Imagination and Belief - A Psychobabble Rant

Panorama over Prague

I hope you'll excuse my abuse of this site, which is primarily a travelogue of our journeys in Pavlov. Occasionally however, I deviate from this goal and include some smattering of the contents of my own thinking and philosophising. Okay, you've been warned!

I have two ideas about some cognitive mechanisms that I find a little contradictory, and so I wanted to air them, expose them to the fresh drafts of other's opinion, if only to clarify my own thinking. The first idea is about the function of imagination in our thinking, and the second is about the function of belief.

Firstly, to consider the imagination. I consider that the function of consciousness is to render the imagination in reality. I'll try to unpack that sentence. In a trivial way, we imagine actions before we carry them out. Sometimes this takes conscious effort, as when I imagine two numbers in my mind, add them together and output the result. Sometimes, its automatic, as when I want to walk to the door, and just carry it out. However, it's clear that we have the idea of an action before we perform the action.

By extension, I think that the same thing occurs for creating things as well as actions. I imagine a flower before I draw it: I see in my mind the shape of the piece of furniture that I'm carving, and so on. The artist, the inventor, the composer; all see 'in their mind's eye' the thing they are making before  creating it in reality.

Prague astrological clock

I notice that when I hold the idea of what I want to make in my imagination, my mind starts to plan and create the steps necessary to bring this about. Often this process goes on outside of my awareness. I see that shape I want in a piece of wood, and my hands start automatically carrying out the steps to realise it. So, in this sense, consciousness translates the imagination into reality, creating what we see internally.

I think there's a deeper sense to this that just the above trivial examples. I used to say to my students: 'You become what you think about'. The contents of our cognition have a way of translating themselves into the reality that we surround ourselves with. Think of the creative artist whose 'channels' are wide open, pouring the ideas in their minds out into creations in the world. However, for many of us, our imaginations are not under our control or wise guidance. I wonder what the impact may be for young men who spend hours each day watching the torrent of pornography available on the internet. What reality does their imagination translate itself into?

A lot of new-age pseudo-religion just amplifies this idea. Concepts like 'The Secret' and training programs like EST focus on how we create our world in this fashion. I know that this concept has worked for us. Megan and I had the idea of seeing Europe by boat, cruising the Mediterranean. We clearly imagined our life doing this, and lo and behold, it came about. Not without a lot of effort, training, painful mistakes and errors, but it did come about. I do think that we can do whatever we can think about.

As an aside, I want to describe briefly some experimental work that I did for my uncompleted doctoral dissertation. I was interested in the role of imagery (the output of the imagination) in attentional processes. I projected a 3 x 3 grid onto a computer screen. In some cases, some of the grid squares were shaded in to form a letter. For example, you can imagine a grid with the letter 'H' shaded in. In other cases, I asked subjects to imagine the letter 'H' in the grid. The secondary task was for subjects to respond with a button push to a probe (a flashing point of light) that could appear anywhere in the grid. Not surprisingly, subjects responded faster to the probe when it occurred on a part of the letter. In line with my predictions, responses were also faster when subject were imagining the letter, as when they were perceiving the letter.

I interpreted these results to imply that imagination is a kind of perception. We can imagine (sic) that perception 'paints' the percept on some kind of spatial representation in the brain. I tend to think of the 'paint' as a kind of attentional process. We attend to the fore-ground of the letter by an increased activation level, and ignore the background by a lesser activation. Therefore, the probe dots are perceived faster on the letter, due to the increased activation level. Similarly, imagination paints with a kind of attention. We draw the letter on our spatial representation with our imagination. Subsequent probes are perceived faster due to the same facilitation mechanism as with perception. In this case, contrarily, 'Believing is seeing'! Imagination is an active process that is similar to perceptual processes.

So in summary, imagination is a creative principle, whereby the conscious mind seeks to realise the contents of the imagination in the real world. In contrast to this principle, I also wanted to explore the idea of 'Belief'.

Prague church window

The most striking example of what I'm calling Belief is given by the idea of 'Faith' in religion. The idea of faith is that I should hold certain tenants (such as 'Jesus died for my sins') irrespective and regardless of my actual experience. I take the idea of Faith as meaning that I am given some ideas from an external source that I will hold to be true, regardless of my own experience. I have faith that 'God is love', even though the world is full of misery. I believe that I will go to heaven as a reward for my good acts, even though science tells me that there is no immortal soul.

I must declare here that I see Belief as a negative process, in that it denies our own experience. But how then do I differentiate it from Imagination, which I see as a positive and creative process. Both are things that we hold assiduously in our mind's eye, and attach a kind of fervour to. Perhaps a hint on how to differentiate the two ideas comes from my own research above. Imagination is a process closely allied to our own perceptual process. It uses the 'perceptual machinery' to paint in the mind's eye. Belief, on the other hand, seems unrelated to our own perceptual process, indeed, it wants to deny that process and have you believe, regardless of the evidence.

Inside St Vitus cathedral in Prague.

By relying on the testimony of others, and forcing adherence to ideas from the 'outside', I see Belief as a process that confounds the imagination, and stops the free flowing creativity that comes from an active imagination. But, as the photo's above show, Belief has given rise to some of the most gorgeous architecture on the planet, and inspired all sorts of creative acts. So, perhaps my argument is flawed. Perhaps one can imagine inside the container of belief. Like all distinctions, it seems to break down at the periphery.

Well, I feel better now, having gotten that out of me. Not so sure you'll feel the same way! All comments and reflections will be gratefully received. Pavlov out.