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Autism and the Imaginative Mind

ILONA MIELKE

in Imaginative Minds

Autism is diagnosed through a symptom of clusters known as the diagnostic triad. One of these is the rigid adherence to routines, repetitive activities, and narrowly focused interests which represent ... More

Autism is diagnosed through a symptom of clusters known as the diagnostic triad. One of these is the rigid adherence to routines, repetitive activities, and narrowly focused interests which represent behavioural and cognitive biases due to a lack of imaginative cognition. The other two clusters include impairment in communication and social interaction because of impairments of imagination. These symptoms gave rise to the assumption that autism impairs imagination. Symptoms consistent with this view are prominent throughout the clinical and research profile of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, some individuals diagnosed with autism exhibit excellent gifts in the field of creative imagination such as in arts, music, and poetry. Some of these personages who suffered from autism include Samuel Beckett, Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This claim purports that autism is not only compatible with creative imagination but in some sense promotes it. This chapter discusses the evidence for the impairment of the imagination in ASD and shows how these problems align with the key psychological models of autism. It evaluates the evidence for elements of preserved imagination by considering autistic visual arts and autistic spectrum poetry. It also highlights the implications of the relationship of autism and imagination.Less

Seven Steps in the Evolution of the Human Imagination

STEVEN MITHEN

in Imaginative Minds

The modern human is a product of six million years of evolution wherein it is assumed that the ancestor of man resembles that of a chimpanzee. This assumption is based on the similarities of the ... More

The modern human is a product of six million years of evolution wherein it is assumed that the ancestor of man resembles that of a chimpanzee. This assumption is based on the similarities of the ape-like brain size and post-cranial characteristics of the earliest hominid species to chimpanzees. Whilst it is unclear whether chimpanzees share the same foresight and contemplation of alternatives as with humans, it is nevertheless clear that chimpanzees lack creative imagination — an aspect of modern human imagination that sets humanity apart from its hominid ancestors. Creative imagination pertains to the ability to combine different forms of knowledge and ways of thinking to form creative and novel ideas. This chapter discusses seven critical steps in the evolution of the human imagination. These steps provide a clear picture of the gradual emergence of creative imagination in humans from their primitive origins as Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago. This chronological evolution of the imaginative mind of humans involves both biological and cultural change that began soon after the divergence of the two lineages that led to modern humans and African apes.Less

Memes, Minds, and Imagination

SUSAN BLACKMORE

in Imaginative Minds

This chapter determines the existence of human imagination and creativity through the concept of human culture and meme. It aims to rebut the two assumptions governing creative imagination in humans. ... More

This chapter determines the existence of human imagination and creativity through the concept of human culture and meme. It aims to rebut the two assumptions governing creative imagination in humans. The first assumption suggests that imagination evolved because humans are biologically adaptive. The second assumption claims that the existence of consciousness is the driving force behind creativity and imagination. In this chapter, it is argued that human creativity is the result of evolutionary processes based on memes rather than genes. This concept suggests that if hominid ancestors of humans are capable of imitation, a new set of replicators are set loose driving human minds to become better at copying, storing, and recombining memes. This coevolution of memes and their copying machinery led to the modern imaginative minds which evolved not because they are biologically adaptive but because they are advantageous for the memes. Hence the driving force behind human imagination is therefore not consciousness but aevolutionary algorithm which function is not biological but memetic.Less

The Creative Imagination: Unique Expression of Our Soul-Body Unity

W. Norris Clarke, SJ

in The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old

This chapter engages in a philosophical exploration of the creative imagination in human beings, seeking to discern its basic structure and its significance for the understanding of what it means to ... More

This chapter engages in a philosophical exploration of the creative imagination in human beings, seeking to discern its basic structure and its significance for the understanding of what it means to be human. Humans enjoy a far wider scope of creative imagination partly because of human intelligence to abstract thought, and partly from the freedom in which human imagination participates because it is associated with the free will of the human spirit.Less

The Creative Imagination as Treated in Western Thought

W. Norris Clarke, SJ

in The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old

This chapter discusses the relationship creative imagination has to the guidance and rule of reason, and what that relationship tells about the nature and dignity of the human person as an embodied ... More

