by Jill Barrett, Evolve CEO
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.””
On a chilly, overcast day last December, I held a coaching session with a young IT analyst at a multinational media and entertainment company. We were discussing creativity and imagination. As a young child, Jennifer (not her real name) had “created entire worlds” with her siblings and friends. Now, in her early 30s, she is sitting here telling me that she is not an imaginative person. She has no opportunity to innovate at her job, she concluded, after doing a coaching homework assignment that week to test the hypothesis.
Why does imagination matter, anyway?, she asked. Oh lots of reasons, I assured her. In the context of coaching, imagination is where it all begins.
I want to change but I can’t
People everywhere face a problem: They know they need to change and adapt but changing behavior is hard, even when new habits can mean the difference between life and death. In studies of patients who have undergone coronary bypass surgery, only one in nine people, on average, adopt the healthier everyday habits required to stay well.
During the last three and a half decades, scientists have gained a clearer view of human nature and behavior change because of the integration of psychology and neuroscience. Imaging technologies along with brain wave analysis technologies, have revealed neural connections in the living human brain. Research and analysis of these connections have led to an increasingly sophisticated body of theoretical work linking the brain (the physical organ) with the mind (the human consciousness that thinks, feels, acts, and perceives).
The implications of this research are very exciting. Science is confirming what some of us have known from personal experience: a unique personal vision and the associated expectations shape reality. People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive. Change your vision, change your reality.
How Vision shapes reality
Image: GDJ, pixabay.com, CC0 1.0
Cognitive scientists have discovered that people’s mental maps, their narratives, expectations and moods, play a central role in human perception. This has been well demonstrated by the placebo effect. When researchers tell people they have been administered a pain-reducing agent—which is really a sugar pill—they experience a marked and systematic reduction in pain. The visualization of pain relief causes the person to repeatedly focus his or her attention on the experience of pain relief, so that the brain’s pain-relief circuits are activated, causing a decrease in the pain sensation. People experience what they imagine themselves to experience.
The impact of visioning (or mental maps or mental models) suggests that one way to start to change your life is by cultivating moments of insight. Those Aha! moments we all crave. We can create these events or experiences by interrupting or provoking ourselves with self-inquiry, in effect, to inspire new, more helpful visions and expectations.
A study out of Northwestern University’s Institute for Neuroscience found sudden bursts of high-frequency 40 Hz oscillations (gamma waves) in the brain appearing just prior to moments of insight. This fluctuation creates links across many parts of the brain. That same study found activation of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, the part of the brain that is involved in perceiving and processing music, spatial and structural relations (such as those in a building) and other complex aspects of the environment. The findings indicate that when we have a moment of insight, a complex set of new connections is being created. These connections have the potential to enhance our mental resources and create new pathways in our brain.
Whose vision is it anyway?
For insights to be useful, they need to be generated from within, not given to individuals as advice. People will experience the adrenaline-like rush of insight only if they go through the process of making connections themselves. The moment of insight is known to be an exalted and energizing experience. This rush of energy may be central to facilitating change. It can strongly override the internal forces, like the fear response of the amygdala, and external forces, like tribal pressure, that are set up to keep change from occurring.
Accomplishing this feat requires us to call upon our capacity for self-observation and self-reflection. One way to do this is to ask ourselves big questions that are self-generated, interesting and just enough of a stretch from our current way of thinking.
Painting mental pictures
Let’s go back to Jennifer. Why does imagination matter? One of the reasons is that it will help her turn her attention to the new circuits she needs to create to achieve her objectives in the future. As she considers the year ahead, Jennifer could ask herself, “What could be exciting and enthralling to step into?” This line of questioning might provoke her to have an insight that inspires a new year resolution. She can deepen her experience by approaching it just after a mindfulness meditation or a peaceful time in nature or a nourishing experience with a friend.
In the course of business and in personal life, we’ve been taught that by identifying the source of a problem, we can go directly to solving it. Based on what we now know about the brain, a better alternative would be for Jennifer to paint a broad picture of where she sees herself in, say one year from now, without specifically identifying the changes that she will need to make. Her goal for herself could be to picture a new way of being in her mind, and in the process develop energizing new insights that have the potential to become hardwired. This is the power of visioning.
In a later post, I’ll share how Jennifer accessed her imagination to create a vision that is leading to permanent new behaviors through focus and attention density. The neuroscientist’s term for the latter is self-directed neuroplasticity.