About this Research Topic

Background

Although there is an immense bulk of literature on imagination, both in the hard sciences and in the humanities, it is still an elusive concept: its definition and understanding change according to different heuristic frames—mainly the anthropological, philosophical, aesthetic, poetic, cognitive, and neuroscientific ones. The complexity of the discourse about imagination is rooted in its determining more than one core domain of our lives, in its shaping our thinking and sense-making processes, as well as our artistic production. Starting with Gilbert Durand in 1963 imagination has been interpreted from the anthropological perspective as a source of symbols, codifying abstract notions or even entities by means of perceptible inputs, in relation to social and cultural issues.

The main questions about imagination regard the modalities and effects of this human faculty, particularly in relation to the construction of cognitive, as well as aesthetic, and symbolic constraints. Many hypotheses and theories have highlighted different features and behaviors of the imagination: some of them regard imagination as regulating the relation among percepts and mental representations, and as determining the image of the world surrounding each perceiving subject; other refer to its role in the cultural and symbolic production of artifacts and texts.

Among the numerous modes of imagination, we underscore its being an embodied process, significant to any human experience representing the world either in thought and/or in cultural products, in fine arts, literature, performance, and multimedia artifacts, as some pathbreaking studies have shown. A core process of the imagination is that of the “embodied simulation,” a functional prelinguistic activation of the human sensorimotor system, that gives rise to all phenomena bound to intercorporeality and intersubjectivity (empathy, sympathy, compassion, social cognition, etc.), as researches conducted by Vittorio Gallese demonstrate, and as recent neurocognitive studies, specifically in the 4E Cognition avenue, have confirmed.

Because of its extensiveness, the topic of imagination requires a transdisciplinary approach, joining neuroscientific and cognitive research and studies on aesthetics regarding the fine arts and literature. In fact, the ambiguity and abundance of meanings in artistic works strongly engage the imagination of the image beholder and of the reader, triggering his/her cognitive faculties. Moreover, both the fine arts and literature may meta-represent imaginative processes, i.e., the phenomenological emergence of endogenous dynamic processes involving a cluster of cognitive faculties, activated by triggering the reader’s embodied simulation.

The inquiry into imagination will benefit from the contribution of scholars in both the scientific and the humanities fields, acknowledging conceptual and experimental approaches through several epistemological perspectives, in order to address research questions such as the following:

Which are the neuronal underpinnings activated in imagining in everyday life?
Are there neural processes involved in imagining counterfactual worlds, that are exclusive of art?
How does the bodily dimension affect the imaginative process?
How is imagery produced in the beholders’ minds?
How is imagery produced while reading a literary text?
What are the differences between simulation and imagination while watching at visual artworks or reading (literary) text?
Which role do emotions play in the construction of imagery during the reading/watching act?
Which role does empathy play in imagining counterfactual worlds?
How do language and style contribute to the creation of imaginative counterfactual worlds?
Which clues of the literary text do trigger imagination?

Keywords: Neuroaesthetics, Intersubjectivity, Emotions, Empathy, Stylistic, Tropes, Imagery, Representation, Performance, Multimodality, Cognitive linguistics, Embodied simulation

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