Imagine if you can

Imagination is a wonderful thing. It has given us everything from Alice in Wonderland to humans walking on the moon. The power and capacity of imagination seems almost limitless. Indeed, according to a new study imagination not only makes great leaps possible it can also make a profound difference to your experience of everyday life because you can use your imagination to change the way that you perceive the world.

This research was done by neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institute who began by noting that we tend to think that what we can imagine and what perceive through our senses are two separate and distinct things. As their research has shown however, this is not necessarily the case.

A series of experiments were done to test the relationship between imagination and sensory perception. For instance, in one experiment, the researchers found that a subjects’ perception of where a sound came from was biased towards an area where they imagined seeing the short appearance of a white circle. In another experiment the subjects’ perception of what a person was saying was changed by their imagination of hearing a certain sound.

According to the researchers this shows that neuronal signals made by imagined stimuli can integrate with signals generated by real stimuli of a different sensory modality to alter perceptions of the world. So at a neuronal level the difference between firing generated by imagination of external input does not exist.

On a medical level this could help understand the mechanisms in the brain that cause difficulty differentiating between reality and thought in disorders like schizophrenia.

On a personal level though, doesn’t this open up the potential use for your imagination? You might not be able to change the reality of the world with your imagination but you could certainly alter your perception of that reality. However, if you change your perceptions then that can change your behaviour which in turn can change reality itself. What if, as John Lennon asked, we could all imagine “a brotherhood of man”? The alterations in perception and behaviour would have to be for the better, so it is not a question of whether it would be a good thing to imagine a brotherhood of man, it’s a question of I wonder if you can.