‘Exploring Imagination’ with Adam Zeman

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Imagination is low down on the priorities for today's time poor executives consume meetings and approvals, the coming wave of automation induced change will go far beyond the downsizing that's currently taking place in many corporates the scarce commodity of imagination will increasingly separate those organisations who can envisage and build wholly new futures from those who continue to double down and defend their existing business models. We're perhaps months away from the first billion dollar unicorns that have one or two people running them, if that's not an incentive to wake up and see the need for building imagination engines in your organisations. Led from the top, what is in this show, we talked to Adam Zeman about his latest book, The shape of things unseen, which gets us to rethink imagination, not just as a creative process, but as a means to orientate ourselves to the world and its future possibilities. Tune in to an important conversation on the evolving leader.
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Hi folks.
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Welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender, along with Jean Gomes, and today we're going to have an amazing conversation, because we are joined by Adam Zeman. Adam is Honorary Fellow Centre for clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, an honorary professor of neurology at the University of Exeter, and he was brought up in London, and after earning a degree in philosophy and psychology, he trained in medicine at Oxford University Medical School. His earlier books include consciousness, a user's guide, a portrait of the brain, and is co author of epilepsy and memory. But today we're here to discuss his latest book, The shape of things unseen, which gets us to rethink imagination, not just as a creative process, but as the means to plan, read and a host of other ways in which we can experience the world. Adam, welcome to the evolving leader.
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Thank you very much for having me.
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Adam, it may seem blindingly obvious, but what is imagination? Well, that's not such an easy question to answer, but the sense of imagination that I had, particularly in mind in this book, was the sense in which it means our capacity to detach ourselves from the here and now, recollect the past, anticipate the future, enter the virtual worlds created by artists and scientists.
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So that's a rather high level sense of imagination.
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I think it can be used in a variety of other ways. It can be used in the sense of our capacity to form an image, which could be the image on your retina, or the image of the world around you, or the image of something that's absent, so the apple that you reading an hour ago, or your breakfast table as you as you left it this morning. So it's it's a it's not a term of science. It's an ambiguous term. It's important to be clear which sense one has in mind when one's trying to make sense of it. But yes, I had in mind that very broad sense of imagination, in which is that capacity that allows us to detach ourselves, ourselves from the here and now, which I think is a rather fundamental human capacity, if you were looking for a psychological capacity which is particularly distinctive in Homo sapiens. I think it would arguably be that one we live much of our lives in our heads as a result. And given, given that description, it says encompass a fairly broad range of mental processes, and, you know, diversity of human nature. I mean, is it fair to say that imagination, therefore, could look very different to different people in terms of, you know, that inner canvas, that inner way of thinking about things? Yeah, absolutely. So if we, if you, think particularly about sensory imagery. So that's the ability to represent things in their absence as they might appear to you if they were present. So imagining that that Apple or your best friend's face, that seems to be extremely variable from person to person.
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So I've spent quite a bit of time over the last 10 years exploring the rather fascinating phenomenon of a Fantasia. So this is the lack of the lack of a mind's eye, and it seems that about 4% of people simply don't, don't visualise at all. They they at a certain point in their development, they realise that when other people speak about the mind's eye, they are talking about the capacity to have an experience that really is somewhat visual. And up till that point, they'd always assumed that this was just just a metaphor. So they can think perfectly well about an apple in its absence, or a breakfast table in its absence, but they've never been able to visualise it. And it turns out that people without Fantasia, who can't visualise, quite often lack or have very thin sensory imagery across the board, so not much of a mind's ear or a mind's fingertip, whereas there are others who we've described as having hyperphantasia, for whom visualisation is as vivid as real seeing and they for.
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Example, quite often have difficulty in being sure whether they'd imagine something or they've really seen it, whether it's really whether it really happened.
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Actually have a family member that has the I can't pronounce what you just said, but the inability to imagine division. Yeah, is there? Is there a in your research and your studies and what you in this whole topic, did you find that what's the what determines the scale for people? Like, is there, like, Is there things happening in the brain, or what's going on in the body? Like, what's happening for people to have these sort of different levels of being able to imagine?
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So that's really work in progress. I mean, it does, it does seem that this is a these differences are real differences, not just an artefact of misdescription. Say.