This chapter discusses the relationship creative imagination has to the guidance and rule of reason, and what that relationship tells about the nature and dignity of the human person as an embodied spirit and image of God. The creative imagination is the incarnation of idea in matter. The role of the creative imagination is to be creative in expanding the arts and literature, technology, economy, politics, and culture. The only wise way of exercising the creative imagination is under the guidance and illumination of human reason.Less

Imagination

Anthony Kenny

in The Metaphysics of Mind

This chapter makes a distinction between fancy and imagination. It also discusses creative, linguistic, and intellectual imagination. It argues that the creative imagination is not something which ... More

This chapter makes a distinction between fancy and imagination. It also discusses creative, linguistic, and intellectual imagination. It argues that the creative imagination is not something which can be contrasted with the intellect in the way in which the fancy can: it is one aspect of the intellectual faculty. In the case of any substantial intellectual structure, the question whether it is to be attributed to imagination or to insight, whether it is to be saluted as a creation or discovery, is a question which cannot be settled by looking within the mind or examining the expression in language of the intellectual structure. It depends on whether the structure can be regarded as a true account of the world.Less

Projections and Recreations

Gregory Currie

in Recreative Minds

This chapter focuses on the similarities and differences between beliefs and so-called belief-like imaginings. It argues that there is a need for a category of desire-like imagining, and ... More

This chapter focuses on the similarities and differences between beliefs and so-called belief-like imaginings. It argues that there is a need for a category of desire-like imagining, and distinguishes between the character and the content of imaginings.Less

Creative Imagination

Vlad Petre Glăveanu, Maciej Karwowski, Dorota M. Jankowska, and Constance de Saint-Laurent

in Handbook of Imagination and Culture

This chapter focuses on the relationship between imagination and creativity as reflected in the study of creative imagination. It is argued that, in order to appreciate today’s close association ... More

This chapter focuses on the relationship between imagination and creativity as reflected in the study of creative imagination. It is argued that, in order to appreciate today’s close association between imagination and creativity, we need first to consider the intellectual trajectory of these concepts before and after the advent of “scientific” psychology. Using sociocultural perspectives in psychology, the authors challenge the easy assumption that creative imagination is all about generating new, original, or vivid images and, following the legacy of Vygotsky, they conceive of creative imagination as both grounded in and constructive of experience. They use three simple illustrations of children making drawings of Victory to introduce and discuss, comparatively, three sociocultural approaches to (creative) imagination: the gap-filling, the loop, and the perspectival models. The authors conclude by raising new questions about imagination as a cultural, developmental, and creative process.Less

General Introduction: Castoriadis in Context

Suzi Adams

in Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

The introduction presents a brief overview of Castoriadis's philosophy and the social theory of creation. It situates Castoriadis's thought within a cultural hermeneutic of modernity, with especial ... More

The introduction presents a brief overview of Castoriadis's philosophy and the social theory of creation. It situates Castoriadis's thought within a cultural hermeneutic of modernity, with especial reference to Enlightenment and Romantic currents of thought and contextualizes his thought within phenomenology and the history of philosophy, more generally.Less

Have Jews Imagination? Jews and the Creative Arts

Yaacov Shavit

in Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew

This chapter is devoted to the question as to whether Jews have imagination — namely, whether they have the creativity to produce works of art. In short, the chapter argues that there is a corpus of ... More

This chapter is devoted to the question as to whether Jews have imagination — namely, whether they have the creativity to produce works of art. In short, the chapter argues that there is a corpus of literary and artistic work created by Jews, which encompasses works of art and literature of all types and reveals a vast and copious creative imagination. However, during the nineteenth century, a different image prevailed, as a popular notion emerged which painted Jews as being without imagination. The chapter stresses that these anti-Jewish notions were even accepted by some Jewish writers. These notions become even clearer when the Jewish mind is contrasted with the Greek mind.Less

Kafka’s Meditation and 
Visualization

June O. Leavitt

in The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka: Theosophy, Cabala, and the Modern Spiritual Revival

