Imagination is an integral part of human activity that distinguishes us from animals. A person is able to perceive the world, reflect it in his mind, give it a personal assessment, change it in his imagination, and then draw up a plan for the implementation of the transformation outside of himself, thanks to the imagination and its constructive levers.

Imagination is a mental process in the human brain that occurs only on the basis of deep knowledge, perception of the environment and its further transformation (taking into account personal characteristics) into images with a partially changed structure, properties or completely new ones.

Human consciousness perceives the surrounding world, applies it to its receptors, makes changes and, on their basis, transforms.

Imagination functions

3 main types

involuntary

These are all images that suddenly appear in the head, and are not related to the setting of tasks and plans.

They appear and disappear. For example, a girl, seeing a couple who is getting married, for a moment imagines herself in the place of the bride. Such images do not carry any information or a message to action. This is passive imagination. Another example is the birth of images in a dream.

Arbitrary

A person consciously recreates the images, sees the goal and, manipulating them, plans actions to achieve, strives for the desired result. Such imagination is divided into two subspecies:

1. Recreative or reproductive;
2. creative.

The essence of reproductive thinking is to use ready-made data, acquired knowledge about existing moments stored in memory.

Creativity is a psychological process, which is characterized by the creation of completely new forms of vision, the creation of original objects that have not yet been.

dreaming

A more passionate mental process to create the desired images. A dream turns into an unrealistic form if it is divorced from reality and there are no plans to achieve it. An impossible dream is called a dream.

Fantasy is called images composed by consciousness that never existed. Finds applications in myths, fairy tales and fables.

Forms of imagination

Agglutination

An image is created in the imagination, consisting of parts of different objects that are impossible in reality. Example: centaur - half man, half horse.

hyperbole

Exaggeration of the subject, object, its exaggeration. Often used in art and literature.

accentuation

A certain property is highlighted, a feature to attract attention.

Typing

Repetition of something, highlighting the same type in many ways.

Schematization

Highlighting differences and similarities.

Aggravation

Increased attention to something, deliberate exaggeration for the sharpness of perception.

Feature transfer

Signs of one object are transferred to a completely different one, which in real life is unusual.

Significance for a person

Thanks to thinking, a person reflects the objectivity of what is happening and the surrounding objects. Having studied the qualities of objects, their characteristics, capabilities and, having kept this in memory, he can manipulate knowledge in various ways in his imagination: transfer in time, connect with other objects, model, change, etc.

The imagination is actualized at those moments when it is necessary to jump over the edge of the real limitation of something (paths, forms, actions) and present the final result.

Anticipatory imagination helps to work. Only a person is given an idea of ​​what can be obtained as a result. The processes of creating final images launch any undertaking: an architect sees the design of the future house, an artist sees a finished landscape before starting work on it, a mother sends her son to school, foreseeing his future.

Imagination, together with perception, memory and thinking, gives a person the opportunity to take care of himself, his life “now” and “later”.

Significance for the child

The child has two types of imagination:

1. cognitive;
2. affective.

The first helps to perceive the world around and modify it in your mind. Interesting games, activities, creativity lessons in many ways help to develop the imagination, which “takes care” of the development of the baby and helps to establish a connection between “child and reality”. In games, the kid imagines himself a hero, strong and brave, like a perceived favorite character from a movie, or plays what he knows well.

Affective imagination - the subconscious fears of the baby. He may be afraid of what is not, what he does not know about. A coat hanging on a hook in the dark may seem like a monster, or, remembering the pain of broken knees, a child will cry for fear of stairs.

Cognitive imagination needs to be supported and developed, directing it to a reproducing one, when the kid, using past knowledge, can come up with something and do it himself: build a house out of cubes, draw an outlandish animal or come up with a game plot.

Imagination and creativity

These are two inseparable concepts. To create something new, you need to accumulate a large number of perceptions. Store them in memory, and then, disassembled into molecules, assemble something original from them.

There is a concept in philosophy that everything we create did not come from nowhere. This is already existing knowledge. But the fragmented words and molecules that had once gathered in someone's mind were mixed up and loosely combined into completely new forms.

