we could only imagine it, we can't really think about it,

do you think that the brain is still evolving, is capable evolving, that there are going to be more changes along the way? Well, in one sense, yes. I mean, in the sense that the structure of an adult brain depends so much upon maturation and the environment we've put the child in during their development, and that influences the sort of connections are created.

As we change our social, cultural environments around us, brains are going to become connected up in different ways. Now, that's not evolution, natural section in the sense, but it's a temporal change in the nature of brains. There's a Steve Jones notion, Stephen Jones notion, that

there's fact that that human kinds evolutionary low as natural selection probably comes to an end in some sense but clearly if we're talking about evolution of the mind, say, as we're creating more and more

new ways of communicating new sort of cultural environments around us, we can generate new ways of thinking. I mean, the internet is a brilliant example, isn't it, where we now got almost immediate access to vast range of knowledge. Does that change the way we think? I think it allows us to think in different ways. This means you can live inside a library in your own house.

I think the speed of communication does make an immense difference in... Can you say that something? Does it have you got to change the function of the brain, the speed of communication? Yes, I'm sure it is going to change. But I really think that our brains are evolving. Charles Darwin, if we accept what he said, that the most variable organs are the one which are evolving fastest, I think you would have to accept that the most variable aspect of humanity

is its difference in behavior from which you can infer that there's a great variability in the structure or the microscopic structure of the brain from which you can infer that it is evolving. That evolution, of course, is now become a two-way process. It is the brain evolving to create new things, which in return impact upon the developing brain. So you're creating a world which then has an input to recreate your mind? Yes, I think that's been happening for the last 100,000 years.

I mean, I think our cultures, our societies we've created, has been an influence on our biological evolution for this last 100,000 years. It's not that per se isn't something new. I think it's, well, we're extending our mind. You started off with the idea of extending your mind with beads and paintings and Stephen, and I think now with the evolution of the mind, we're creating more objects, more new technology, ways of dealing with our world in a different sort of way.

So we've got more complex tools, and so those complex tools are going to create different responses. So it's making more public the jobs the mind does. So I can ask you a very simple question. Do you think a time will come when you can take the lid off the skull and look in and point and say, look, that bit does that, bit does that, that bit's the imagination

under a, it's terribly simplistic, but under a massive microscope, we can find out in this material mass where everything we think comes from. I think that's a possibility. I think it's not only a possibility, I think it's a probability, and I think it'll happen sooner than we think, but the consequences of that are something which we should also think about.

I mean, you see, I think we're going to have to re-examine the legal system. If you get somebody who has to create crimes because of certain brain structure, you have to overhaul the legal system, and everything else. May I come back very briefly to a point I made right at the start,

which is that if the imagination is a synthesizing power, if it's the power to put together our sensory experiences, then I don't think we'll be able to pinpoint it in the brain. I think it's an activity in the brain rather than a modular part. Oh, I think you can pinpoint activity in the brain. Oh, yes, but I think it's a diffuse activity. Well, you can pinpoint diffuse activities too. Okay.

Right. Well, there we go. Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you to Susan Stewart, to Cimeo Zeki, and to Stephen Meiton. Next week, we will be looking at the Scottish Enlightenment with Tom Deveen, Karen O'Brien and Alexander Brody. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.