9. The concept of “imagination” in psychology. Types of imagination. Ways to create images of the imagination.

All representations of the imagination are built from material received in past perceptions and stored in memory. The activity of the imagination is always the processing of those data that are delivered by sensations and perceptions. For example, a person who has not been to the Far North can imagine the tundra only because he has seen images of it in pictures and photographs, has actually seen individual elements included in the landscape of the tundra - he has seen a snow-covered plain, small bushes, he has seen deer in a zoo .

Imagination - psychic a process involving the creation of new images (representations) by processing the material of perceptions and ideas obtained in previous experience. It is unique to humans. It is a cognitive process. The specificity lies in the processing of past experience. It is inextricably linked with the process of memory (memorization, preservation, reproduction and forgetting). Transforms what is in memory.

Types of imagination: 1 ) recreating imagination - unfolds on the basis of a description, story, drawing, diagram, symbol. 2) creative imagination - the creation of a completely new, original image that has not existed before. 3) a dream is a special form of imagination, localized in a sufficient future and uniting ideas about a high quality life.

Types of imagination:

""Passive imagination: 1. intentional; 2. unintentional.

Passive intentional imagination: dreams are images of fantasy, deliberately evoked, but not associated with the will aimed at bringing them into reality.

Passive unintentional imagination: in a half-asleep state, in a state of passion, in sleep (dreaming), with pathological disorders of consciousness (hallucinations), etc. It occurs when the activity of consciousness, the second signaling system, is weakened, during temporary inactivity of a person.

Active imagination: 1 creative; 2 recreating.

Imagination, which is based on the creation of images that correspond to the description, is called recreating.

Creative imagination involves the independent creation of new images, which are realized in original and valuable products of activity.

Techniques (methods) for creating images of the imagination: 1) agglutination - the creation of a new image by combining fragments of different thoughts and words into one whole. observed in schizophrenia (in particular, it is one of the mechanisms for the formation of neologisms) and in focal cortical speech disorders (leads to the formation of paraphasias such as contaminations.) 2) accentuation is one of the ways to create imaginary images. bring to the forefront, emphasize some idea. 3) schematization - creating images using diagrams and paintings. 4) typification - selection or development of standard designs or production processes based on general ones; generalization, expression of general ideas, processes and phenomena; highlighting the essential, recurring in homogeneous phenomena and its embodiment in a specific base.

The synthesis of ideas in the processes of imagination is carried out in various forms.

1) agglutination - involves the “gluing” of various parts in everyday life of unconnected qualities, properties, parts.

2) hyperbolization - characterized not only by an increase or decrease in the object, but also by a change in the number of parts of the object or their displacement.

3) sharpening - emphasizing any features (caricatures, caricatures).

4) schematization - individual ideas merge, differences are smoothed out, and similarities appear clearly.

5) typification - highlighting the essential, repeating, embodying them in a specific image.

Development of imagination.

The game is characterized by the rapid development of imagination processes. Imagination is formed in various types of activities and fades when the child stops acting.

Fantasy acts as one of the most important conditions for the assimilation of social experience. Fantasy is an important condition for the development of a child’s personality.

Dream - images of the desired future.

Imagination- the ability of the human mind to construct images and assumptions, which is categorically unacceptable in the work of a Christian ascetic.

The activity of human imagination is inextricably linked with the power of the human mind. This activity is quite acceptable in many areas of human creativity - science, art, etc. However, it is deprived of all meaning in the life of prayer and has no positive meaning for knowledge.

The source of spiritual life is Himself, and not man-made images and guesses. The knowledge of God descends from God Himself, given through His Divine. It cannot be achieved through one’s own human efforts, and therefore requires a decisive ban on the activity of the imagination. A person knows God to the extent that God Himself reveals Himself to Him. The created creature is not able to replace this with the activity of the created mind, and any such replacement leads to the spiritual degradation of man, to spiritual death. If in the field of science and culture imagination has a positive value, then in the matter of knowledge of God it can cause harm to human imagination, which replaces God with its sensual images.