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So there's nice work, for example, showing that if you are a visualizer and you imagine looking into the sun or looking into a bright room, your pupils constrict, which doesn't, doesn't happen in people with a fantasy. If you read somebody with imagery very scary story, they will tend to sweat. People with a Fantasia don't. And the explanation is probably that you need imagery to mediate between the story and the and the gut response. What the underlying difference is in the brain is a really interesting question, and there have been half a dozen papers over the last year on exactly that. It looks as if, interestingly, people with aphantasia do activate visual regions of the brain when they think about the appearances of things, which is what people with imagery do. But there seem to be differences in connectivity in the brain, which are probably relevant to understanding the difference between people with vivid imagery and people who like it.
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And it may also be that the representations in visual areas are rather different in people with a Fantasia. So they the the way the brain is activated when they visualise is less similar to the way it's activated when they see things than it is in people with vivid imagery, if that makes sense. So there's a there's more overlap between imagery and perception and people with vivid imagery than there is in people who who have thinner, thin imagery or lack it. But as I say, work, work in progress. When you knew
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talking earlier, and you said when you were asked to visualise a face, for example, and immediately my brain is going to try and visualise my mum, actually, who passed a few years ago. And the difference between that kind of day dreamy type of imagination where things just pop into your head, really fully formed, versus you tell me to think of something, and I find it struck. I struggle to do that. What are the conditions for kind of mobilising imagination, intentionally versus reactively?
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Yeah, no, that's a really interesting question, is this, and you're right, that much of the work done by psychologists has involved the rather artificial phenomenon of voluntary, deliberate imagination. So think of an apple, which is not something where we're doing constantly.
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That's that's going to be a very top down task, isn't it? You're going to use regions of the brain that are involved in cognitive control to drive regions of the brain that are involved involved in sensation.
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So visualisation has been described as vision in reverse.
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Normally, there's information streaming in through the senses, activating visual areas, leading to recognition. When you visualise deliberately, you're sort of doing the opposite. So that's a highly deliberate, voluntary, rather artificial setup. Contrast that with what happens when you're reading a novel. So many people, when they're reading a descriptive passage in a novel will form more or less vivid image of what's going on. And that's that's not top down in the same sense as the previous task, the imagery is somehow being orchestrated by the the words you're reading and the images form involuntarily. It seems that both those kinds of imagery are probably lacking in people with a Fantasia. But then there's another kind of imagery which happens in our dreams, which is, of course, involuntary, very vivid, with a hallucinatory or delusional quality. So we think we're really there, and really rather fascinatingly, people, most people with aphantasia Do dream visually. So there's a, there's a dissociation between between voluntary and involuntary, or I think rather between wakeful and dream imagery. Dream Dream imagery representing a, I guess, the kind of extreme form of involuntary imagery on that spectrum. So I think it seems that every kind of sensory imagery is going to involve activity in sensory areas in the brain, but you can generate that activity by by very different routes, by very deliberate route, when you're asked to visualise an apple by a more relaxed route. When you're reading a novel, and then by a kind of bottom up, entirely involuntary route, when while you're dreaming,
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when you're walking or, you know, in the shower or something, and your brain is sort of idling, and you tend to generate lots of kind of unbidden thoughts and imagination. What's going on there that's different from from the other aspects you've just described.
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Yeah, yeah. So I think this is a really, really interesting area, and it, I must it's, it's an area in which discoveries over the last 20 or 30 years have made sense of things that just were very difficult to understand in neurological terms when I came into neurology. And I think they are, they're fundamental to imagination in the sense in the sense of creativity. So our ability to create things that are to make things that are both new and useful, which is how creativity is generally defined, depends to a substantial degree on a kind of spontaneity that we have come to understand better through these discoveries over the last 20 or 30 years, and there are quite a number of nice examples. So let me, let me give you the example of replay. So this is a fascinating phenomenon, which was discovered first in rats, but turns out to occur in people too. If you go for a walk in a new place, whether you're a rat or a person, you will begin to lay down a memory of its spatial layout. And it turns out that over the period after your walk, the brain will replay the route, particularly in periods of restfulness, when you're when you're idling and in sleep, and to some extent, but probably to a great extent, that process is an unconscious one, but we know that it's kind of ticking away in the background, and it might be the explanation for some of those mysterious, Spontaneous images that appear in our heads.
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Don't know whether you have my partner calls them Stuttgart station moments. It's when, when a place that you haven't thought about or visited for ages just comes into your into your mind, completely out of the out of the blue. So replay is one example of the of the the ceaseless, spontaneous activity the brain occurring in the in the background of our lives, another night, another nice example of spontaneous activity comes from studies of what's been called the the brain's resting state.
