网范文：“Imagination: Structure and Process” 搜索信息与外部感官,想象力可以创建自己的信息。它是人类的基本特性,相比智力来说更基本。这篇心理范文描述的想象力是思想的一个方面,想象力是行为或能力形成的心理图像,或通过结合以前的经验创建的新图像。过去的感性经验,斯蒂芬说自主想象的存在,这是建立在一种特殊的心理现实中的意识。詹姆斯描述这种体验,意识到的强度几乎像一个幻觉，他们决定我们的态度。关于区分两个基本精神属性:智慧和想象力，英语毕业论文，这是有用的。
相比于智力,想象力是一个更微妙的心理现象,看似无法量化。富有想象力的过程是人类能力唤起一个图像或一个想法的过程,形成一个没有对象的心理表征。下面的范文进行详述。
Introduction
Unlike the information-seeking external senses, imagination creates its own information: new and sometimes distorted images of the natural world. It is a basic human characteristic, more basic than intelligence, which is abundant in the animal world (BRONOWSKI 1977). As here described, imagination is an aspect of mind that we know by its lexical meaning: “the act or power of forming mental images of what is not actually present; the act or power of creating mental images of what has never been actually experienced, or of creating new images or ideas by combining previous experiences; creative power” (WEBSTER 1996).
I is the “employment of past perceptual experience, revived as images in a present experience at the ideational level” (DREVER 1964, p130), “the process of creating objects or events without the benefit of sensory data” (CHAPLIN 1985, p221). STEPHEN speaks of the existence of autonomous imagining, “imagery so compelling, so powerful it can even override all demands of external reality” (1989, p56), imagery “experienced as an external, independent reality”, and propose that religious experience “is grounded in the psychological reality of a special imaginative process operating outside ordinary awareness” (p212). JAMES describes that experience, “the convincingness of what it [imagination] brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world” (1936, p71).
It is useful here to distinguish between two fundamental mental attributes: intellectual and imaginative. Compared to the intellect, imagination is a more subtle mental phenomenon, seemingly impossible to quantify (ECCLES 1989). “The imaginative process is the human capacity to evoke an image or an idea in the absence of a direct perceptual stimulus” (RANGELL 1988, p63), “to make images and move them about inside one’s head in new arrangements” (BRONOWSKI 1977, p24). BERES defines imagination broadly, “as the capacity to form a mental representation of an absent object, an affect, a body function, or an instinctual drive… a process whose products are images, symbols, fantasies, dreams, ideas, thoughts, and concepts” (1960, p327). DENTT speaks of images as existing within a phenomenal space that can contain a god or heaven as well as a tangible object: “Phenomenal space is Mental Image Heaven, but if mental images turn out to be real they can reside quite comfortably in the physical space in our brains, and if they turn out not to be real, they can reside, with Santa Claus, in the logical space of fiction” (1978, p186).
I suggest that for early Homo sapiens with emerging imagination (as for a large number of modern humans), real objects and “Santa Claus” reside together quite harmoniously. To all this I would add that, in relation to the brain’s processing of external information, imagination functions as sensory-distorting perception. To the extent that this perception leads to something new that can be shared, we might call it “creative imagination”. Here, individual processes are extended to those of a social nature: to the sharing of illusions and the formation of new images as a social process. Products of imagination are qualitatively different from mere illusions, from that perversion of sense-data which might occasionally have taken place in pre-imaginative hominid brains (and in those of other animals).
With the advent of imagination, illusions would increase and assume new forms and new functions. One positive function would be to divert the individual from fearful thoughts involving “self” and change. KOESTLER speaks of this function as: “the transfer of attention from the ‘Now and Here’ to the ‘Then and There’— that is, to a plane remote from self-interest” (1964, p303). In an imaginative state, a state identified as Absolute Unitary Being, a state described in the mystical literature of the world’s most ancient religions, individuals lose their sense “of discrete being, and even the difference between self and other is obliterated” (D’AQUILI/WBERG 1998, p195). Religious literature describes imaginative states in which indi- viduals lose their awareness of self and with it lose their mortal fears.
In such states, rather than adding to awareness, imagination acts as a filter, a curtain, or even as a screen, distorting, dimming, or obliterating awesome perceptions. In such states, imagination serves to transport or sever the individual from the sources of mortal fear. Historically, in literary theory, “it was opposed to reason and regarded as the means for attaining poetical and religious conceptions” (HOLMAN/HARMON 1992, p241). As it first evolved, imagination, undoubtedly, would merge with older forms of illusion—in and out of dreams. “In primitive stages of hominid specialization dream may not have occurred exclusively or even mainly in sleep. For eons of human (or protohuman) existence imagination probably was entirely involuntary, as dreaming generally is today, only somewhat controllable by active or passive behavior” (LANGER 1972, p283).
