麻豆传媒

Our capacity to create imaginary worlds could be key to our health as well as the power behind the rise of human civilisation

IT WAS during the Abix-Rontu war for control of the solar system that the planets Rorkak and Slockland were formed. The war had erupted when two 6-year-old boys living in the US could not agree on whose cat should rule their shared imaginary world. It was resolved diplomatically when they decided to split it in two. Kevin walked away with Abixia, an island nation on planet Rorkak inhabited by the cat-human Abixians who worship the horse god Aht. Simon got Rontuia, a constitutional monarchy on planet Slockland inhabited by lynx-like Slocks with advanced technological prowess.

The imaginary worlds of Kevin and Simon (not their real names), by child psychologist Marjorie Taylor of the University of Oregon in Eugene, seem very elaborate to the adult observer: Kevin has minted coins and written a gospel for the Abixian religion, while Simon has made sculptures and designed buildings. But this complexity is far from exceptional. Psychologists who research pretend play say 12 per cent of US college students remember having imaginary worlds (psychologists call them paracosms). Two-thirds of children under the age of 7 have or remember having imaginary friends.

A short post on my Facebook page asking for my friends鈥� own examples elicited accounts of Fred who lived inside the shaggy lounge rug and didn鈥檛 have much luck with girlfriends; Loula and Loulac who were responsible for any naughty behaviour; elaborate fairy worlds at the bottom of gardens; and skating worlds beneath beds.

Humans have endless capacity for imaginative thought (Image: Good Wives and Warriors)

And the phenomenon isn鈥檛 just the preserve of childhood. While many of us leave our imaginary worlds and companions behind as we grow up, some adults continue to interact with them. Agatha Christie reportedly still spoke to her imaginary companion at the age of 70, and Kurt Cobain addressed his suicide note to his childhood imaginary friend Boddah. More frequently, adults indulge their imaginations with novels, movies and video games, not to mention daydreaming, fantasy and hypothetical thinking.

Central role in thought

So why do we spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in worlds that exist only in our heads? Neuroscientists and psychologists used to regard our propensity to conjure up and then flesh out fictional scenarios, people and objects as mere mental fluff. Now imagination is recognised as playing a central role in human thought, from planning and creativity to memory and problem-solving. It protects our mental health and may even be the fragile foundation on which human society is built.

When I found out that nobody knows how much time people typically spend immersed in figments of imagination, I set out to keep track of my own imaginings. My aim was to do it over the course of a month, but I gave up after a few hours, overwhelmed by the scale of the task. I may be prone to daydreaming, but even so imagination seems like an almost continuous feature of inner life. Even on an ordinary day we exercise it all the time: what to have for lunch, how to prioritise today鈥檚 workload, how to structure the next sentence.

If imagination is the ability to transcend our current circumstances and use our minds to travel through time and space and beyond, then that includes everything from daydreaming of unicorns to visualising an event from last weekend and figuring out, at two in the afternoon, how best to get to a social occasion across town that evening. If you go with that definition, then we are constantly using our imagination, says Taylor, who runs the Imagination Research Lab at the University of Oregon.

, a psychologist and philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, uses a slightly narrower definition to rule out any confusion with memory. She sees imagination as our ability to consider possibilities that we know aren鈥檛 true in the here and now 鈥� a definition that includes unicorns and future events but excludes memories and visualisations of things that really happened. Even this more narrow definition encompasses a large proportion of human thought.

Decisions, decisions

Gopnik is particularly interested in counterfactual thinking, a kind of imagination that treads a fine line between the real and the unreal. Take the following scenario: you were interviewed for a new job, but just heard that you didn鈥檛 get it. You mull over all the things that happened in the interview and how they might have played out differently. Why didn鈥檛 you see that question coming? How could you have forgotten to mention the brilliant idea you had prepared ahead of time? In other words, you think about a reality that didn鈥檛 happen 鈥� but only just. This is how we learn from our mistakes and adjust our behaviour, and is seen as being one of the prime functions of imagination.

Similarly, every day we play out various scenarios in our minds to enable us to select the best one. Is it better to carry on working tonight, or quit now and finish off early tomorrow? Would a glass of wine help? Should I call my sister to tell her my news? What if I sent her an email instead? Sometimes these spill over into pure fantasy, from daydreams about future holidays to visualisations of what a new romantic relationship might be like.

This kind of mental flight of fancy is an important part of how we make decisions. It allows us to explore our emotional reactions to various outcomes without having to actually experience them. Imagination also plays a role in designing and innovation. Taylor points out that every human-made object in your line of vision was imagined before it became real.