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So brain imaging studies, until about 20 years ago, always involved giving people a task, and then you'd see what happens in the brain when you're performing that task, as opposed to when you're resting or when you're performing some other task. But it turns out that if people just lie in a scanner, the brain is constantly active, and it's possible to use statistical techniques to pull out networks within the resting brain. So not surprisingly, there's a group of visual areas which talk to one another and a group of motor areas involved in controlling movement which talk to one another. But there are also networks which are rather less obvious, which have been identified using this approach.
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And perhaps the most interesting is the default mode network, and it's so called because this is the set of regions which is especially active in the resting brain. It's level activity stands out above the background.
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And this set of regions turns out to be involved essentially in the things that we do intuitively when we daydream. So it's involved in thinking about the past, anticipating the future, thinking about other minds, you know, the person who offended you yesterday, thinking about some slightly tricky moral decision that you have to take.
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So it is, this is a bit of a caricature, but it is. It is, in a sense, a daydreaming network that becomes especially active when you when your mind is idling. And it's not, not a huge leap, I think, to suspect that that notebook is likely to be involved in in creativity. I could give other examples.
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There's, there means nice studies of insight. So there are problems which, which you can solve, either in a deliberate fashion or in a kind of spontaneous, insightful fashion.
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So for example, if I ask you what single word unites tree, pine and source, it's very unlikely to come to you, but Apple is the common denominator, pineapple, apple tree, Apple source. Now you can arrive at Apple by thinking about it hard for a long time and running through alternatives, but people will sometimes have a moment of illumination, a moment of insight. And it turns out that that moment of insight, which you can study in a in a brain scanner, has a particular. A neural signature, interestingly, involving a burst of activity not on the left side of the brain, which is classically involved in language, but on the right side of the brain, where meanings are rather more vaguely, loosely represented. So just the kind of representation that you need to be able to to come up with the remote associate of it's called of the three items that were presented.
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So we're kind of beginning to develop an understanding of the the processes which take place, in some sense below the radar in the brain, but which are, are, I think, absolutely crucial for creativity, not, of course, that creativity depends just on spontaneity, as as I explained in the book, I think it create.
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It depends critically on very high levels of skill, so very few creative human creative achievements that that don't occur as a result of training and development of skill and cognitive control is also involved. Creativity, I think, depends on a kind of interesting dance between spontaneity, control and and training.
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So is it fair to say that imagination is sort of our default setting over sort of rational processes? Yeah.
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I mean, certainly that's, that's what the resting state work suggests, yep, yes. I mean, daydreaming seems to be a very natural mode for the human brain. And there are those lovely studies showing that if you sample experience by getting a buzzer to ring in somebody's pocket at random intervals between a quarter and a half the time, our minds are wondering and we're daydreaming. And in fact, the most common content of the conscious mind is not the here and now. It's not the immediate perceptual world. It's it's imagery.
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How does all this sort of help us think differently about the roles we play in our lives as leaders and partners, and all the roles we play like, how does, how does this sort of understanding of imagination? What? What can it do for us?
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I think it can give us a kind of renewed respect for the complexity and also the generativity of our own minds.
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So as as the neuroscientist Sandile Seth has put it rather nicely, our experience is more inside out than it is outside in. You know, where I think that's a that's an important message from contemporary neuroscience, that that we are.
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We're constantly predicting the world into being, and much of our experience depends on our priors, on assumptions we make about the about the world, and I guess it helps us to understand as as a result of what I've just said. It helps us to understand differences of perspective better than we otherwise might.
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We are We are creatures of culture, where we're created by our education and exposure to the cultural world around us.
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What is one of the things that's most distinct about the human brain is it's huge. Is its huge storage space for difference. We are all very different from one another, but both individually and across cultures, we should respect those differences because because Manners maketh man and our traditions are hugely important. But I think this new science helps us to understand that these differences are also very arbitrary. So it's a very strong argument against fundamentalism of any kind, in my view. You know, yes, you you must respect difference, but, but we should also acknowledge that our own take on the world is unlikely to be the only privileged one that gives us the one and only true view of things. I wanted to write an article for a long time called you do not belong to the chosen people, but
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pick your moment for that one.
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Good title.