A close reading of Kafka’s post-1911 prose reveals that he continued to be infected by the widespread fascination with invisible forces. However, this fascination was not merely theoretical, but ... More

A close reading of Kafka’s post-1911 prose reveals that he continued to be infected by the widespread fascination with invisible forces. However, this fascination was not merely theoretical, but pragmatic. Kafka’s diary entry of June 25, 1914 is a case in point. This diary passage provides evidence that the “I” voice was employing some method to bring on a vision the purpose of which was ontological in nature. The visualization exercises the narrator used, which seem to have been revivals of Renaissance and ancient cabalistic practices, not only correspond to those espoused by Steiner. The visualization exercises the narrator used evoke certain practices associated with occult societies which were flourishing in Prague. However, the meticulous details of the vision of an angel described by the first person narrator, also suggests that Kafka genuinely experienced such a vision, if not on June 25, 1914, at some time prior to that.Less

Excessive Straining After Effect

in Murmured Conversations: A Treatise on Poetry and Buddhism by the Poet-Monk Shinkei

This chapter presents two verses to show that poets err through excess due to lack of proportion, restraint, and precision in using their poetic tools. Shinkei does not fault these verses for ... More

This chapter presents two verses to show that poets err through excess due to lack of proportion, restraint, and precision in using their poetic tools. Shinkei does not fault these verses for deviating from a decorous norm and are thus deemed unnatural. He defends poets from charges of excess and deviancy by appealing to the essential freedom of the creative imagination. In fact, he himself had been guilty of using the kind of inverted and illogical syntax cited by Retired Emperor Juntoku in Yakumo mishō. In poetry, even the most exaggerated conception or unnatural diction is justified, as long as it contributes to the moving quality, charismatic appeal, or evocative power that constitutes Shinkei's ideal of the quintessentially poetic (en).Less

Just Imagine: Three Hundred Years of the Creative Imagination

Arthur Krystal

in Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature

This chapter looks at the history of creative imagination. It explains that imagination was once of profound relevance to artists, writers, and philosophers but it has lost its place in the ... More

This chapter looks at the history of creative imagination. It explains that imagination was once of profound relevance to artists, writers, and philosophers but it has lost its place in the intellectual universe. It highlights the importance of understanding the concept of imagination for it is a word whose history records the history and the diminution of the human spirit.Less

The Scientific Image-ination

in Image and Reality: Kekule, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination

The philosopher of mind Colin McGinn has argued for the importance of what is known as the image-ination, or the ability to form and manipulate mental images having no direct correlation with visual ... More

The philosopher of mind Colin McGinn has argued for the importance of what is known as the image-ination, or the ability to form and manipulate mental images having no direct correlation with visual perception itself. He concludes that images and percepts are two coequal species of visual apprehension, and also suggests that the creative imagination (an image-generating mental power) is even constitutive for understanding and generating language. The subject of visual thinking in physics has been examined in detail by Arthur I. Miller, whose work on imagery and the visual imagination deals with the work of twentieth-century physicists, but also has implications for research on chemistry in the nineteenth century. Miller's evidence for the importance of visual mental imagery in scientific thought was largely taken from a close study of Albert Einstein, who acknowledged many times that his thinking took place mainly in the form of visual imagery.Less

At the Cusp of Invisibility: Visions, Dreams, and Images

David Morgan

in Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling

This chapter argues that external and internal images are interrelated since external images are the medium for grasping and maintaining the internal, which are ephemeral, unstable, and evolving ... More

This chapter argues that external and internal images are interrelated since external images are the medium for grasping and maintaining the internal, which are ephemeral, unstable, and evolving compared to anything material. This notion supports the belief that fleeting, private, inscrutable, or contrived images are all made available and credible by a process of visualization. The idea of artistic inspiration adapted to religious revelation enables artists to transform old imagery into new, and forget the mundane visual source. This allows devout artists and admirers of their work to explain artistic inspiration as a miraculous or visionary operation, an act of visual revelation whose medium is the creative imagination.Less