I doubt that there is a specific gene for imagination it seems to me it may be far more global than could be encompassed by one set of genetic instructions. Does poetry or its ilk serve an evolutionary purpose? Do dreams? Does one’s Muse…? All interesting questions for sure, but perhaps the wrong ones with which to begin the quest to understand. I suppose what I’m really asking is why it exists at all. Or is that merely another chicken versus egg conundrum drummed up by an overactive imagination? But what is imagination? Is it a luxury -a chance evolutionary exaptation of some otherwise less essential neural circuit- or a purpose-made system to analyse novel features in the environment? A mechanism for evaluating counterfactuals -the what-ifs?Ī quirkier question, perhaps, would be to ask if it might predate language itself -be the framework, the scaffolding upon which words and thoughts are draped. Shakespeare had a keen appreciation of the value of imagination, as that quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests. Theseus, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven
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