It's like the law of energy in physics: nothing is taken from nowhere, if it arrives in one, it will surely decrease in the other. There is nothing coming, but through the imagination, the new is modeled from the old.

A man with no imagination - what is he

It is said that the imaginative man was kissed by God himself. Such a person, being literate, well-read, educated and comprehensively developed, brings tremendous benefits to society. In any field, imagination will lead such a person to an important discovery, the creation of interesting projects, innovative finds.

A person with no imagination, even with a lot of knowledge, will not be able to create anything new. You can rarely call him active.

A person with a weak imagination or with a complete lack of it is only capable of automatically performing actions according to a learned scheme.

Spatial thinking is unusual for him. This type of personality does not become a good doctor, a famous surgeon or a writer.

Development of imagination in adults

He who sees, knows, absorbs and perceives much is capable of imagination. Your own fantasy is the transformation of what you remember, saw or read. Imagination is given by nature, and it is worth developing it on your own.

Active pastime, travel, reading books, studying culture, getting to know the achievements of science and technology, communicating with interesting people from different fields are categories that provide a lot of information for perception.

Our memory tends to retain a huge amount of knowledge, even small details do not pass without a trace. We can forget a lot, but the fragments of what we see, disassembled into small particles, will one day be used to create something new.

How to develop imagination in children at an early age

The method of developing the imagination of children according to L.S. Vygotsky is aimed primarily at the development of speech. A professor of psychology, studying children with hearing and speech disorders, according to the results of the study, found that there is a big difference between the ability to imagine healthy children and children without hearing. Children deprived of hearing and speech have poor imagination. They don't know how to manipulate images.

The child, not having a sufficient vocabulary, is not able to think in the mind. Speech and imagination are closely related and interdependent concepts.

Painstaking work on the mental analysis of objects and their properties, combinations with others without converting feelings from perception into words is impossible. Various mechanisms for the development of speech should be involved:

• Active communication with the child;
• learning new words;
• memorization of poems, proverbs, songs;
• Reading books.

The child has a special kind of perception of the world. To accelerate the development of thinking, memory and imagination, it is necessary to conduct many educational games. It is through the game that the baby learns to think, identify himself with the world and imagine himself and his behavior in different situations.

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Which of us, serious adults, has never fantasized? Yes, no one. We all dreamed as children. Even if now all these processes are pushed far, far away, in childhood everyone came up with some incredible space travel, a handsome prince on a unicorn or control of a time machine. For little us, fantasies were very important, thanks to them, everyone had some kind of cherished secret dream that they aspired to. Aspirations have changed, but are adults happier? Hardly. Why not dream a little and serious adults?

What is fantasy?

In psychology, fantasy is commonly understood as the activity of the psyche associated with imaginary, unrealistic ideas. This, one might say, is an improvisation of our brain. It is worth mentioning right away that the concepts of fantasy, although very close in meaning, are not the same. If the imagination operates with something or someone real, then fantasy is based on unreal, completely invented ideas. For example, imagining yourself in front of the Statue of Liberty is imagination, even if you have never been near it. But imagining yourself flying on a beak to the Statue of Liberty is already a fantasy.

It seems to many that fantasy, like imagination, needs to be developed only by children in order to adequately adapt to the surrounding reality. But it is not so. Any unrealistic dream moves a person and allows him to create something new. It was only thanks to imagination that the inventors revealed to the world a light bulb, a TV set, cars and all other achievements of human thought. It is only thanks to her that we have music, literature, cinema, photography, etc. Everything created by the hands and thoughts of a person was once just someone's seemingly unrealizable fantasy.

How to develop imagination?

There are many ways to develop imagination. There is no need to be afraid to try various methods and exercises, since they definitely will not be superfluous, especially. They guarantee an interesting pastime for everyone who fantasizes. All methods are suitable for kids and adults. However, parents should remember that the child should not be completely immersed in his fantasies, otherwise this will prevent him from contacting real people around him, and the baby’s ideas should not border on delirium, although the categories are rather arbitrary in this matter.

Games as a way to develop fantasy.

For the development of fantasy, exercises that provoke the inventing of something non-standard are useful.

