But what is imagination? Imagination is as imagination does.

If we
treat the imagination as merely a faculty of the mind, then we will
miss the dynamic action-oriented aspect: it is part of the organism’s
pragmatic attempt to get maximum grip on its changing environment.
We are also likely to misunderstand the way it recruits from many
brain-processing areas, such as perception, emotions,
motivational/conative areas, memory, image representation, executive
planning, and so on – ie, it is distributed. But though it would be
wrong to view imagination as only a faculty of the mind, it is indeed a
brain-based (embodied) system of capacities and applications. It has
an involuntary mode (ie, mind-wandering and dreaming) and a
voluntary mode (governed by conscious goal-direction).
Broadly stated, the imagination has five steps: mimicry;
abstraction/decoupling; recombination; expression; and social
feedback. First, our neural mirror-system generates embodied mimicry
of our perceptions. Then representational techniques such as drawing
or language decouple those mimicked experiences from their original
contexts. Next, our combinatory cognition blends and mashes novelty
(involuntary or voluntary), and then – in the final two stages – those
novel combinations are expressed and read against social feedback. In
this way, imagination does not just redescribe a world, but regularly
makes a new world. This world-making ability of imagination – its
ability to generate Umwelten (perceptual worlds) – is why it should
stand as the interdisciplinary foundation underlying both art and
science. The more we understand imagination as core cognition, the
more we recognise the artificiality of the ‘two cultures’ divide.
From birth, our minds are awash in stories and images, but we also
view ‘real life’ largely through imaginative constructions that are
rarely acknowledged. Imaginative cognitions can happen in parallel
with real-time perception (forming a co-present) or they can decouple
and run offline before and after real-time perception. This mean that
humans simultaneously experience a real ‘now’ and an imaginal
‘second universe’ but, phenomenologically, they are combined in
present experience. Occasionally, this leads to epistemic slippage and
confusion, like conspiracy thinking, but usually imagination makes
humans more awake to the potentials in lived experience. Popular
culture recognises only the fantasy version of artistic imagination and
fails to appreciate that everyday conversation, daydreaming, map
navigation, political strategising, scientific hypothesising, moral
reflection, field surgery, cooking, reading and lovemaking are all
imaginative activities, too.

I magination has had a modicum of formal recognition in academic

circles, notably in arts education, yet a whiff of illegitimacy still
surrounds the academic study of imagination. Perhaps ‘illegitimacy’ is
too strong; rather, imagination is relegated to a branch
of aesthetics where it can stay segregated from the ‘serious’ business
of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and cognitive
psychology. In The Evolution of Imagination (2017), I argue instead
that imagination needs to be moved from the periphery to the centre.
Whenever budget constraints occur, art teachers and departments are
the first on the chopping block. But once art teachers are better
equipped with some cognitive psychology and life sciences (easily
done with adult education workshops), they should be the last rather
than the first teachers cut.
Art should not be taught as a self-referential contained history, nor
should artmaking be reduced to therapeutic self-expression (no
disrespect to that excellent function). Rather, art is one productive
branch of the imaginative mind, science being another, politics
another.

Recently, I hiked up a small mountain in New Mexico to see the Three

Rivers petroglyphs. These images – including a smirking face, an
arrow-stricken bighorn sheep, a bird figure with geometrical innards,
and thousands of other designs – are astounding because they are
aesthetically beautiful, but also because they allow us to peek into the
gears and springs, as it were, of the human mind. Thought to be
created by the Native American Jornada Mogollon people, these
petroglyphs date back to well before Christopher Columbus landed in
the Americas. In these petroglyphs, we have a powerful argument for
the innateness of a visual grammar. Yes, much of drawing is culturally
learned, but not the fundamentals.