5Imagination and Association

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

— Henry David Thoreau (1817–62)

IMAGINATION ‒ THE KEY

The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the human soul never thought without first creating a mental picture. All knowledge and information, he argued, entered the soul – that is, the brain – via the five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. The imagination would come into play first, decoding the messages delivered by our senses and turning the information into images. Only then could the intellect get to work on the information.

In other words, in order to make sense of everything around us, we are continually creating models of the world inside our heads.

Most of us start to make mental models from an early age, and soon become highly adept at it. We can recognise an individual solely by the characteristic sounds their footsteps make. We can make an intuitive judgment of a person’s mood from the briefest of movements. But what you are doing right now is an even more spectacular example. With considerable ease, your eyes are scanning an enormous sequence of jumbled letters, and your brain is recognising groups of words and simultaneously forming images as fast as you can physically read them.

Perhaps the most spectacular display of what our imaginations can do lies, if we can remember them, in our dreams. There are various gadgets available that can help us enjoy and experience our dreams. Volunteers have tested one such device, which consists of goggles containing sensors that pick up rapid eye movements (REMs). REM sleep is the period when our dreams seem to be at their most active, occurring only at certain times, and then only for short bursts. Once REMs are detected, the sensors trigger off tiny flashing lights fitted into the goggles. The intention is to make the volunteer gradually aware that he or she is in a dream state without waking them up. This semiconscious awareness allows for a fascinating ringside view of the virtual reality world of the imagination, with reports of “seeing everything in full-blown technicolor and immaculate detail”. Faces of friends or relatives that haven’t been seen for years are faithfully reproduced with incredible accuracy, and all the senses are experienced as uncannily real.

I used the example of dreaming merely to counter the poor excuses that some people give me, such as “I could never adopt your methods, I just don’t have the imagination for it”. Wrong. We all possess a highly inventive imagination, as exhibited in our dreams, although sadly, for some people, this is the only time it’s let out to play.

The debate over whether you can teach creativity or not is a false one. We have all proved just how naturally creative we were as children, living in our own colourful imaginary worlds. The question should be: how can we encourage the return of creativity into our adult lives?

Perhaps being told too early in our lives to “grow up” or “start acting like an adult” is partly to blame, by leaving us with the notion that an active imagination is a sign of childishness and that the ones who don’t grow out of it end up in uncertain careers as comedians, entertainers or artists. I believe that it’s not a question of what you should do to become creative, but what you should undo. To become an “un” person you need to be:

Unlocked

Unbound

Unrestrained

Unleashed

Unprejudiced

Unchained

Unrestricted

Unpredictable

Unplugged

Untamed

Unobstructed

Uncensored

Unbarred

Unusual

Uncorked

Unhindered

Unimpeded

Uninhibited

Interestingly, removing the “un” prefix from many of these words gives you a description of what inevitably happens to creative freedom in countries that are governed by oppressive regimes – that is, censored, restrained, bound, barred, restricted, obstructed, tamed.

So if creative thought is to blossom, we first need to remove the blinkers and tear down the boundaries we may inadvertently have set up for ourselves in order to allow our ideas to flow freely and unchecked. Once liberated, our thoughts can then be allowed to meander, explore and wander in any direction at all – preferably taking the most scenic route.

The following exercise is a useful test of the imagination, and will also put you in the right frame of mind for absorbing memory techniques in the next few chapters. If you are familiar with brainstorming and creative thinking exercises, then you should find this easy. Just let your imagination have free rein.

Assuming you now own the original of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, write down as many possible uses for it as you can think of. Give yourself no more than two minutes. Then score as follows:

20 or more	Highly creative
16–19	Excellent
11–15	Very good
7–10	Good
3–6	Average
0–2	Couch potato

The most common answer is:

“for selling and making millions”

The socially responsible person:

“for donating to a museum”

The unadventurous type:

“for hanging on the sitting-room wall”

The unleashed, unhindered:

“for lagging pipes in severe winter”

The secret to scoring well in an exercise like this lies in letting your imagination literally run riot, rather than wasting time trying to contrive and plan an idea based on practicality, logic or ethics. Follow your mind’s eye and simply record whatever you see. After a while you’ll have a job to keep up with the torrent of ideas that flow out, unrestrained and untamed.

When I memorised the order of a pack of cards in 38 seconds – a world record – there was no time to plan anything. I acted like a photographer hurriedly trying to take snapshots of fifty-two marathon runners. With only forty-three seconds to play with, there’s no time to set up carefully designed portrait shots: you just click what you see.

Similarly, for imagination to flower you need to relinquish a bit of control and just watch. Being told to use one’s imagination implies some kind of effort is needed. But we are continuously and automatically manufacturing ideas. The difficulty comes in trying to see them. So any effort should be directed toward training the visual side of our imagination. I would say that about 95 per cent of the time spent on training my memory is concentrated on this very aspect: visualisation.

ASSOCIATION

We define an object not by what it is but by what we associate it with. When I see a smoking pipe I don’t immediately think to myself, “This is a tube with a bowl at one end for the smoking of a fill of tobacco”; I think of Sherlock Holmes, a small tobacconist’s shop I know, the smell of Balkan Sobranies or the famous painting of a pipe by René Magritte entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is Not a Pipe).

When I see a pair of wellingtons, I don’t automatically think, “These are rubber boots loosely covering the calves and protecting against the intrusion of water”; I think of a muddy footpath, a fishing trip, horse-racing, woodland walks – anything but the dictionary definition. And when I see an oyster, it’s not a bivalve shellfish to me – it’s why my mouth is watering.

I perceive something – a telephone or a cat – not by its function or chemical constituents, but by the sum total of all my previous associations with it. The more I encounter and experience something, the more mental hooks I attach to it. I have gathered such a wealth of these mental hooks over the years that they now form an aura surrounding the object, almost giving it a character of its own. What do you associate, for example, with a telephone? Contact with the outside world, exciting news, sad news, paying the bill? If you think long and hard enough you could probably write a book about it. What feelings are triggered at the sound of a telephone ringing? A sense of joy, panic, curiosity, relief or annoyance? Pondering on these associations provides us with an extremely neat link to the next chapter.