For example, the exercise "Chair" (or "Bedside table", or "Stapler", it's not so important). Competitors need to come up with as many uses for the item as possible, with uses such as "sit" or "rest" being discarded immediately. But the options “make a cannon” or “drive off aliens” are quite suitable.

Another similar exercise is to come up with a way to create an object. For example, a chair can be folded out of coins, molded from melted chocolates, etc.

On paper, you can draw the same or different squiggles, circles, triangles. The players must draw each of these figures to something complete.

Use of verbal exercises.

Such exercises are very different. By the way, you can invent them yourself.

• Connecting parts of words. For example, we take halves from the words "socket" and "TV" and get: "rosevisor". And then this “rosevisor” needs to come up with a description, purpose and a short story. Such exercises are good because they do not cause any subconscious mental reactions - a completely new concept is obtained.
• Pronunciation of nouns. If you take two objects and make one of them an action, you can get various interesting phrases: “sofa phone” or “telephone sofa”, “thread a carpet” or “carve a thread”, etc. And that's not all - then you need to describe all these strange-sounding actions.
• The combination of the image of one object and the action of another. We take two items, for example, a phone and a mug. We imagine the action of one and the other: we call on the phone, and we drink from a mug. We connect the action with the image: “the phone drinks from the mug” or “the mug rings the phone”. Thanks to such absurd proposals, fantasy develops, because then you need to come up with a whole story: who is calling the mug and why the phone suddenly wanted to drink.

Creative activity.

Even if the lessons of labor in elementary school are long over, drawing has never been a favorite subject, and the process of writing poetry has always ended before it really started, because of the ever-absent muse, sometimes you can do something creative. Together with the child or independently, you need to take paints, brushes and start drawing. The hand itself will create something on a sheet of paper. If something mysterious or unrealistic comes up, you can then come up with a story about the hero of the drawing. In the same way, you can sculpt, sew, write essays, songs or poems, play the guitar, picking up chords by ear.

Imaginary friend.

Almost all kids had an imaginary friend. It could be some kind of animal, a fabulous kind monster, an imaginary child or an adult. Together with him, the kid could come up with some games, play out situations, make whole trips. Why shouldn't adults come up with someone with whom they can imagine the most unprecedented miracles without hesitation? To make it also useful in real life, you can endow your imaginary friend with qualities that the adult himself does not have, and consult with him how to act in this or that situation. This will be a more objective view of the situation from the outside, which in some cases helps a lot.

Inventing stories.

In order to diversify your daily life, you can fill it with various interesting stories. Not only can you come up with the ending of books, having read only half, or new turns in the cinema, stopping at the most interesting place, even what seems unpleasant in life, thanks to the development of fantasy, will become enjoyable.

Going to work in the morning, you can look into the faces of passers-by, not forgetting to invent an interesting fate or profession for them. Only they really should be interesting, for example, an ordinary old woman in a beret who pushes on the subway can become the owner of countless treasures buried somewhere on a desert island, and a sleeping guy in headphones actually works at night as a vampire slayer. Another way to develop fantasy can be to invent the childhood or old age of random passers-by or fellow travelers. This is a very exciting activity that also works to improve communication skills.

If you learn to invent such stories and biographies, you can fantasize about the evil boss as a cute toddler in childhood or in a funny hat. It will no longer be possible to treat him negatively, which means that relations will improve. Yes, and boring work can be perceived as a quest or mission, so as not to lose motivation.

Fantasies and dreams are necessary for everyone in order not to become soulless robots that do everything according to the same algorithm day after day. And only the fantasizing representatives of society will be able to create many more objects of art and make discoveries in various fields.

Imagination is an integral part of human activity, which distinguishes us from animals. A person is able to perceive the world, reflect it in his mind, give it a personal assessment, change it in his imagination, and then draw up a plan for the implementation of the transformation outside of himself, thanks to the imagination and its constructive levers.

Imagination is a mental process in the human brain that occurs only on the basis of deep knowledge, perception of the environment and its further transformation (taking into account personal characteristics) into images with a partially changed structure, properties or completely new ones. Human consciousness perceives the surrounding world, applies it to its receptors, makes changes and, on their basis, transforms.

Functions

Main types

involuntary

These are all images that suddenly appear in the head, and are not related to the setting of tasks and plans.