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You know, when you write a book, and this is a this is a wonderful book to take on holiday with you, I think because it gives you a chance to kind of think about a lot of things in a different way. What what in that process was most surprising to you, either about research that you had come across that made you think about things differently, or something you learn about yourself in in this or you re evaluated yourself through the process of doing it.
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Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, certainly one of the I. Best reasons for writing a book is that it enables you to find out about a subject to read widely in the and the task of explaining what you've discovered to others is a useful discipline. I felt that in this book, I was, in a sense, repaying debts. So I've had a I've taken a slightly unusual intellectual journey, and then I really started out life, mainly interested in the arts, and then found my way to science through psychology, and that took me to the brain. And I was delighted to discover the brain, because it it seemed to me that what I was learning about the brain, to some extent, validated the study of subjectivity, which I'd become rather dubious about. I'd begun to distrust my reactions as a as a reader or an appreciator, appreciator of art, what I learned about the brain helped to to kind of renew my my confidence in those reactions, because it seemed that there were discoverable correlates between subjective experience and objective happenings in the Brain. So I guess overall, that's been my main, my main source of fulfilment in this line of work, that I've taken a journey from the from the arts to the sciences and back again, and what I've discovered about the brain has helped to restore my confidence in in in the the kind of appreciative in my appreciative sensibilities, if you like, with with regard to the arts, I'm wondering whether there's anything In the course of writing the book that particularly surprised me. I think, I mean, this may, this may sound slightly lame, but I think what the book, what the process of writing the book, did for me particularly, was to reinforce the hunches that I began with. So I suppose you could, you could write a book with a with an idea that feels interesting, and as you read and think you might come to the conclusion that this wasn't a good you didn't start in the right place. But, but actually, I I felt that the the four ideas which I began with were actually borne out by by what I discovered. So those four ideas are that, first of all, that we live much of a life in our heads, as we've been discussing, that seems to be very characteristic about about a characteristic thing about people. Secondly, that becomes a little less puzzling when you appreciate that actually all our experience comes from our heads.
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And that was a that was a view that all my reading and thinking about psychology had brought me to. But nevertheless, it's a, it's, it's quite a startling view. So it's, it's, I was reassured to find not only that the evidence pointed that way, but also that a lot of contemporary thinkers believe that then third. The third idea is that in sensory imagination, we essentially run the brain systems that we use when we perceive the world offline. So there's a lot in common between imagination and perception in the brain. Kind of interesting idea. And then the fourth, the fourth big idea is that what is special about us is that we have evolved to share what we imagine. So I think probably many animals may well have imaginative experience, but they aren't able to coordinate their imaginative experience in the way that we can. And that, you know, you could say, Well, that's obvious. We can talk to each other. No animals can do that. And that's true. But I think this, our ability to talk to each other actually rests on a deeper ability to share our minds, which has evolved over the course of the last few million years, in which you can you can see developing in infants and small children who are pre linguistic or only in the very early stage, stages of language. It's really that ability to share our minds that language rests on, depends on.
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So those, those are the four ideas that I started out with. I might have ended up doubting them, and actually I I was pleased to find that I think they're true. Any of them individually is original either, but it was fun to bring them together.
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No, well, I think, I mean, it's very interesting listening to how an author and a researcher actually goes through the thought processes and of writing a book, because it was, we all know it's not an easy thing to do, so a lot of people are interested not just in the work itself, but actually the process. Of the work. Yeah, the
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there was a, there's a funny postscript to that, which is that the this book lived with me during the pandemic. So I had quite, I had more time for it, I guess, than than I'd expected, in a way. And the publisher had commissioned 100,000 words, and I delivered 150,000 and I thought they'd be delighted that this was sort of three for two, but, but no, so I then, I then had to shed 50,000 words, which was
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not they couldn't imagine a big book. Can we? Can we build on some of these ideas from a bias perspective and some pitfalls around that? So this sort of living in our head inside out picture of reality. How do we then challenge our own assumptions and confront our own biases and and get honest about the way that our depiction of reality, our imaginations and constructs might be, you know, creating adverse impact in ways that we don't intend?
