Imagination Is the Seed of Creativity

Across domains and levels of sophistication of creativity, there is one fundamental skill that makes creativity possible. Without imagination, there can be no creativity. This chapter explores cognitive and affective processes common to both imagination and creativity, advancing the argument that the former enables the latter in conjunction with other personal factors such as expertise, personality, and motivation, as well as environmental support (S. B. Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015; Seligman, Forgeard, & Kaufman, 2016; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991). Imagination refers broadly to the human capacity to construct a mental representation of that which is not currently present to the senses (Markman, Klein, & Suhr, 2009; Seligman et al., 2016). We engage in imaginative thought both intentionally and unintentionally and both solitarily and collectively. Across social-emotional and temporal domains, there are a number of forms of imaginative thought, including perspective-taking, identity construction, constructive internal reflection, thinking informed by an understanding of multiple cultures, pretend play, prospection, memory construction, counterfactual thinking, and mind-wandering (Abraham, 2016; Runco & Pina, 2013). Many forms of imagination – especially imagination about people, including oneself, across time and space – draw heavily on the brain’s default mode network, a network composed of several brain regions along the midline of the brain in the frontal and parietal lobes, including the medial prefrontal cortex, medial parietal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, and regions within the medial and lateral temporal cortex (Andrews-Hanna, Smallwood, & Spreng, 2014; Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou, & Singh, 2012; Raichle & Snyder, 2007; Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007; Spreng & Andrews-Hana, 2015; Tamir & Mitchell, 2011). Other forms of imagination that involve visualizing physical objects or physical space are thought to recruit more heavily the brain’s executive attention network and dorsal attention network, a network involving communication between the frontal eye fields and the intraparietal sulcus (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014; Jack et al., 2013). An understanding of the brain networks that support imaginative thought can help elucidate the confines of the imagination construct. Regardless of the specific largescale brain network interactions involved with specific forms of imagination, we see