Fran Pérez, a 30-year-old journalist, remembers perfectly the day when her friends got tired of children’s games. “A terrifying day,” he assures us. I was accused of being childish because I refused to participate in new activities which mainly consisted of wandering off to a corner to talk or standing in that same corner watching other groups of boys and girls. To defend themselves from the accusations, they told their friends something they repeat with pride today: “What’s happening to you is that you have no imagination.”
These words, spoken by a child more than 20 years ago, are not so far from reality: imagination, the ability that allows us to mentally represent things that cannot be directly perceived by the senses, has deteriorated. This is one of the effects that new technologies have had on the mind and the public debate has forgotten the claim of this cognitive resource.
There is a loss of attention, memory or even the ability to orientate oneself, but no atrophy of the imagination. “It’s very easy not to talk about it because we all believe that we are capable of imagining, it’s a basic thing, like air, that we think will always be there,” explains Begoña Quesada, journalist and author of In defense of the imagination (Paraninfo, 2023), Premio Internacional de Essay Jovellanos 2023.
Another reason is that, unlike the fact that memory “can be measured, for example, by counting the number of digits someone can remember”, or attention “the number of followed pages of a book someone can read”, there is no point in empirically measuring the imaginative state of the human being. It is possible, for example, to analyze imagination in its creative aspect.
In 2011, a study from the University of William & Mary in the United States analyzed the results of 300,000 Torrance tests, which measure creative thinking, and concluded that this human capacity had declined since 1990. This creative asphyxia has also been commented on in media such as The New York Timeswith reference to the current cultural field of remakesthe sequels and restarts.
We consume more and more products imagined by others. In Spain, according to a study carried out by ElectronicsHub, each person spends around 35% of their daily time looking at a screen. Casi 6 hours. During this time, the need to imagine is less. Videos that are short, fast, and saturated with visual stimuli require only passive attention. There is no need to complete, to project anything, to maintain one’s own mental image. Hence much less than when we consume other formats – like a book – or, quite simply, there is a total absence of stimuli: silence. The consequences of this atrophy of imagination range from widespread creative asphyxia to reliance on external stimuli to activate the mind and even lack of empathy.
In one of the chapters of the book, Quesada explains that the brain is an organ of great plasticity, which transforms through the use and disuse of certain areas. Psychiatrist Gary Small, according to the author, studied the frontal lobe where memory, imagination and complex reasoning are located, and demonstrated that repeated use of screens leaves part of the brain disused and that part of the brain falls away, like the interior of an abandoned house, oxidized and powdered.
The singer Irenegarry, in one newsletter of Substack ―a platform that allows writers, journalists and content creators to publish their work―, reflected on the loss of imagination implied by the increase in audiovisual consumption: “I can’t imagine the temperature of the drops if they splash. In general. A bath full of rose petals. Is that what I imagine? I imagine less now that I see more?”
Quesada, who answers the phone to EL PAÍS from Berlin, says she realizes the importance of her imagination during the pandemic, with her children. “We had to be very creative people to keep in touch with lazy people or keep our children occupied for more than an hour. » He also warned of the danger that threatened this human faculty by seeing how the relationship between his children, his school and his friends was entirely digital. “I think that if the raw material of the imagination, the reality that we perceive, depends more and more on technology, then the imagination itself, as we understand it today, is changing. It is even weakened,” he adds.
Suele associates the step of maturity with that moment when children, among other things, begin to imagine that there is an army of monsters chasing them in the schoolyard, that a handful of arena octopuses constitute a precious commodity. Reality becomes homogenized and no longer needs the intervention of the imagination. This moment, in many cases, comes before time if children change the game through imagination, through constant consumption of screens.
Last July, Mattel, the company that manufactures the famous Barbie toy, reached an agreement with OpenAI to create a joint product. There are no details on the operation, but it is logical to expect that soon children will be able to talk to ChatGPT through a Barbie.
Among other consequences, children, who have always been busy giving a voice and personality to their children, found themselves with a muñeca or a piece of canvas wrapped around a stick, without having to use their imagination to do it. “Nothing is understood,” says Quesada, “children never need their toys to be able to give them life.”
Imagine showing empathy
The poet and professor Fernando Valverde, whose latest book is The men who killed my mother (Visor, 2023), he studied imagination in the Department of Romantic Literature at the University of Virginia. I brought him to a theme through the poet Percy Shelley, to whom he dedicated a biography. While reviewing his work, he read a statement that piqued his curiosity: “Imagination is the main tool we human beings have for good morals.”
This statement, Valverde recalls via video call, forced questions to be asked. “Shelley explained that only if we are able to imagine the pain our actions will cause in others, what today is called empathy, can we choose whether or not to do so freely. That is: we can make a moral decision about our actions. This gives imagination a primary role in the human condition.” comments.
Valverde, a supporter of the creation of a department dedicated to imagination in universities, conducted an experiment with his own students with the aim, among other things, of reactivating their imagination. Nadie was able to enter the classroom without technology after the 19th century. This includes everything from mobile phones and computers to handhelds. The reason for this measure, which may seem exaggerated, also has something performanceas a small symbolic ritual that helps students break away from their technological dependence: “The problem of imagination in society is the result of living inside a screen, it has renounced the real world. Even when the group moves towards it by looking at a screen.” And he clarifies: “I’m not a Luddite. Technology has many positive uses.”
According to the poet, this experience carried out over several years had a “very positive” impact on the students. “There is no clock, you have to imagine the time. Sometimes we finish 10 minutes earlier, other times 20 minutes later. Let’s forget it,” he says. At first, many students admit that they feel anxious about being without a phone for an entire class, but as the term progresses, they become accustomed to it and reduce their dependence. Another consequence is that it increases the level of socialization of students: “It’s time to know the names of five companions at 18.”
Valverde and Quesada agree on the fact that regaining the imaginative faculty necessarily involves maintaining a good reading habit. It is no coincidence that in the Wikipedia entry dedicated to imagination there appears an image of Don Quijote de la Mancha, the knight-errant who lives absorbed in the imaginary world. “Reading a book takes a lot of effort: it involves you, it’s active consumption, it requires patience until the story unfolds within you and the text becomes a kind of landscape. It requires faith, but once you’re there, everything is yours,” concludes Quesada.
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