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I think that's a that's a very, very important question, isn't it, politically and societally? I'll begin with just a couple of anecdotes. I think it's not too hard to change your take on the world if you are willing to take a plunge to expose yourself to something new. So I've had two specific experience of this, experiences of this, relatively trivial ones, in a sense. But one is that as a teenager, I used occasionally to hear Indian music on the radio. I just couldn't understand how anybody could want to listen to this discordant jangle of sound. And then when I was a student, I just happened, I can't quite remember how I just happened to go along to hear Ravi Shankar playing. Shankar playing in Oxford town hall with some dancers and drummers, and I was completely captivated, and then began listening to Indian music.
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And it doesn't it didn't take very long for that discordant jangle to become something extremely, extraordinarily beautiful and exciting. But it took a it took a particular exposure, I guess, to allow me to take that step. And the other experience was going to Kenya for my medical elective. As a medical student, I spent four months in Western Kenya, and when I arrived in my Mission Hospital, I was surrounded by a sea of faces I couldn't distinguish from one another. It took about a month, I guess, for those faces to become as easily distinguished as any faces were at home. And then when I came back to London, I kind of wanted to shake hands with every dark face I met on the street, because of the very strong sense of affinity I developed. So that was a very dramatic experience of perspective change through through simple sensory exposure.
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I've had a bit of experience as an academic of multidisciplinary work, where you are trying to tackle a project, which people from different disciplines approach in very different ways.
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Sometimes those projects works.
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Sometimes they don't. I think they will only work if you spend some time getting to know each other, if you like each other, and if you're prepared to work a bit to learn how, learn a bit about the the approach taken by the the others. And I would have thought that that general, those general principles, must apply more broadly. So we we have to take a bit of time to to get to know each other and get to know each other's points of view. I don't think there are any shortcuts, but that's that's likely to be helpful in overcoming prejudice. I'm, you know, I think tribalism is almost comes very naturally to people. I think we're naturally tribal. I'm naturally very tribal. I quite often have have the experience of discounting somebody or discounting somebody's point of view, because I just they just don't, you know, it's not, not what I'm used to. And then, you know, little while later, you discover great richness in that person or in that person's point of view.
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So the way I mean this may sound a bit trite, but the way I've kind of summarised this to myself recently is that one of the really distinctive things about us is that we are all all very different from one another, but an equally important thing about us is that we're all pretty much the same, and you have to hold those two, those two ideas, in in mind, I think, in your dealings with others, if, if at all possible,
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welcome back to the evolving leader podcast. As always, if you enjoy what you hear, then please share the podcast across your network, and also leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get back to the conversation.
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Our imagination can can run wild, and it can sometimes overwhelm us. What Why does this happen? How does it work?
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Taking a step back to the idea that perception, that our experience of the world. World is is, in a sense, more inside out than it is outside, in that it's that it's generative, that where that we occupy live in a world and imagined world. So that one psychologist, Chris Fitz, has described our experience the world as a kind of controlled hallucination. We hallucinate a world which, fortunately, most of the time corresponds to reality. So if all that is true, then it's not hard to see how sometimes we can lose touch with with reality. We the checks and balances which most of the time allow us to bring our the generative processes which produce our experience into line with reality. From time to time, there's those checks and balances are going to fail. So I give a wide range of examples in the book of this happening. So to take one familiar example that would be familiar to many people, hallucinations are extremely common after bereavement, so many people who lose a spouse with whom they've lived for decades will, from time to time, hear or see or be touched by that person who have a very strong sense of That person's presence. And of course, very few predictions are as strong if you've lived with somebody for 30 years as the prediction that that that person is going to be sitting in the armchair when you open the door or be there when you when you roll over in bed. So it makes perfect sense that from time to time, expectation will become so strong that it actually turns into reality for for a moment.
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So that would be, that's, that's an example of a kind of everyday hallucination. And there are many similar examples from situations in which people are deprived of normal input. So the Charles Bonnet syndrome is a syndrome in which people who lose vision, usually late in life, hallucinate vividly. It's quite common. It occurs in perhaps a quarter of people who who lose vision late in life, that they will experience formed hallucinations. They don't generally talk about them because they're perfectly aware that they're not real. They don't want to be thought of as crazy. But again, this is an example of the generative brain at work having lost one of its normal checks and balances, which is input from the visual world. I mean, in that context, it seems almost as if sensory input is inhibitory rather than excitatory. What it's doing is to kind of damp down the brain's tendency to to generate experience. And when you when you lose that input, the brain's generativity becomes very, very clear. Prison there. There's a variety of types of hallucination, which we described in people who are imprisoned or are in very monotonous landscapes. So if you know the Mirage, if you're walking through a desert or like pilots, are quite prone to hallucinations when they're driving in very when they're flying in very monotonous conditions at night, right?