It鈥檚 nigh on impossible to say how much time the average adult spends immersed in mental time travel, daydreaming, planning, counterfactual thinking, creativity and fantasy. 鈥淏ut one thing pretty much everyone agrees on,鈥� says Gopnik, 鈥渋s that however much we as adults imagine, we don鈥檛 do it nearly as much as children.鈥� Pretend play starts when we are about 2 years old, and young children can spend most of their days immersed in it, making them ideal subjects in the study of imagination.

Gopnik wants to know why children spend so much time immersed in pretend play. 鈥淭hey have so much to learn about the real world, so why are they spending so much time off in these crazy imaginary worlds?鈥� To answer the question, her colleague Daphna Buchsbaum, now at the University of Toronto in Canada, introduced a group of 3 and 4-year-olds to a stuffed toy monkey and told them it was his birthday. She also showed the children a musical machine that would play Happy Birthday to the monkey if it was fed an object called a zando, but wouldn鈥檛 play if it was fed a different object that was not a zando.

The imagination part came when a person walked into the room and took away the birthday machine, the zandos and the non-zandos. Buchsbaum grabbed a box and two blocks and said they could just pretend that the box was the birthday machine and that one of the blocks was a zando.

The children were later asked various questions that required counterfactual thinking, such as 鈥渨hat if we said this zando was a non-zando 鈥� now what happens if I put it in the birthday machine?鈥�

Buchsbaum found that the children who had spent time in pretend play with the box and blocks were better at answering the counterfactual questions (). 鈥淚f they can pretend that they are playing with the machine then they can also do more counterfactual thinking about it,鈥� says Gopnik. She sees this as evidence that pretend play is serious business, allowing children to explore causal relationships in the world around them.

So when a child tells another 鈥渓et鈥檚 pretend that鈥檚 a tiger cage and I鈥檓 the zookeeper and you鈥檙e the tiger,鈥� she isn鈥檛 just messing about. She is exploring all the possible scenarios in that set-up, and their consequences. If the tiger is locked in the cage then it can鈥檛 eat the other children, but if the zookeeper leaves the cage open, the tiger can escape, and then what happens?

Another form of make-believe that reveals a lot about childhood imagination is having an imaginary friend. Once thought to be the refuge of loner kids who had trouble establishing relationships or interacting with the real world, it is now clear that they are a common element of a normal childhood.

Taylor has spent decades interviewing children about imaginary friends and says most are very aware of their fictional nature. 鈥淲e take notes very seriously while they are talking to us and at some point, they will say 鈥榶ou know, this is just pretend鈥�. Or we will ask them where they met their friend and they say, 鈥榃ell, I just made her up鈥�.鈥� In a study of 83 children with imaginary friends, a third spontaneously offered this kind of clarification and only two children showed any signs of being confused about the nature of their friends.

So what鈥檚 the point? 鈥淚maginary friends are pretty multi-purpose individuals,鈥� says Taylor. 鈥淭hey are the most unbelievably diverse group that you could think of.鈥� Over the years, Taylor has been introduced to Elsy Welsy, a tie-dyed veterinarian; a shark that lived inside a child鈥檚 throat; Charlie Ravioli, who was always too busy to play with the little girl who had made him up; and hundreds more.

鈥淚t used to drive me crazy,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 would wonder 鈥榳hat鈥檚 the typical imaginary friend?鈥� Then I realised the finding is that there is no typical imaginary friend.鈥� Their diversity, she says, reflects their range of uses, from being plain old fun to vehicles to express fears, explore emotions and to run 鈥渆xperiments鈥� on the mysterious adult world.

Division of labour

In this way, childhood imagination can be seen both as a way to safely explore the real world and as a dress rehearsal for adult imagination. Gopnik talks about a division of labour between childhood and adulthood. She compares the former to a sort of research and development division, where we can experiment with the world and develop our creative minds unencumbered by worries about survival. The skills we acquire during this period prepare us for adulthood 鈥� the production and marketing division.

Imaginary friends may also help children cope with real-life difficulties. Taylor and her colleagues interviewed 152 12-year-olds whose teachers said they were problematic. They were from poor families, had poor grades, got into trouble a lot and didn鈥檛 interact well with their peers. Thirteen said they had imaginary friends. Six years later, 11 of these children reported back, and eight of them were doing well 鈥� they had no mental illness, were not using illegal drugs, hadn鈥檛 been arrested and had graduated high school. By contrast, only a quarter of the kids who hadn鈥檛 reported imaginary friends also ticked all of these boxes ().