They appear and disappear. For example, a girl, seeing a couple who is getting married, for a moment imagines herself in the place of the bride. Such images do not carry any information or a message to action. This is passive imagination. Another example is the birth of images in a dream.

Arbitrary

A person consciously recreates the images, sees the goal and, manipulating them, plans actions to achieve, strives for the desired result. Such imagination is divided into two subspecies:

1. Recreative or reproductive;
2. creative.

The essence of reproductive thinking is to use ready-made data, acquired knowledge about existing moments stored in memory.

Creativity is a psychological process, which is characterized by the creation of completely new forms of vision, the creation of original objects that have not yet been.

dreaming

A more passionate mental process to create the desired images. A dream turns into an unrealistic form if it is divorced from reality and there are no plans to achieve it. An impossible dream is called a dream.

Fantasy is called images composed by consciousness that never existed. Finds applications in myths, fairy tales and fables.

Forms

• Agglutination

  An image is created in the imagination, consisting of parts of different objects that are impossible in reality. Example: centaur - half man, half horse.

• hyperbole

  Exaggeration of the subject, object, its exaggeration. Often used in art and literature.

• accentuation

  A certain property is highlighted, a feature to attract attention.

• Typing

  Repetition of something, highlighting the same type in many ways.

• Schematization

  Highlighting differences and similarities.

• Aggravation

  Increased attention to something, deliberate exaggeration for the sharpness of perception.

• Feature transfer

  Signs of one object are transferred to a completely different one, which in real life is unusual.

Significance for a person

Thanks to thinking, a person reflects the objectivity of what is happening and the surrounding objects. Having studied the qualities of objects, their characteristics, capabilities and, having kept this in memory, he can manipulate knowledge in various ways in his imagination: transfer in time, connect with other objects, model, change, etc. The imagination is actualized at those moments when it is necessary to jump over the edge of the real limitation of something (paths, forms, actions) and present the final result. Anticipatory imagination helps to work. Only a person is given an idea of ​​what can be obtained as a result. The processes of creating final images launch any undertaking: an architect sees the design of a future house, an artist sees a finished landscape before starting work on it, a mother sends her son to school, foreseeing his future.

Imagination, together with perception, memory and thinking, gives a person the opportunity to take care of himself, his life “now” and “later”.

The child has

The child has two types of imagination:

1. cognitive;
2. affective.

The first helps to perceive the world around and modify it in your mind. Interesting games, activities, creativity lessons in many ways help to develop the imagination, which “takes care” of the development of the baby and helps to establish a connection between “child and reality”. In games, the kid imagines himself a hero, strong and brave, like a perceived favorite character from a movie, or plays what he knows well.

Affective imagination - the subconscious fears of the baby. He may be afraid of what is not, what he does not know about. A coat hanging on a hook in the dark may seem like a monster, or, remembering the pain of broken knees, a child will cry for fear of stairs.

Cognitive imagination needs to be supported and developed, directing it to a reproducing one, when the kid, using past knowledge, can come up with something and do it himself: build a house out of cubes, draw an outlandish animal or come up with a game plot.

Creation

These are two inseparable concepts. To create something new, you need to accumulate a large number of perceptions. Store them in memory, and then, disassembled into molecules, assemble something original from them.

There is a concept in philosophy that everything we create did not come from nowhere. This is already existing knowledge. But the fragmented words and molecules that had once gathered in someone's mind were mixed up and loosely combined into completely new forms.

It's like the law of energy in physics: nothing is taken from nowhere, if it arrives in one, it will surely decrease in the other. There is nothing coming, but through the imagination, the new is modeled from the old.

A person with an absence - what is he?

It is said that the imaginative man was kissed by God himself. Such a person, being literate, well-read, educated and comprehensively developed, brings tremendous benefits to society. In any field, imagination will lead such a person to an important discovery, the creation of interesting projects, innovative finds.

A person with no imagination, even with a lot of knowledge, will not be able to create anything new. You can rarely call him active. A person with a weak imagination or with a complete lack of it is only capable of automatically performing actions according to a learned scheme. Spatial thinking is unusual for him. This type of personality does not become a good doctor, a famous surgeon or a writer.

