Bruce Bower writes in Science News:
Marjorie Taylor of the University of Oregon in Eugene belongs to a contingent of researchers who regard imagination as a thinking tool. Kids regularly use their imaginations to figure out how the world works and to address mysterious issues, she notes, such as what God looks like and what happened in their families or in the world before they were born. Children also apply fantasy to sidestep pain. “Fantasy is alive and well in children’s lives,” Taylor says. According to Taylor, adults as well as children are imaginative thinkers—even while posing as staunch realists. From plumbers to prime ministers, individuals encounter and converse with others purely in their own thoughts, ponder the future, and rework past events in pleasing ways. “Imagination is about considering possibilities,” Taylor says. “That’s fundamental to how people think.”
A 3-year-old boy enthusiastically describes a scary creature after Harvard University psychologist Paul L. Harris shows the boy a box and asks him to imagine that a monster lives inside it. Nevertheless, the boy reassures Harris that a monster won’t pop out if they open the box. The monster is only make-believe, the boy declares with an air of satisfaction. Harris then leaves the room for a few minutes. Alone with his thoughts, the youngster eyes the box nervously as he moves away from it.
This type of response, which kids regularly display by around age 2, doesn’t mean that they fail to distinguish fantasy from reality, in Harris’ view. Adults react in comparable ways, he says. In one experiment that he performed, adults filled a bottle with tap water and wrote the word cyanide on a label that they attached to the bottle. The volunteers knew that they were only pretending that the water was poisonous, but most wouldn’t drink it. Taylor points out another example: Grown-ups get “really scared, not pretend scared,” while watching horror movies.
In his book The Work of the Imagination (2000, Oxford), Harris proposed that people have evolved a brain system that goes to work appraising emotionally charged situations, whether or not they’re real. In fact, responding emotionally to imagined scenarios aids decision making, he holds. For example, Harris has found a deficit among people who don’t show physical signs of emotional involvement, such as an increased heart rate, while reading a suspenseful fictional passage. Such individuals score lower on tests of reasoning and logic than do people who show strong physical and emotional reactions to such tales.
From around the time that children begin to talk, Harris argues, they contemplate not only current and past events in the real world but also imaginary versions of the present and the past, future possibilities, and spiritual or supernatural concerns. He says that many other developmental psychologists neglect imagination’s role in mental development. They assume that children generate reality-based theories primarily to explain what they observe around them, much as scientists do.
Read more here.