Psi XPerience moved to fernandotarnogol.com

I don’t regard myself as an unusually intelligent guy. I’d say I’m average. But life has treated me well so far. Looks like I’ve been making good decisions, I’ve sometimes had good timing and why not, I’m might even have been a bit lucky (I haven’t won the lottery though).

This article will tell you about the relationship between intelligence and the imagination. The ability to represent a fictional play within your mind.

Defining it is not the purpose of this article but what we need to know is that there are several theories about intelligence. Some people consider intelligence as one big integrated thing (called the g-factor, or general factor of intelligence), others, like Howard Gardner, conceive it as different intelligences that combine and interact. For instance, one of the most common intelligence tests, WAIS, take into account different kinds of intelligence and integrate all the results in a general intelligence scale. The well known IQ.

None of these theories consider imagination a form of intelligence. And with just cause. Imagination takes a different route, a more heuristic and intangible one.

Many regard imagination as an expression of intelligence. Einstein once said that “the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination”. Bottom line is that no one is absolutely sure about what intelligence is. Definitions of it abound. Standpoints too.

The point I’ll try to make is that having a big imagination won’t make your logical-mathematic or spatial intelligence better. It does help in the development of abstract and heuristic thinking, but it is not a factor that will pop up as a booster of intelligence/es in any test.

Imagination prepares you for unexpected events, it helps you plan and foresee possible situations by staging a theatrical play in your head.

I’ll use myself as a Guinea Pig. I’m always thinking about something, day dreaming if you’d like to call it like that. It can be realistic or absurd things. But at the end of the day, some of those thoughts, crazy or not, are the ones that inspire me to write a post, to develop new ideas for work, or are just to wacky to be do-able in the real world (although some times you can trim those utopias to match reality) . It triggers synapses, associations and organizes my mental map. It also helps me be prepared. For what, you may ask? It helps me “already know what to do when a certain moment comes”.

Let’s say you are faced with a challenge and you need to make a decision on the fly. If you had imagined that situation before and played with that fantasy, most likely you will have a wide array of different scenarios which will help you deal with that particular situation. You’ll be ready because you have previously “lived” that scenario in your mind. You’ve been there, you’ve imagined different outcomes and ways that lead to that goal.

Notice that during these whole process, your intelligence per se, or to make the example more clear, none of your intelligences have been put to actually work in a conscious manner. You’ve been thinking in another channel. And your cognitive resources were harvested to put those scenarios together in your fantasy; all this in your psychologic backyard

Imagination, in a way, works like a quantum computer, or like the behaviors of particles in quantum physics. Particles have multiple histories (let’s consider the particle as a thought for practical purposes). Virtually, every thought can have an infinite number of ramifications, or states if you want to. Unluckily infinite will be limited to a handful by our owns brain limited processing power. We can argue that if we can only handle a few options, statistically, the chance of imagining a plausible possibility would be close to zero. But our mind has had a lifetime of experience. It has learn to limit itself (compare your day-dreaming of your youth with yours at say… 40). It has also learn to predict human behavior, so the possibilities will always be conditioned by our individual realities, and in some regards, they tend to be pretty similar when we throw in culture, religion and shared history as citizens or human beings.

I haven’t nor pretended to cover all the benefits that a vivid imagination entails. I just wanted to focus on its relationship with intelligence. And that the imagination can work as a situation planner and help you make decisions without having to make the effort when the moment comes; because you’ve already been there. It feeds on your intelligence to create those fantasies, thus boosting the reach of your general intelligence.

If you are interested in more, here’s a link to a related post by Joshua Denney.

Post image by Innovation Tools