In adults

He who sees, knows, absorbs and perceives much is capable of imagination. Your own fantasy is the transformation of what you remember, saw or read. Imagination is given by nature, and it is worth developing it on your own.

Active pastime, travel, reading books, studying culture, getting to know the achievements of science and technology, communicating with interesting people from different fields are categories that provide a lot of information for perception.

Our memory tends to retain a huge amount of knowledge, even small details do not pass without a trace. We can forget a lot, but the fragments of what we see, disassembled into small particles, will one day be used to create something new.

In young years

The method of developing the imagination of children according to L.S. Vygotsky is aimed primarily at the development of speech. A professor of psychology, studying children with hearing and speech disorders, according to the results of the study, found that there is a big difference between the ability to imagine healthy children and children without hearing. Children deprived of hearing and speech have poor imagination. They don't know how to manipulate images.

The child, not having a sufficient vocabulary, is not able to think in the mind. Speech and imagination are closely related and interdependent concepts.

Painstaking work on the mental analysis of objects and their properties, combinations with others without converting feelings from perception into words is impossible. Various mechanisms for the development of speech should be involved:

• Active communication with the child;
• learning new words;
• memorization of poems, proverbs, songs;
• Reading books.

The child has a special kind of perception of the world. To accelerate the development of thinking, memory and imagination, it is necessary to conduct many educational games. It is through the game that the baby learns to think, identify himself with the world and imagine himself and his behavior in different situations.

Imagination is the ability of human consciousness to create images, ideas, representations and work with them without connecting practical actions. It plays a key role in such psychological processes as planning, creativity and modeling situations, that is, it is the basis of any creative activity and all our deliberate actions.

Today the site talks about how to develop imagination, and why we need it.

Why you need to develop imagination

Imagination is our own world in which we are free to do what we want. It helps us not only to imagine any situation in colors, but also to understand how we can benefit from it, what mistakes are likely and how to avoid them.

The better a person has a developed imagination, the easier it is for him to achieve creative goals, plan any future enterprise and event, and determine his true desires.

Imagination insures us quite reliably against the waste of time, which we would have to spend every time on gaining practical experience, if we did not have the ability to create mental images and draw appropriate conclusions.

A well-developed imagination improves our memory, makes our brain more mobile, and its work fruitful. It allows you to accumulate and use life experience for planning the achievement of goals, not only our own, but also the one that we witnessed at different ages, starting from early childhood.

In addition, a good imagination is a lifeline in everyday storms - it allows you to disconnect from reality and mentally transport yourself to a prosperous and calm environment for a while. This, in turn, contributes not only to the restoration of peace of mind, but also to the search for an adequate way out of a difficult situation.

In addition, a well-developed imagination helps us to partially compensate for what we do not have in reality, that is, in some way it saves us from unsatisfied needs. This frees us from internal tension, from resentment towards the whole world, and even from dissatisfaction with ourselves.

With the help of a developed imagination, we can mentally experience situations that we would never allow to occur in real life, for example, because of the fear of going beyond morality or social norms. Thanks to him, we satisfy some of our secret desires and at the same time remain decent and adequate people in the eyes of others.

It is worth noting that a well-developed imagination is also an excellent motivator. We imagine what benefits await us after the next victory or the completion of an unpleasant task for us, and we are much more actively moving towards the final goal. Moreover, the mental images we create help to make a difficult and annoying activity more enjoyable, and the result, correspondingly, more satisfying.

How to develop imagination

How to develop imagination

Collecting Feelings

In order to develop your imagination, start replenishing your piggy bank of visual and tactile sensations daily. Pay attention to how you feel when you touch metal, plastic, glass, various fabrics, and the skin of loved ones. Remember and classify all the smells that surround you and all the sounds that you hear.

Creating Thought Forms

Create vivid mental images in your spare time. To begin with, try to recreate what happened to you in reality, for example, during the day. Then start imagining alternative developments of the situations you were in. Don't miss the details and the sensations you experience. It is desirable to ensure that you not only see pictures in your mind's eye, but also smell and touch, hear the sounds and voices of those who are present in your thought forms.

Use of works of art

When reading fiction, do not skip descriptions of the nature and appearance of the characters, pay special attention to them and clearly imagine everything that the author paints. The clearer and more detailed the picture you draw in your thoughts, the better.

A well-developed imagination is a huge plus for any person. It allows you to make more effective creative self-realization, interpersonal communication, planning decisions and actions, performing official tasks and even household chores. So it makes sense to spend some time and expand the scope of your consciousness, developing your visual-figurative thinking to the maximum.

After the lateral rupture was made, we had a lot of mostly illogical (lateral) judgments. Now we have to take a step aimed at eliminating the resulting pattern gap. The upcoming stage is connected with the work on the development of creative imagination in order to search for and create full-fledged creative ideas from the metamorphoses obtained in the previous stages. In other words, in this session you will learn how to learn how to repair a lateral tear most effectively. This lesson describes the methods, principles and features of the development of creative imagination, and also contains useful techniques, exercises and games.

What is creative imagination

creative imagination- this is a kind of imagination, during which a person independently creates new images and ideas that are of a certain value. These ideas can be embodied in concrete products of creative activity.

Also close to creative imagination and useful in the process of creative thinking is recreative imagination. Recreating imagination this is the creation of images of objects that were not previously perceived by a person in a finished form, although he was already familiar with similar objects or with their individual elements. At the same time, the knowledge already available to a person about these objects is used, which determines the predominantly reproductive nature of the created images. At the same time, these images are distinguished from memory representations by a great variety, flexibility and dynamism of elements. Simply put, recreative imagination, unlike creative imagination, is more consciously based on previous experience.

The peculiarity of imagination in the creative process lies in the fact that it is the imagination that is difficult to control when creating something new. If at the previous stages it was possible to describe an almost exact algorithm of actions, then the last stage should be based precisely on a person’s ability to creative imagination and associative thinking, you can read about the latter in a special lesson on memory development.

Ability to find solutions to problems

Before proceeding to the means of developing a productive imagination, it is important to note that everyone has the ability to creative imagination. The human mind has an important property, which is the presence of an incentive to eliminate logical contradictions.

For example, many smokers, knowing about the serious dangers of smoking, always know how to explain to themselves and the people around them the reason why they do not give up this addiction. It turns out that smokers are faced with an internal contradiction “smoking is good - smoking is bad”, which in psychology is called cognitive dissonance (). This contradiction causes psychological discomfort, and people are forced to come up with all possible ways to eliminate this contradiction, and some of them reflect the high creative abilities of a person: smoking can be harmful, but pleasant, smoking helps creativity, tunes in the right way, helps to train breathing, reduces weight etc. Almost every smoker has his own excuse, which was caused by a logical contradiction.

It turns out that a person is initially programmed to deal with contradictions and look for a way out of the current difficult situation. In the previous lesson, we had a lot of changed judgments about the object in the selected focus. At the stage of breaking the pattern, we violated the logic, and came to a dissonance that will have to be corrected with the help of our imagination, life experience and natural predisposition to a certain kind of thinking. Moreover, the ability of people to effectively seek solutions to logical contradictions is the stronger, the more experience a person has, ideas about various behavior patterns and other knowledge about the world around him.

To understand how this mechanism works for you personally, as well as to train your imagination, we suggest that you perform an exercise called "Mixed Letters in Words"

Exercise "Mixed letters in words"

This exercise perfectly shows that our brain can find and understand the meaning of words, even if they try to deliberately confuse it. This happens because we do not read by letters and syllables, but whole words, and in addition, we understand the meaning of words thanks to neighboring words and phrases that our brain has encountered before.

Means of Imagination Development

One of the main ways to develop the imagination is to gain many-sided life experience. The more we communicate with different people, participate in various activities, do different things, the more sensory, emotional and intellectual experience we get. As a result, all this experience is involved in the elimination of logical dissonances that arise during lateral thinking. Naturally, there are no universal recommendations for gaining life experience, but you can pay attention to such things as expanding world models and reading.

Expansion of the number of models of the world. The term "model of the world", as well as framing, which was discussed in the second lesson, is popular in neuro-linguistic programming to describe the different approaches people have to interpret reality.

