{"id":160346,"date":"2023-03-15T18:23:57","date_gmt":"2023-03-15T23:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/imagination-makes-us-human-this-unique-ability-to-envision-what-doesnt-exist-has-a-long-evolutionary-history-2"},"modified":"2023-03-15T18:23:57","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T23:23:57","slug":"imagination-makes-us-human-this-unique-ability-to-envision-what-doesnt-exist-has-a-long-evolutionary-history-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/imagination-makes-us-human-this-unique-ability-to-envision-what-doesnt-exist-has-a-long-evolutionary-history-2","title":{"rendered":"Imagination makes us human\u2014this unique ability to envision what doesn\u2019t exist has a long evolutionary history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/imagination-makes-us-human-this-unique-ability-to-envision-what-doesnt-exist-has-a-long-evolutionary-history4.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that\u2019s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you\u2019ve never done before\u2014like water skiing\u2014and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else.<\/p>\n<p>Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn\u2019t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.google.com\/citations?user=Ury0hsMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao\">I\u2019m a neuroscientist<\/a> who studies how children acquire <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/imagination\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">imagination<\/a>. I\u2019m especially interested in the neurological mechanisms of imagination. Once we identify what brain structures and connections are necessary to mentally construct new objects and scenes, scientists like me can look back over the course of evolution to see when these <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/brain+areas\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain areas<\/a> emerged\u2014and potentially gave birth to the first kinds of imagination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that\u2019s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you\u2019ve never done before\u2014like water skiing\u2014and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else. Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}