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'Imagination', what are the things that you can think of when hearing this word? Wizards
and fairytales, mental illness, or just midnight dreams and nightmares? But if you look into
it, you will find that it has a vast amount of meanings and explanations, one of them
is that imagination and curiosity are prominent and correlated; and definitely the genius
makers. There are many evidences to support that ,even
if it sounds odd, if we go a little far in time, we will find that Albert Einstein, the
person who discovered the theory of relativity once said "I have no super power, I am just
passionately curious" and it makes a lot of sense that his curiosity dragged him to illustrate
the concepts of relativity, to mention another quote Einstein said " logic can take you from
A-Z but imagination can take you anywhere" this is another evidence that Einstein used
imagination to construct his theories. Now let's move to sir Isaac Newton, isn't it plausible
that he discovered gravity because of imagination? He would have never wondered why the apple
fell towards the Earth's core, unless he imagined that there is a force pulling it downwards,
you can conclude that curiosity lead him to explore the mysteries of gravity.
Using fMRI scans, researchers like V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition
at the University of California, San Diego, discovered that imagination and reality activate
the same cells whether we do the thing or imagine our selves doing it, and therefore
our brain can't differentiate between silhouette and reality, you can see how this study made
by Jeffrey Schwartz and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles
elucidates the power of imagination. Schwartz instructed obsessive compulsive patients to
think that their brains generated these obsessive thoughts and that they can get rid of it,
after 10 weeks, 2/3 of the patients experimented, improved significantly and their symptoms
mitigated .A couple of other tests and scans revealed that this therapy worked exactly
the way drugs affected OCD. If that's not enough, doctors use a type of
medication called placebo medication, it is a medically ineffective treatment for a disease,
intended to deceive the recipient usually by using inert medication, sugar pills and
even sham surgeries, sometimes patients given placebo treatment will have an improvement
in their medical condition, this phenomenon is called "placebo effect", placebos are used
nowadays to treat diseases like Parkinson's and depression.
If we talked about disorders related to imagination we find that it affects its patients positively
in most cases, synaesthesia which translates into "sensation together" in Greek is a condition
in which people relate things like numbers, letters and days to colors or personalities,
in other words "union of senses". For example, the letter "S" might always look blue to them
or perhaps rogue. Quiet surprisingly many of those who have this condition are bright,
creative people like Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Vladimir Nabokov.
As said by William Wordsworth, the English poet "Imagination is but another name for
absolute power" you can't move objects or travel to Mars by imagination but it is sure
helpful, imagination and curiosity open doors to creativity and intelligence, remember to
always be imaginative.