The variety of world models comes from the fact that reality is perceived by people in different ways, and no one is able to be an objective interpreter of reality. To understand the essence of the process of creating something new, you need to realize that all the ideas we have expressed are perceived by each person differently. For example, some music that you like may cause negative attitudes in other people. The problem of interpreting music shows well the difference in people's ideas: what seems beautiful, original or even brilliant to one, may not seem so to another.

For the development of creative thinking, it is necessary to use the representative features of various models of the world. In other words, the more we communicate with different people and try to understand them, the better our creative thinking will be qualitatively.

Reading. Reading books and other sources of information, including using the technique of speed reading, is a very effective way to develop creative imagination. While reading, there is an active visualization of what you are reading. Since you get no additional information other than the letters that make up words and sentences, you inadvertently have to imagine a picture of what is happening. It is especially useful for the development of creativity to read science fiction, adventure, detective stories and, of course, poetry.

However, the impact of reading books on the ability to think creatively is not entirely clear. For example, Schopenhauer in his work Parergaund Paralipomena noted that excessive reading is not only useless, since the reader in the process of reading receives other people's thoughts ready and assimilates them worse than if he came to them on his own, but is also harmful to the mind, since weakens him and teaches him to look for ideas in external sources, and not from his own head. To this we can only add that although reading expands our models of the world, but the habit of looking for truth in books impairs the ability to find a creative solution.

Exercises

For creative thinking, it is important to be able to find connections between already acquired experience and what we are contemplating at the moment, in other words, to build associations. The exercises below are aimed at developing imagination and associative thinking.

Exercise 1: Rotate Shapes

This exercise is aimed at training the imagination. Its use in the development of the imagination was proposed in the 1980s by the famous psychologist Roger Shepard. In each task, you will be shown 2 figures: some are obtained by reflection of each other, others by rotation, and the third are just similar and are not rotation and reflection of each other.

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Try for a minute to name as many things as possible that are now in the room with you and begin with the letter: "K". On the letter "P" ... And on the "B"?

Count how many you got. If you try, you can name more than 50 things, and you can name more than 100. To improve this exercise, think about which groups of surrounding objects you forgot to include. For example, the letter "B" can be called:

• things, hanger, (items),
• screws, introduction to the book on the shelf, (details of objects),
• tungsten lamp filament, felt, cotton wool, viscose, etc. (materials),
• pile on the carpet, wax on the parquet (coating),
• hair, eyelids, freckles, whiskey, etc. (body),
• imagination, delight, excitement, the ability to come up with something else (mental concepts),
• air, breeze, word variants, you yourself, everyone else (also on “v”).

Think what else can be called? Practice with other letters: “p”, “k”, “s” are simpler, “d”, “a”, “t” are more difficult.

Exercise 4. Come up with a title and description

Try to come up with a title or caption for the picture, describe what is happening on it:

As you may have guessed, this is a painting by Pablo Picasso. It's called Night Fishing in Antibes. To develop your creative imagination, try to describe interesting things around you more often: paintings, photographs, music, food, and much more. Try to go to museums more often, carefully look at the exhibits. The mystery of Malevich's "Black Square", for example, lies in the fact that if you have imagination and creative perception of the world, you can see a lot for yourself in this picture. If you do not bother your creativity, then you will see only a black geometric figure that does not represent anything. The black square is the mirror of your imagination.

There is another modification to this exercise: while traveling on public transport, try to come up with a name, bio, or other details for strangers who are traveling with you, based only on their appearance. If you are traveling with a friend, share yours with him, and then invite him to do the same, compare your stories.

Imagination Games

Imagination is a key factor in the last element of our creative thinking scheme. The better the imagination is developed, the wider the worldview of a person, the faster he is able to find the necessary associations in his head, the more creative his ideas are.

Imagination develops with us constantly, the more we know the world, the better our imagination is developed. However, mere contemplation of the world is not enough. It is important to think about what we see, to analyze what is happening.

Test your knowledge

If you want to test your knowledge on the topic of this lesson, you can take a short test consisting of several questions. Only 1 option can be correct for each question. After you select one of the options, the system automatically moves on to the next question. The points you receive are affected by the correctness of your answers and the time spent on passing. Please note that the questions are different each time, and the options are shuffled.