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Yeah.
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Didn't want to know that. Yeah, that's super interesting. Can we train our imaginations
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so they work better for us? Yeah? I I am sure that we can. Of course, it depends a little on what sense of imagination you are thinking of, but let's think of the creative imagination. I talked to quite a number of creative people in the course of writing the book, researching the book, one of the things that struck me was that you can sort of turn creative people on and off, like a like a tap, so they I don't, I don't want to name anyone individually, but I talked to a number of people in whom it was clear that they was they were so used to Using material which the world supplied them with to create stories, for example, that this happened almost automatically as a result of a kind of lifelong cultivation of that particular creative habit.
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So that's not, not in the least to say that their creativity isn't skillful. Indeed, it, I think it's precisely to say that it is skillful, but it, but it becomes a such a such a highly trained skill that rather little effort sometimes is needed to drive it so. A question has been raised whether people who lack imagery could train their visual imagination. That seems to be difficult. So many people I've spoken to have tried, but it's rather as if there were some biological obstacle in their way. They seem to find it very hard to cultivate imagery. But my guess is that just about any psych with with some exceptions, people for whom there might be some biological logical obstacle, just about any psychological capacity is going to be like a muscle. It will, it will be to some degree, trainable. And I'm sure that this is true of imagination. I came across a number of interesting tricks that people have used to make the most of their imagination. So Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, was aware that many of his better ideas came to him on the verge of sleep. So he used to rest with his elbow on a table so that if he if he dropped off for a moment, his head would fall forward, and he would then wake just at the moment of dropping into sleep, which might deliver an idea. And Thomas Edison, of the night bulb used to hold a weight in his hand so that at the moment he nodded off, the weight would drop and he would be woken in the same in the same state. So that's that's, I guess, training yourself to to make the most of spontaneous gifts from from the from the unconscious.
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Yeah, I think Salvador Dali did that all as well. Didn't he had that he used to yes, that set of keys. That's right, yeah, to get that liminal place. Yeah. What do you think the future of imagination is in the sense that when the world becomes more and more automated, does imagination take on a new importance or significance in the future of mankind?
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Well, I would say that imagination is imagination makes us what we are really, you know, we, we are absolutely cultural creatures. And all our traditions, all our artefacts, are the product of products of acts active imagination. So it's kind of he fund, utterly, absolutely fundamental our capacity to to to be creative and to to to use the form of imagination that sustains creativity. And I can't see that changing. I guess that, AI, of course, raises interesting questions here. Is it possible that artificial systems will, artificial intelligence will become as or more creative than we are. Doesn't seem that that's the case just yet, but it's a possibility for the future.
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We're certainly going to to need to get on on terms with our with the AI assistance, I think it
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feels like there's at least a temptation to outsource our creativity to the likes of chat GPT, right? Sort of, instead of maybe spending a lot of energy trying to be creative, we sort of just put in the prompt right, that that could maybe perhaps diminish our capability with imagination over time. I might assume,
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yeah, yeah, that's that's a danger, but there is a risk then, that that that our assistance will take over, which we probably don't want to have happen, and also I don't think we want to sacrifice the satisfactions of creativity. So we're all creative to some degree, and I think most of us will have experience of, for example, the flow state in which we are we're engaged in a task which matches our abilities closely, which gives us right, just the right degree of challenge, and which allows us to forget ourselves in the in the in the the process of creation, in the case of creativity, or in, in in, of course, flow experiences can also carry in other contexts, like like as in sport, but certainly, creativity often gives rise to to flow states. Or the creative process gives rise to flow states, which is something people enjoy and wouldn't want to lose people also wouldn't want to lose their sense of excitement at their at the ideas they're working with and the creations they come up with. So shivers down the spine are the target of a one of my favourite scientific studies in this whole. Uh, area of research. So there was a study by Canadian neuroscientist Robert Sara, who is an organist, who was working with a postdoc called Anne blood, who turned out to be a rock drummer. And the two of them clearly shared a love of music, but they liked very different kinds of music, and they realised that one of the things they had in common was that they both got chills, shivers down the spine when they were when they were listening to music, and they did a wonderful brain imaging study in which they showed that passages of music, which give us shivers down the spine, essentially turn a key in the lock of the reward system. They activate, among others, just the regions of the brain that are activated by eating good chocolate. And suddenly I got quite a good I got my my share of shivers down the spine, right writing this book and reading around, and I wouldn't want to have to forego those. So I think we, we, we need to keep going in our creative
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endeavours. When we we think about organisations, they typically are about creating predictable, reliable outcomes. Imagination is probably not highly required. Or you know, when you ask people you know, is your job to be creative, most people will say, No, it's not. Yet they get a paradoxical call for action, which is, we need more creativity. We need more innovation. But they're actually not cultivating that. If you were advising a group of business people about how to kind of practically harness imagination to develop it. What are the kind of tips and guidance you would give people
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so nice, I take the point that there's always something slightly subversive about imagination, isn't there?