The holy fathers contrast the imagination: “One image of sobriety is to constantly watch the imagination, or otherwise, for excuses: for without imagination Satan cannot create thoughts and present them for evil deception” ().

“Imagination and memory are nothing more than the impression of all those sensory objects that we have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched. We can say that imagination and memory are one internal common sense that imagines and remembers everything that the external five senses had to experience before. And in some way, external feelings and sensory objects are like a seal, and the imagination is like the impression of a seal, teaches St. . – God is beyond all feelings and everything sensual, beyond every form, color, measure and place, he is completely ugly and formless, and although he is everywhere, he is above all; then He is beyond all imagination... From here it naturally follows that imagination is such a power of the soul that, by its nature, does not have the ability to remain in the area of ​​unity with God.”

“The mind, during prayer, must be kept, and with all care, formless, rejecting all images drawn in the imaginary faculty: because the mind in prayer stands before the invisible God, Who cannot be represented in any material image. Images, if the mind allows them in prayer, will become an impenetrable curtain, a wall between the mind and God. ...

If, during your prayer, the form of Christ, or an Angel, or some Saint, - in a word, any image - appeared to you sensually or was depicted in you mentally, in no way accept this phenomenon as true, do not turn to it no attention, don't engage in conversation with him. Otherwise, you will certainly be subjected to deception and severe mental damage, which is what happened to many. A person, until he is renewed by the Holy Spirit, is incapable of communicating with holy spirits. He, as still in the realm of the fallen spirits, in captivity and slavery to them, is able to see only them, and they often, noticing in him a high opinion of himself and self-delusion, appear to him in the form of bright angels, in the form of Christ Himself, for the destruction of his soul.

The most dangerous, incorrect form of prayer occurs when the person praying with the power of his imagination creates dreams or pictures, apparently borrowing them from the Holy Scriptures, but in essence from his own condition, from his fall, from his sinfulness, from his self-delusion. With these pictures he flatters his conceit, his vanity, his arrogance, his pride, he deceives himself. It is obvious that everything created by the dreaminess of our fallen nature, perverted by the fall of nature, does not actually exist, it is fiction and lies, so characteristic and so beloved of the fallen angel. A dreamer, from the first step on the path of prayer, leaves the realm of truth, enters the realm of lies, the realm of Satan, and arbitrarily submits to the influence of Satan.

Daydreaming in prayer is even more harmful than absent-mindedness. Absent-mindedness makes prayer fruitless, and daydreaming causes false fruits: self-delusion and (so called by the holy fathers) demonic delusion.”
St.

Along with perception, memory and thinking, imagination plays an important role in human activity. In the process of reflecting the surrounding world, a person, along with the perception of what is acting on him at the moment, or the visual representation of what influenced him before, creates new images.

Imagination is the mental process of creating something new in the form of an image, idea or idea.

A person can mentally imagine something that he did not perceive or do in the past; he may have images of objects and phenomena that he has not encountered before.

The process of imagination is peculiar only to man and is a necessary condition for his work activity.

Imagination is always directed towards the practical activities of man. Before doing anything, a person imagines what needs to be done and how he will do it. Thus, he already creates in advance the image of a material thing that will be manufactured in his subsequent practical activities. This ability of a person to imagine in advance the final result of his work, as well as the process of creating a material thing, sharply distinguishes human activity from the “activity” of animals, sometimes very skillful.

The physiological basis of imagination is the formation of new combinations from those temporary connections that have already been formed in past experience. At the same time, simple updating of existing temporary connections does not yet lead to the creation of a new one. The creation of a new one presupposes a combination that is formed from temporary connections that have not previously entered into combination with each other. In this case, the second signal system, the word, is important. The process of imagination is a joint work of both signaling systems. All visual images are inextricably linked with him. As a rule, the word serves as a source of the appearance of images of the imagination, controls the path of their formation, and is a means of retaining, consolidating, and changing them.