LANGER gives support to the view of the pioneering French psychologist Jean PHILIPPE who described imagination as a kind of biological entity: “In the complexity of our mental organization it is a sort of living cell, which maintains its life through manifold and diverse transformations” (PHILIPPE 1903, p4). Whatever it physically consists of, imagination most likely evolved with Homo sapiens. Expressions of it are difficult or impossible to detect from the monotonous tools and other archeological finds from the long record of Homo erectus, although it seems likely that at least gestation of human self-awareness had begun by the end of this period of some hundred thousand generations of big-brained and potentially aware creatures who became extinct 200,000 years ago. MITHEN, pondering how little Homo erectus seemed to create with his large brain, speaks of a “shuffling of the same essential ingredients” in their technology for more than a million years, with only “minor, directionless change” (1996, p123).
Imagination in Its Early Forms
The earliest artifacts that have been found to express imagination, those from the late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic periods, express religious activity having to do with death and mortality. The earliest traces of beliefs and practices are of such religious form: Neanderthal burials seventy thousand years ago and perhaps even older burials in China; elaborate Paleolithic cave art drawn in dark, tortuous, difficult to access recesses; evidence of animal worship and of rituals associated with hunted animals; and other prehistoric evidence of the struggle to understand and come to terms with individual death and glimmers of mortality (DONALD 1991; HOLMES 1996; PARRINDER 1984).
In historic times we see this struggle for understanding expressed in the earliest literature, in all known cultures. These cultural products express the religious thought that seems to be the primal focus of human imagination, as we first encounter such imagination in salient human behavior (BROWN 1959; DENTT 1995; FREUD 1950; HOCART 1954; JAMES 1936; JAYS 1976; LANGS 1996, LANGER 1982; MITHEN 1996). I argue that the imaginative parts of mind were naturally selected in response to debilitations that paralleled awareness of mortality. Imagination and companion devices to process and store its products in memory evolved to mitigate that awareness, to discover offsetting information beyond the apparent horizon, to sense a more favorable reality, and thus, to make the emerging awareness of death more bearable, and to make the aware individual more fit. Although much of the prehistoric process may never be known, evidence for this function of imagination permeates history and contemporary human life.
DONALD describes the universal importance of religious belief within hunter–gatherer societies, all of whom appear to have an elaborate mythological system similar in principle: “Myth permeates and regulates daily life, channels perceptions, determines the significance of every object and event in life. Clothing, food, shelter, family—all receive their ‘meaning’ from myth. As a result, myths are taken with deadly seriousness: a person who violates a tribal taboo may die of fear or stress within days, or be ostracized, or put to death” (DONALD 1991, p215). There is neuropsychological data to suggest that “human beings have no choice but to construct myths consisting of personalized power sources to explain their world” (D’AQUILI/WBERG 1998, p191).
Supporting this, a range of cultural products reveals the primacy of mortal fears and religious hopes in diverse societies throughout time and throughout the world. Every known social group has had a religion that includes some sense of immortality or some attempt to deny the reality of death (BROWN 1959). As one well-documented example, Egypt, four thousand years ago, a society of some seven million people, devoted the bulk of its surplus and some of its essentials to the building of monuments for its Pharaohs. To prepare dead bodies for entry into an imagined next world, living bodies suffered hunger in this world. There is evidence, in the caves that housed them, that many of the hundreds of thousands of pyramid builders and artisans labored willingly for their Pharaoh’s afterlife and for their own. Today, with five billion of the world’s six billion as adherents, ancient religions are alive and flourishing, 143 years after On the Origin of Species and their predicted demise.
In a nationwide poll by The New York Times and CBS News of over a thousand teenagers, “ninety-four percent say that they believe in God” (GOLDSTEIN/CONLLY 1998). DENTT writes of religions, “They have kept Homo sapiens civilized enough, for long enough, for us to have learned how to reflect more systematically and accurately on our position in the universe” (1995, p518). Yet, from the record, the majority of people reflect on our position in the universe in much the same way that they did before DARWIN. The refusal of religion to die has become an embarrassment (D’AQUILI/ WBERG 1998).
I believe that part of the explanation for this lies in the nature of the mind itself. “Okay”, the reader might say; “we can agree that religious belief has been of prime importance since the beginnings of human culture. So what? What does that have to do with natural selection and other natural forces? Are you suggesting a marriage of heaven and earth, with religious belief an offspring of God and Mother Nature?” No. I argue that the products of imagination, including religious belief, are natural products (memes: cultural material, based on genes: DNA), and that the brain structures to conceive and store such belief are natural structures that aid human survival. However, I am suggesting a somewhat different view of nature: the nature of “human”.
In relation to human phylogenetic processes and cultural change, LORENZ notes: “If we discover that certain behaviour patterns and norms of social conduct are found in all human beings in all cultures in exactly the same form, we can assume with virtual certainty that they are phylogenetically programmed and genetically specified” (LORENZ 1977, p182). While the content of religions differs from culture to culture, “the behavior patterns and norms” of seeking meaning and continuity in life, of searching for supersensory powers, and developing belief in such powers, this seems to be present in all existing cultures, even those practicing Buddhism (BROWN 1959; SMITH 1958). This behavior existed at the dawn of civilization some ten thousand years ago, and, I suspect, existed earlier, shortly after the advent of imagination in Homo sapiens. D’AQUILI and WBERG, based on their neurological research, make the claim that “the brain constructs gods, spirits, demons, or other personalized power sources.()
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