What is the definition of imagination?

Imagination is a psychological process in which people process and transform the images stored in their minds to form new images. This is a special form of thinking. Imagination and thinking are closely related, and both belong to advanced cognitive processes. They are all generated from problem situations, driven by individual needs, and can foresee the future.

Imagination is the ability to form mental images, phonetic paragraphs, analogies or narratives about things we can't feel. Imagination is a manifestation of our memory, which enables us to examine the past carefully and construct a hypothetical future scenario that does not yet exist but may exist. ?

Imagination also allows us to look at things from other angles and sympathize with others. Imagination expands our experience and thoughts, enables individuals to construct a world view and reduces our sense of uncertainty. In this way, imagination fills the gap in our knowledge, enabling us to create a thinking map and extract meaning from the vague situation we are facing, which is an important function of our memory management.

To some extent, this explains why people have different reactions to what they see, because they make unique explanations based on different transcendental knowledge and experience. Imagination enables us to create new meanings from cognitive clues or stimuli in the environment, which can sometimes bring new insights.

Extended data:

Use eight imaginations every day.

1. Effective imagination: combining information to coordinate new concepts and ideas.

2. Intellectual (or constructive) imagination: This kind of imagination will be used when considering and developing hypotheses from different information, or thinking about various significance issues in the fields of philosophy, management or politics.

3. Fantasy: Create and develop stories, pictures, poems, stage plays and mysterious buildings. ?

4. Empathy Imagination: Help a person to emotionally understand what others have experienced from their frames and references. ?

5. Strategic imagination: paying attention to the vision of "what may be" and the ability to identify and evaluate opportunities by turning them into psychological scenes.

6. Emotional imagination: it involves expressing emotional tendencies and extends to emotional scenes.

7. Dream: Dream is an unconscious form of imagination, which consists of images, thoughts, emotions and feelings that appear in a specific sleep stage. ?

8. Memory reconstruction: the process of restoring our memories of people, things and events.

The role of imagination

1. Complementarity: a supplement to human cognitive activities

2. Foresight: Foresee the result of the activity and guide the direction of the activity.

3. Substitution: Meet the demand that cannot be realized in reality.

4. Regulating effect on the body:

"Holy Land Phenomenon": In the Middle Ages in Europe, people found some patients suffering from hysteria. When they thought about the suffering of Jesus Christ, their palms and soles would show symptoms of congestion or ulcers, as if they had suffered the same torture.

"Mindfulness phenomenon": also known as conation phenomenon, it is very common:

When people hold a straight line focused on the hammer, close their eyes and imagine that the heavy hammer is moving in a circle, they will find that the heavy hammer is really rotating.

For example, when you imagine lifting weights, you will feel muscle tension and record the corresponding bioelectric activities of muscles; Imagine that visual objects cause eye movements.

Imagination can not only improve the individual's physical condition, but also cause human diseases. Such as false pregnancy, misdiagnosis, victimization paranoia, etc.

References:

Baidu encyclopedia-imagination