Imagination is always a certain departure from reality. But in any case, the source of imagination is objective reality.

In psychology, a distinction is made between voluntary and involuntary imagination. The first manifests itself, for example, during the purposeful solution of scientific, technical and artistic problems in the presence of a conscious and reflected search dominant, the second - in dreams, so-called altered states of consciousness, etc.

A dream is a special form of imagination. It is addressed to the sphere of a more or less distant future and does not imply the immediate achievement of a real result, as well as its complete coincidence with the desired image. At the same time, a dream can become a strong motivating factor in creative search.

Types of imagination

There are several types of imagination, among which the main ones are passive and active. Passive, in turn, is divided into voluntary (daydreaming, daydreaming) and involuntary (hypnotic state, dream fantasy). Active imagination includes artistic, creative, critical, reconstructive and anticipatory. Close to these types of imagination is empathy - the ability to understand another person, to be imbued with his thoughts and feelings, to sympathize, rejoice, and empathize.

Active imagination is always aimed at solving a creative or personal problem. A person operates with fragments, units of specific information in a certain area, their movement in various combinations relative to each other. Stimulation of this process creates objective opportunities for the emergence of original new connections between the conditions recorded in the memory of a person and society. In an active imagination there is little daydreaming and “groundless” fantasy. Active imagination is directed to the future and operates with time as a well-defined category (that is, a person does not lose his sense of reality, does not place himself in the grip of temporary connections and circumstances). Active imagination is directed more outward, a person is mainly occupied with the environment, society, activity and less with internal subjective problems. Such imagination is finally awakened by a task and directed by it; it is determined by volitional efforts and is amenable to volitional control.

Recreating imagination is one of the types of active imagination, in which new images and ideas are constructed in people in accordance with externally perceived stimulation in the form of verbal messages, diagrams, conventional images, signs, etc.

Despite the fact that the products of the reconstructive imagination are completely new images that have not previously been perceived by a person, this type of imagination is based on previous experience. K. D. Ushinsky viewed imagination as a new combination of past impressions and past experience, believing that the recreating imagination is a product of the influence of the material world on the human brain. Basically, the reconstructive imagination is a process during which recombination occurs, the reconstruction of previous perceptions in a new combination.

Anticipatory imagination underlies a very important and necessary human ability - to anticipate future events, foresee the results of one’s actions, etc. Etymologically, the word “foresee” is closely related and comes from the same root as the word “see,” which shows the importance of understanding the situation and transferring certain elements of it into the future based on knowledge or predicting the logic of the development of events.

Thanks to this ability, a person can see with his mind's eye what will happen to him, other people or things around him in the future. F. Lersch called this the “Promethean (looking forward) function of the imagination,” which depends on the magnitude of the life perspective: the younger the person, the more and more clearly the forward orientation of his imagination is represented. In older and older people, the imagination is more focused on events of the past.

Creative imagination- this is a type of imagination during which a person independently creates new images and ideas that are valuable to other people or society as a whole, and which are embodied (“crystallized”) into specific original products of activity. Creative imagination is a necessary component and basis of all types of human creative activity.

Images of creative imagination are created through various techniques of intellectual operations. In the structure of creative imagination, two types of such intellectual operations are distinguished. The first is the operations through which ideal images are formed, and the second is the operations on the basis of which the finished product is processed.

One of the first psychologists to study these processes, T. Ribot identified two main operations: dissociation and association. Dissociation- a negative and preparatory operation, during which the sensory experience is fragmented. As a result of such preliminary processing of experience, its elements are able to enter into a new combination.

Without prior dissociation, creative imagination is unthinkable. Dissociation is the first stage of creative imagination and preparation of material. The impossibility of dissociation is a significant obstacle to creative imagination.

