It makes us human. Scientists tell for the first time what imagination is and how it arose

Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that does not exist, or even something that cannot actually be. In simple words, we can easily imagine cycling through the sky, but that will never happen, writes Inverse.

Scientists believe that imagination is one of the fundamental abilities that make us human. However, where it came from, how it developed and what kind of evolutionary path it followed is still not fully understood.

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Andrey Vyshedsky, a neuroscientist at Boston University who studies how children acquire imagination, decided to shed light on how imagination begins. The scientist notes that he is most interested in neurological mechanisms – brain structures and connections necessary for the mental construction of new objects and scenes. The researcher believes that by examining these questions, we can shed light on how imagination arises and which developmental path it follows.

From bacteria to mammals

Life on Earth appeared about 3.4 billion years ago. Organisms gradually became more complex until about 700 million years ago.

Dinosaurs appeared about 240 million years ago, and mammals a few million years later. The latter had to share the territory with powerful hunters, which was not so easy. However, dinosaurs were cold-blooded, which means they couldn’t hunt effectively at night – mammals had to rethink their behavior in order to survive.

Mammals moved underground and surfaced at night, but this lifestyle required them to maintain their body temperature at 37 degrees Celsius, meaning they needed more weight than dinosaurs to survive.

Researchers believe mammals have developed a new system for efficiently remembering where they found food. Essentially, they made a connection between the part of the brain that records features of the landscape and the part of the brain that controls navigation. Landscape features are encoded in the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain, and navigation is encoded in the entorhinal cortex. At the same time, the entire system was interconnected by a brain structure, the hippocampus. Note that modern humans actually still use this system to remember objects and past events.

Neuroscientists believe that all mammals are able to recall and relive past experiences by remembering coded objects or events by reactivating groups of neurons. In fact, this system, which developed 200 million years ago, was the first step towards the emergence of imagination.

Unintentional “memories”

The next stage in the emergence of imagination was the ability to create “memories” that did not exist in reality. Note that the simplest form of imagining new objects and scenes occurs during sleep; In humans, such fantasies are associated with REM sleep.

Scientists suggest that other species, whose rest includes periods of REM sleep, are also capable of dreaming and therefore daydreaming. Researchers believe that stage ability developed in marsupials and placental mammals about 140 million years ago, when they followed a different evolutionary path from egg-laying mammals.

Research shows, for example, that animals can imagine visiting places they’ve never seen before. At the same time, the solutions that people find in dreams can solve some real problems.

Imagination by appointment

To understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary imagination, it is enough to imagine muscle spasm and voluntary muscle control; while the former is uncontrollable, the latter allows for a combination of muscle movements.

The same thing happens in imagination. Arbitrary – helps to consciously combine thoughts, visualize a certain process or action, involuntary – what happens in a dream, imagination, which we cannot control.

The ability to combine and reassemble mental objects is called prefrontal synthesis and developed about 70,000 years ago. Historian Yuval Harari believes that this “cognitive revolution” associated with prefrontal synthesis occurred about 65,000 years ago, as evidenced by various archaeological artifacts found in different parts of the world.

So, according to the neuroscientist, our species has evolved over millions of years to gain imagination, thereby learning to imagine something that doesn’t actually exist and that didn’t happen involuntarily during REM sleep.

Previously Focus He wrote that scientists explain why some people can’t dream.