I was fascinated by an NPR story and interview with Professor Paul Bloom about our relationship with our imagination. In the context of the conversation, Professor Bloom explained that the #1 activity of humans, in terms of time spent, is imagining. According to Professor Bloom, more than time spent with technology—emails, texting, or other activities—we humans choose to daydream and engage in activities where we create with our imaginations.
A more provocative dimension of Professor Bloom’s observations is that we do not discern whether a situation, character, or personality with whom we engage emotionally at any given moment of our day is real or imagined. The implication is that we are as upset by what happens to a favorite fictional character in a book or on a television show as we are with what happens to real people in our lives, and sometimes react in ways that seem a bit over the top for imaginary characters. Some people write to ask authors not to kill off favorite characters in book series; others spend hours talking with friends about television show characters with the same rage or drama, as if they were real.
To the extent that we engage a fictional context, we are not present for whatever else is going on in at that moment in our lives. We may be more engrossed in a television show than in the person with whom we watch. We may engage with a book more than whatever else presents itself in the moment. I suppose one reaction to this observation is “DUH” since books and television are popular precisely because they are entrees into a world we seek to enter, and thereby escapes from the rest of our physical lives.
Okay, so that reaction I get. The one I am more perplexed by is our desire to create these alternative universes in which to live. Is it unconscious or conscious? By choosing to engage our mental and emotional energies in these alternative experiences, do we perceive our lived reality to be somehow too boring? Do books, television, theatre, and movies take us beyond where we “imagine” we can go in our physical lives? Or is it just that the world of imagining is so magnetic and so easy to access that we choose to be in whatever worlds we transport ourselves than in the physical world in which we live and breathe? Is there a downside to all this imagining that blurs the line between virtual and physical reality?
Is it possible that we lose our ability to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary in a way that we limit our ability to create the experiences that we watch or read about in our own lives? Or is it simply too much work to do so and we would rather an effortless voyeurism into another world, emotionally fulfilled by the experience and grateful for what we escape dealing with in our everyday physical world? Either way, if we lose the ability to distinguish between our physical experience and our imagined worlds, I hope we err on the side of shattering our beliefs about what is possible in our current physical world, and get drawn into creating a world of our highest imaginings.
Now that might encourage a bit of imagining AND some changes in our physical-world experiences.