Association- creation of a holistic image from elements of isolated image units. The association gives rise to new combinations, new images. There are other intellectual operations, for example, the ability to think by analogy with particular and purely accidental similarities.

Passive imagination subject to internal, subjective factors.

Passive imagination is subordinated to desires, which are thought to be realized in the process of fantasizing. In the images of passive imagination, the unsatisfied, mostly unconscious needs of the individual are “satisfied”. The images and ideas of passive imagination are aimed at strengthening and preserving positively colored emotions and at repressing and reducing negative emotions and affects.

During the processes of passive imagination, unreal, imaginary satisfaction of any need or desire occurs. In this, passive imagination differs from realistic thinking, which is aimed at real, and not imaginary, satisfaction of needs.

The materials of passive imagination, like active imagination, are images, ideas, elements of concepts and other information gleaned through experience.

Synthesis, realized in the processes of imagination, is carried out in various forms:

• - agglutination - “gluing together” incompatible qualities and parts that are different in everyday life;
• - hyperbolization - increasing or decreasing an object, as well as changing individual parts;
• - schematization - individual ideas merge, differences are smoothed out, and similarities appear clearly;
• - typification - highlighting the essential, repeated in homogeneous images;
• - sharpening - emphasizing any individual characteristics.

- Imagination. Impact on life
— The power of imagination changes reality
— Mental training method

Imagination is the ability to form mental images of something that cannot be perceived by the senses. The ability of the mind to construct psychological scenes, objects or events that do not exist, do not exist, and did not happen in the past. Memory is actually a manifestation of fantasy.

Every person has some ability of imagination. In some it may be highly developed, while in others it may appear in a very weak form. This manifests itself to varying degrees in different people. Imagination allows you to imagine the whole world in your mind.

This makes it possible to look at any situation from a different point of view, and allows you to mentally explore the past and future. It manifests itself in various forms, one of which is dreams. Although simply daydreaming can make you impractical.

Some dreams, when not doing something that requires attention, provide temporary happiness, peace of mind and relief from stress. You can travel at the speed of light in your imagination anywhere without any obstacles.

This makes it possible to feel free, albeit temporarily and only in the mind, from tasks, difficulties and unpleasant circumstances. Imagination is not limited to just seeing pictures in your head. It includes all five senses and sensations. Can you imagine a physical sensation, smell, sound, taste, feeling or emotion.

Some people find it easier to see mental pictures, others find it easier to imagine feelings, and some feel more comfortable imagining the sensations of one of the five senses. Imagination training makes it possible to integrate all the senses.
A strong and developed imagination does not make you a dreamer and impractical.

On the contrary, it strengthens your creativity and is also an excellent tool for creating and reconstructing your world and life. This is a great power that can change your whole life. It is widely used in magick, creative visualization and affirmation. They are the creator and circumstance of the event.

When you know how to work with it, you can make your wishes come true.
Imagination plays a big role and is of great importance in the life of each of us. This is much more than simple daydreaming. We all use it, consciously or unconsciously, in most of our daily activities.

We use our imagination when planning parties, trips, work or meetings. We use it when we describe events, explain how to find a certain street, write, tell a story, or prepare a cake.

Imagination is the creative force needed to invent a tool, design a dress or building, draw a picture or write a book. The creative power of imagination plays a big role in any field to achieve success. What we imagine with faith and feeling comes to us.

These are power, creative visualization, positive thinking and affirmations.
Visualizing an object or situation, a frequently repeated mental image, attracts the object or situation into our lives. This suggests that we need to think only in a positive way about our desires.

Otherwise, we can create life, events, situations and people that we really don’t want. In fact, this happens to most of us because we do not use the power of imagination correctly. If we do not recognize how important the power of imagination is, even if it is rebellion, your life cannot be happy and successful, as you would like to see it.

For some reason, most people prefer to think in a negative way. They will not succeed. They expect the worst, and when they fail, they believe that fate is against them. This attitude must be changed, and accordingly, then life will improve.

