Your imagination is what allows you to form new ideas and mental images, even though what you’re imagining isn’t present to your senses.

It’s why you can be empathetic and understanding toward others despite not sharing the same experiences, and how great authors and filmmakers can dream up worlds and galaxies they’ve never visited.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the different types of imagination, and how you use them to formulate new ideas.

8 Types of Imagination

According to Dr. Murray Hunter of the the University of Malaysia Perlis has identified 8 types of imagination, which he says we use on a regular basis:

1. Effectuative Imagination

Effectuative imagination involves the synthesis of existing ideas and information to form a new thought or idea. This type of imagination is often triggered or guided by your own random thoughts or memories, especially of your past experiences.

Reading is one activity that will offer you more information and ideas to synthesize, and therefore fuel your effectuative imagination. That’s why if you want to be a better writer, it’s important to read as much as you can. To be more creative, it’s necessary to study existing ideas.

2. Intellectual or Constructive

Intellectual, or constructive, imagination involves a very deliberate process that starts with a definite idea and is used when considering or developing different hypotheses and possibilities based on available information.

Say you want to write a groundbreaking book. Sure, a lot of your ideas might come spontaneously, or be inspired by your own past experiences (like effectuative imagination).

But most likely, you’ll want to be more intentional in your planning. Your extensive research will be guided by your imagination, and you’ll want to make sure your idea or creation is as complete as it can be. This type of imagination is commonly exercised in philosophy, politics, or management.

3. Imaginative Fantasy

This type of fantasy can be guided or unguided, and involves generating new ideas from scratch. It’s the type that comes to most of our minds when we think of the word “imagination.”

Although still triggered by some source of inspiration, you’ll likely wander off to wherever the initial idea takes you, exploring ideas that may or many not be rooted in reality. This can lead you to create new stories, pictures, poems, songs, and other ideas.

4. Empathy

Empathy is our ability to understand and share the feelings of others, or to put yourself “in their shoes.”

For example, to invent a life-changing product that will help millions of people with disabilities even if you don’t have a disability yourself, you’d need to have enough empathy to imagine and understand the unique challenges those people face.

Similarly, if you’re a writer, you need to experience empathy to write diverse characters, otherwise the life of each character will mirror yours (which might be fine for one story, but it would get pretty boring if you write more).

In many ways, empathy both requires imagination (to understand and feel something you haven’t actually experienced personally), and contributes to it (feeling empathetic toward someone’s situation might inspire you with new ideas).

5. Strategic

Strategic imagination involves the ability to envision multiple possibilities of what could be, and to weigh the possible risks, benefits, and outcomes.

Someone who is an avid planner and seems to be “prepared for anything” is likely someone who has a strong strategic imagination.

However, in addition to considering possible risks, they’re also able to spot and evaluate potential opportunities.

6. Emotional

Emotional imagination refers to our ability to extend emotional dispositions into emotional scenarios.

We know that three-headed monsters aren’t real, but yet many of us still experience feelings of fear when we see them in movies. That’s an example of emotional imagination—we can imagine that the monster is real, and we feel the very real emotions of fear as a result.

If you want to elicit certain emotions from others, you’ll need to use your emotional imagination and draw on your awareness of human emotions, which is why this type is in many ways related to empathy.

7. Dreams

Dreams are an unconscious type of imagination. They consist of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur while we sleep.

In most cases, you can’t really use your imagination to control what you dream; they are unconscious events, after all.

You can, however, use your dreams as a source of inspiration for other creative endeavors, which is why it can be very helpful to keep a dream journal, so you can recall and reflect on your dreams.

8. Memory Reconstruction

It’s pretty rare for two people to recall the same event in the same exact way. That’s of course because we all experience moments differently, but also because memory is selective, and reconstructed to fit your view of the world. Memories are also influenced by emotion.

To retrieve your memories of people, things, or events, you must use your imagination, which often fills in gaps.

Is Imagination Good For the Brain?

A brain imaging study led by the University of Colorado Boulder and Icahn School of Medicine suggests that imagination can be a powerful tool for helping people overcome phobias or post-traumatic stress, because imagining a threat lights up similar regions of the brain as actually experiencing the threat does.

If you have a fear of flying on airplanes, you may have heard of simulated flight experiences that are designed to help people overcome that fear. Such trainings are effective because when you imagine something that scares you (which could be a turbulent flight, a large spider, or a hissing snake), your brain and body react much the same as they would if you were experiencing the real thing.

According to a neurological study, being imaginative creates more neurons in your brain. And, if you continue to exercise your imagination later in life, you can be up to 73% less likely to develop memory problems that lead to dementia.

Use Your Imagination

Exercising your imagination can lead you to be more creative, so you can find innovative solutions to problems, overcome writer’s block, or simply have more fun by channeling your inner child.

If you want to practice flexing those creative muscles right now, try one of these 70 creative writing prompts that will inspire your imagination.

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!

 

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