Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts

Imagination is a neurological reality located in specific brain regions, consisting of identifiable components and processes with adaptive functions that made Homo sapiens the dominant species. The chapter defines key terms, describes brain evolution and imagination's role in modern human behavior, explains the default mode network as imagination's neurological locus, and details three core imaginative processes: simulation, mental time travel, and perspective taking. These are illustrated with Wallace Stegner's novel Angle of Repose. Four specialized forms of imagination—dreaming, mind-wandering, autobiographical narratives, and counterfactual thinking—are linked to literary creation and reading. The argument concludes with literature's adaptive functions.

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Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this chapter is to explain how imaginative verbal artifacts are produced by the imagination and in turn influence the imagination. Assimilating recent neuroscientific research on the evolution of modern brain shape and on the brain’s default mode network, we can now say with confidence that the imagination is a neurological reality, that it is lodged in specific parts of the brain, that it consists of an identifiable set of components and processes, that these components and processes have adaptive functions, and that in fulfilling its functions imagination has been a major causal factor in making Homo sapiens the dominant species on earth. The first section of the chapter defines the main terms in this argument. The second section describes the evolution of modern brain shape and suggests the role imagination has played in producing the complex of behaviors that characterize neurologically modern Homo sapiens. The third section describes the current neuroscientific understanding of the brain’s default mode network—the neurological locus of imagination. The fourth section describes three core processes of imagination used in constructing imaginative verbal artifacts: simulation, mental time travel, and perspective taking (also known as “Theory of Mind” and “mentalizing”). The three processes are illustrated with reference to a modern American novel, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The fifth section describes four specialized forms of imagination that deploy the core processes: dreaming, mind-wandering, autobiographical narratives, and counterfactual thinking. That section explains how these forms are involved in writing or reading literature and identifies a few literary works that illustrate them. The final section sums up the argument for the adaptive functions of literature.