Understanding how to use your imagination correctly, and putting this knowledge into practice, for your own benefit and for others, will set you on the golden path to success, satisfaction and happiness.

— The power of imagination changes reality

Scientists have proven that the power of imagination really changes reality.

Psychologists Christopher Davoli and Richard Abrams from Washington University in St. Louis (USA) have proven that imagination influences existing reality.

During the experiment, the subjects were required to quickly find the letters pre-selected by the experimenter among those scattered across the monitor screen and mark the completion of the task by pressing a button. During the test, participants were asked to imagine one of two situations: in the first of them, the subject holds the monitor with both “imaginary” hands, and in the second, his hands are behind his back. The results showed that when mentally changing their posture, volunteers spent significantly more time searching for letters.

Thus, the effectiveness of performing a certain type of task can increase not only with a physical change in body position, but also with a mental change in posture. According to scientists, this proves the truth of the concept put forward by sports psychologists: with the power of imagination you can really change reality. The main thing is to believe in what you see. works wonders.

Many people devote a lot of time to improving their body - a swimming pool, horizontal bar, gym and much more serve to build muscles - but it is impossible to increase gray matter by such means. But meditation helps to increase the volume of some parts of the brain. Scientists from the University of California (Los Angeles) came to this conclusion.

Using high-precision brain scans, it was found that people who regularly practice meditation have significantly larger areas associated with the manifestation of emotions than the control group. People who regularly engage in meditation often show positive emotions, have the ability to maintain peace of mind and engage strangers people into a caring attitude towards others.

All 22 subjects had been meditating for quite a long time: from 5 to 46 years, the average duration was 24 years. Most of them devote 10 to 90 minutes a day to this activity.

— Mental training method

The power of imagination is the same skill. And it needs to be pumped up, like many other things! There is even a .

1) Take 20 minutes to spend in a private, quiet environment. This can be done in the morning immediately after waking up or in the evening before going to bed. You can also work out during your lunch break if there is a park nearby.

2) Relax. And imagine the situation that you want to see, imagine what is so important to you. The picture should be bright and colorful. See how well events turn out and everything happens the way you want.

3) Turn on the sound. Bring the picture to life. Hear what people say to you, what you say back to them. What other sounds are heard nearby - a car horn, the sound of rain, the ticking of a clock, or perhaps a pleasant melody.

4) Feel yourself in this situation. How are you dressed? What is your hand touching? What is your posture, how do you hold your head, how do you stand or sit, how confident do you feel.

5) Inhale the smells - what does your picture smell like - freshly ground coffee, autumn leaves... What emotions do these smells evoke in you?

6) Feel satisfaction, inspiration and joy from the result.

7) Finish your exercise.

IMPORTANT! Conduct such classes regularly and constantly. Then your consciousness will learn to quickly process the request received and implement it.

The material was prepared by Dilyara specifically for the site

Imagination is a special form of the human psyche, standing apart from other mental processes and at the same time occupying an intermediate position between perception, thinking and memory. The specificity of this form of mental process is that imagination is probably characteristic only of humans and is strangely connected with the “mental” of all mental processes and states. The latter means that the ideal and mysterious character of the psyche is not manifested in anything other than the imagination.

As for the mystery of this phenomenon, it lies in the fact that until now we know almost nothing specifically about the mechanism of imagination, including its anatomical and physiological basis.

Effective beings, people not only contemplate and cognize, but also change the world, transform it. In order to transform reality in practice, you need to be able to transform it mentally. Imagination satisfies this need. Imagination is inextricably linked to our ability to change the world, effectively transform reality and create something new. Therefore, A.M. Gorky was right when he said that “it is fiction and design that raises a person above the animal” - fiction, first of all, as a plan.

Imagination in the broadest sense of the word is sometimes understood as any process occurring in images. In this case, memory, reproducing images of what was previously perceived, seems to be “only one of the types of imagination.” Based on this, they come to distinguish between reproductive and creative imagination and identify the former with memory.