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You run the risk of overturning the well worn ways of doing things which can be can be disconcerting, but probably worthwhile. So I guess some simple tips would include creating a bit of mental space to allow ideas to will up because it does seem that if you're very busy, you're less likely, if you keep yourself very busy, you're you're less likely to have a creative insight than if you, at least from time to time, give your your mind some, some, some, some space and time in which to come up with interesting ideas you you would want to listen widely to the people you're working with. So Don't, don't assume that the best ideas are going to come from your more senior colleagues, because that won't necessarily be the case. Great ideas can come from unexpected places, and it's probably a good idea to harvest as many ideas at an early stage as possible, and then to sort through them later.
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So So create, create a space be open minded about the possibilities that are being raised. Harvest as many as you can
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in creating that space, sort of really wanting to harness the power of the collective, right? So I'm thinking of leaders listening right now and building on this idea. Are there conditions that leaders should be creating so that their team members have the best chance of tapping into their own imagination to the get those ideas that you want, right? You said genius comes from everywhere, which is true.
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But how do we create those conditions for people to tap into their imaginations? It's helpful
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to have a critical mass of people, because people seem to stimulate one another.
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Yes, I think I say in the book that isolationism is a kind of perfect antidote to creativity.
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You want. You want to bring people together in reasonable numbers. You want to make it clear that their ideas are going to be valued. And to, as I've said, Give them space to to come up with them, and give them the confidence to to speak. So something that struck me in medicine over the years is that it's actually quite hard to create conditions in which people really believe that any question can be asked. In fact, I've only encountered it once or twice. People are generally or very often, in. Professional contacts a bit defensive, a bit a bit careful, a bit cautious.
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So creating a climate in which people feel that the the asking of difficult questions and the proposing of interesting ideas is is for the good rather than dangerous feature. Challenging.
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Creating that sort of environment is hard but, but very well worth. Well worth doing. You want to persuade everyone that their ideas are going to be heard, so don't, don't discourage people who are younger or more junior in the organisation. You so I guess, I guess, I guess those things create, create space, give people confidence that they that any questions can be asked, any idea can be raised, they won't be judged for speaking. And create, relatively creators level as democratic, a an organisation for this purpose as possible.
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So you've written about consciousness and imagination. What's next for you?
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There are a couple of books I'd like to write which link with the book you've just read. So I think the A Fantasia, hyper Fantasia spectrum is a really fascinating one. It's unlocked all sorts of avenues, all sorts of doors. So I'd like to write a book that's focused on that spectrum. And I think, among other things, it relates to two interestingly contrasting tendencies in human thought. One is to think in more abstract, semantic, schematic ways about the world, which is perhaps what scientists tend to do. The other is to think in more experience, near experience, rich ways of thinking about the world, which is what artists, I think, tend to do. So I'd like to do that.
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I'd like to write a book about advertisement, aphentasia. In fact, that's what I'm planning to work on next. I've always been fascinated by what is distinctive about us as human beings, and I'd quite like to write something about that. And I think the answer is, as is often the case, no one thing.
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It's a very complicated story, and I keep a little notebook in which I jot down the features which are alleged to be the distinctive mark of mark of man and woman, if you like. I think putting them together would be fun. So those are my next two projects. And then I if I have time, I'd quite like to write something about neurology and how we get diagnoses right and wrong in neurology, but that's a more, more specifically professional book, I guess, excellent.
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Well, we really look forward to seeing you on your next work, because you know that your books are incredibly enjoyable and informative. So really appreciate you spending time with us.
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Okay, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
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Thank you, Adam and folks make sure you get your copy of the shape of things unseen if you want to explore and learn more about this topic.
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And until next time, remember the world is evolving. Arjun,