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Making it up. Playing house. Using our imagination. These are activities we play as young children and then believe that we can grow up and grow out of it. It wasn’t until last week when the belief that I don’t do those things anymore all changed for me. Even if we tell ourselves we need to “grow up” and we are too old for playing imagination games, our brain has other ideas. Our brain is constantly imagining, but I think we need to define this term differently in the context of last week’s discussion. Your imagination is a product of the creative part of your mind which is used for constructing a world of ideas and images which may not seem “possible” or are somewhat removed from the reality that you experience. (Note that this is my definition, and is a construction of how I view my imagination.)

We have this tool, that I am calling the imagination which fills in the world as you want to see it. In our society we believe that we control our imagination and when and how we use it. After our discussion of the brain last week, I am not sure that this is really true. Last week’s discussion suggests that imagination may in fact be an innate part of the brain and may be in action much more than we have previously appreciated. Your brain is constantly using your imagination to fill in the gaps and to finish out the details of the picture you have of reality. Your imagination is working to create the picture in your brain and thus also what you see in the outside world. I don’t know if the imagination is really “making it all up,” since I don’t think that your brain is trying to fool your body into thinking reality is something different than it, your imagination is simply helping to tailor your reality to what your nervous system can handle.

It doesn’t seem that odd to me that the “picture in the head” is different for different people. There is a degree to which we do and process much of the sensations around us in similar ways, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the same experience. My ‘blue’ may be very different from yours, but the point is that it is your picture and it works for your sensory system.

The craziest part about all of this is when we think about the role (or lack of a role) the I-function plays in all of this. At the beginning of the course I feel like we determined the I-function to be an integral part of the human brain and we set it aside. Now something creative and requiring interpretation (i.e. the picture in the head) which I would assume to go through the I-function doesn’t. It definitely seems a bit counter-intuitive. The I-function isn’t needed for perception!?! We only need it for accessing this visual information and being conscious of it. I am not yet sure what this says about experience and the I-function’s involvement in consciousness and thus reality. It seems like reality may in fact be out of our conscious control and is a byproduct of the nervous system. We can then only access this byproduct via the I-function; each of these conclusions seem a bit wild to me, probably just because I have never thought about all this before.

Furthermore, what does this suggest about human instincts? In one of my posts earlier in the semester I was thinking about the influence of the I-function and its relationship to instincts. And if there is not a place in the brain for a picture, where do we get the concrete reaction which we attribute to instincts or instinctive actions? If our brain is filling in information/is taking in information but we are not conscious of it, then instincts are not really as we say they are. Instincts are actually then just reactions to information that is already present but not interpreted by the I-function. But then who or what is choosing to react? What is it about the information that causes us to react in the way we do? Can our imagination not fill it in or there are too many options? What causes instinctive actions and how does this relate to the “picture in our head”? So many questions!