Since, on the one hand, imagination always relies to some extent on past experience, and on the other hand, figurative reproduction usually, as research shows, to some extent transforms what is being reproduced, there is undoubtedly a connection between imagination and figurative memory.

But no less indisputable is the existence of differences between them. The main difference between imagination itself and figurative memory is associated with a different attitude to reality. Memory images are the reproduction of past experiences. The function of memory is to preserve the results of past experience as intact as possible, the function of imagination is to transform them.

For imagination in those higher forms in which its specificity is fully manifested, no less characteristic is a different attitude towards past experience in general and directly given - the consciousness of a certain freedom in relation to it, which makes it possible to transform it. This freedom in relation to the present means, first of all, a certain psychological independence in relation to the past. This distinction between imagination and memory comes from the relationship, on the one hand, with the reproduced images of memory, and on the other, with the imagination of objective reality. But in both of these processes one common component can be identified, namely the very emergence and formation of a holistic image-representation, that is, the process of which the representation is the product or content. The general laws of this process are of significant importance for the psychology of art.

Only a person can have imagination in its own, very specific sense of the word. Only a person who, as a subject of social practice, really transforms the world, develops true imagination.

Any imagination generates something new, changes, transforms what is given to us in perception. This change, transformation, deviation from the given can be expressed, firstly, in the fact that a person, based on knowledge and relying on experience, imagines, that is, creates for himself a picture of something that he himself has never actually seen. For example, a message about a flight into space encourages our imagination to paint pictures of life in zero gravity, fantastic in its unusualness, surrounded by stars and planets.

The imagination can, anticipating the future, create an image, a picture of something that never happened. So the astronauts could imagine in their imagination a flight into space and a landing on the Moon when it was just a dream, not yet realized and it is unknown whether it is feasible.

The imagination can finally make such a departure from reality that it creates a fantastic picture that clearly deviates from reality. But even in this case, it to some extent reflects this reality. And the imagination is the more fruitful and valuable the more it, while transforming reality and deviating from it, still takes into account its essential aspects and most significant features.

To study the cognitive role of imagination, it is necessary to clarify its features and identify its real nature. In the scientific literature there are many approaches to defining imagination. Let's look at some of them and define the main features of imagination.

S.L. Rubinstein writes: “Imagination is a departure from past experience, it is the transformation of what is given and the generation of new images on this basis.”

L.S. Vygotsky believes that “the imagination does not repeat impressions that were accumulated before, but builds some new series from previously accumulated impressions. Thus, introducing new things into our impressions and changing these impressions, so that as a result a new, previously non-existent image appears, forms the basis of that activity that we call imagination.”

According to E.I. Ignatiev, “the main feature of the imagination process is the transformation and processing of data and materials of past experience, resulting in a new idea.”

And the “Philosophical Dictionary” defines imagination as “the ability to create new sensory or mental images in the human mind based on the transformation of impressions received from reality.”

As can be seen from the definitions, an essential feature of imagination is the subject’s ability to create new images. But this is not enough, because then it is impossible to distinguish between imagination and thinking. After all, human thinking (the creation of cognitive images through conclusions, generalizations, analysis, synthesis) cannot simply be identified with imagination, because the creation of new knowledge and concepts can occur without the participation of imagination.

Many researchers note that imagination is a process of creating new images that occurs visually. This tendency classifies imagination as a form of sensory reflection, while the other believes that imagination creates not only new sensory images, but also produces new thoughts.

One of the features characteristic of imagination is that it is associated not only with thinking, but also with sensory data. There is no imagination without thinking, but it cannot be reduced to logic, since it always presupposes the transformation of sensory material.

Thus, it is obvious that imagination is both the creation of new images and the transformation of past experience, and that such a transformation takes place with the organic unity of the sensory and rational.