The result is far from conclusive 鈥� the numbers are very small and the outcome could reflect correlation not causation. But it is backed by interviews that Taylor has done with children in the US foster care system. Those who had imaginary friends often used phrases like: 鈥淪he was there when I needed her鈥�; or 鈥渨henever I got sad or mad or I wanted to throw something and break, it was like what a mom would do, try to calm someone down鈥�. Taylor says that in difficult situations, imaginary friends can offer the same kind of support as real friends and family.

Whether children鈥檚 imaginary worlds predict something about their future is an open question. One study, led by Michele Root-Bernstein of Michigan State University in East Lansing, found that adults who had received awards for creativity were more likely to have had paracosms as children. But Taylor says there simply haven鈥檛 been any long-term studies following individuals over decades to show whether kids who engage in more pretend play make more creative adults.

Some studies also suggest that children with imaginary friends have stronger theory of mind 鈥� meaning they are better able to understand and relate to the mental states of other people. Steven Mithen, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Reading, UK, suggests that the evolution of theory of mind in our early ancestors was the first step in acquiring our unique skills of imagination.

Mithen, who specialises in the evolution of the human mind, has outlined seven key milestones in the gradual evolution of our imagination (see 鈥�Seven steps to imagination鈥�). He argues that every one of these milestones was selected for other reasons. 鈥淭he modern human creative imagination was largely an accident of evolutionary history,鈥� he says.

One milestone was becoming bipedal, which required a narrow pelvis. This in turn means infants must be born with flexible skulls and small brains, which grow to full size during childhood. So standing up on two feet laid the foundation for long childhoods when our brains develop under cultural influences.

For Maurice Bloch, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, the moment our imaginations became unique was around 10,000 years ago, and is inextricably linked to world domination.

For tens of thousands of years after first appearing in Africa, Homo sapiens lived in small, isolated groups of hunter-gatherers. Around 60,000 years ago, some left Africa for Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Then, about 30,000 years ago, a revolution took hold. Suddenly, there was a flowering of cultural expressions. Cave paintings appeared, tools became more complex and evidence of symbolic thought through sculptures and representations of the dead became frequent. Global domination was cemented 10,000 years ago with the emergence of large civilisations built around sedentary societies.

Anthropologists have suggested all sorts of explanations for what archaeologist Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge calls the 鈥渟apient paradox鈥� 鈥� the mystery of why it took tens of thousands of years for our ancestors to make this leap. Language is thought to have played an important role. And climate change offers a popular explanation: the end of the last ice age would have allowed people to start farming, living in villages built around or near religious temples.

But many, including Renfrew, believe that something may have also been stirring deep inside the human brain 10,000 years ago. For Bloch, at least part of that has got to do with imagination.

Made-up world

Large societies and the glue that holds them together are completely made up, says Bloch. Nations, tribes, religion, marriage, money and the law-enforcing powers of a judge are arbitrary products of our creative thought. So to create them, our ancestors must have had fantastic powers of imagination.

鈥淚f people belong to a clan,鈥� says Bloch, 鈥渢hey might say we are members of this clan, we came to this land 200 years ago and will be there 200 years from now. But that idea can only exist in imagination.鈥� Without these imaginary structures, interactions within social groups are limited to being physical transactions between animals that exchange favours. 鈥淚f you want to have large-scale societies you have to move to a transcendental level of social cognition,鈥� says Bloch.

So, according to Bloch, the thing that was stirring in our brains 10,000 years ago and that triggered the sudden world domination of our species was a significant upgrade in human imagination to a level that can conceive of the existence of abstract concepts like laws, nationality or religion. Since then, he says, humans have been using their remarkable imaginations to dream up and then create social structures and institutions, including religion, money, laws, nation states, science and much more. That is an amazing feat that may explain why we alone among the creatures on Earth have developed technological civilisations.

But Bloch suspects there is a subtle downside. The imaginary fabric of human society makes it inherently fragile, he says. 鈥淭his is only a hunch for now, but I think there are moments when suddenly the arbitrariness of the system appears.鈥� Legalising gay marriage may be one such momentous issue for some people, he suggests.

鈥淚鈥檓 fascinated by the people who have been demonstrating against gay marriage in France,鈥� says Bloch. Talking to them, he found that 鈥渨hat really worried them was this notion that if gay marriage is possible then everything will collapse. What I think is going on is suddenly an awareness of the imaginary nature of the institutions that we live in.鈥�

There is, of course, a very real distinction between imagination and the real world. Nobody protested when Rorkak and Slockland decided to go their separate ways; nobody died in the Abix-Rontu war. But the fact that Kevin and Simon were able to dream them up at all tells us a great deal about what it means to be human, and the world we have conjured out of mere thought.

鈥淚 would love to know if chimpanzees can entertain the notion of a unicorn鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淒aydream believers鈥