Imagination Is a Muscle

Children transform a piece of fabric into waves, sails, wings, and shelters during a theater workshop on imagination.

Sometimes I ask children to put a few questions to their parents or work through short creative challenges with them.

It is not unusual for a child to come back and tell me that their parents apologized because they “have no imagination.”

Imagination and attention are often treated as opposing forces, as though being imaginative automatically meant being distracted.

I do not see it that way, although there clearly needs to be a healthy balance between the two.

So I have developed a very simple explanation to distinguish between these concepts.

If we were to playfully compare the human brain to a computer, we might say that:

• intelligence is the processor: the ability to process and connect information;

• memory is the storage space in which memories and information are kept;

• attention is the system that directs resources: the ability to focus our energy on a goal without wasting it or constantly being pulled away by other stimuli, whether external or internal.

And imagination?

This is where the computer analogy breaks down: imagination is a muscle.

After all, there are no muscles in the brain.

Imagination is the extraordinary human ability to imagine things that do not yet exist.

Developing imagination in children means treating this ability like a muscle: it must be exercised and strengthened over time. If it is not stimulated and used, it gradually loses strength.

As children, our imagination is constantly at work: we still know little about the world, so we imagine what we do not know.

Attention, on the other hand, still has to be developed. Everything is new, and any stimulus can pull us elsewhere.

As we grow, we must develop our attention so that we become increasingly capable of dealing with and solving everyday problems. But developing attention must not come at the expense of exercising imagination.

It is imagination that can take us beyond what we already know and allow us to find new solutions.

There is no human activity that cannot be improved with a little imagination.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein