{
  "abstract": "Prof. Zeman trained in Medicine at Oxford University Medical School, after a first degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and later in Neurology in Oxford, at The National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square,London and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996, as a Consultant and Senior Lecturer (later Reader) in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and to the Peninsula Medical School (now University of Exeter Medical School) in September 2005 as Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology. His specialised clinical work is in cognitive and behavioural neurology, including neurological disorders of sleep.His main research interests are disorders of visual imagery and forms of amnesia occurring in epilepsy. He has an active background interest in the science and philosophy of consciousness, publishing a wide-ranging review of the field in Brain (2001; 124:1263-1289) and an accessible introduction to the subject for a general readership (Consciousness: a user’s guide, Yale University Press, 2002). In 2008 he published an introduction to neurology for the general reader, A Portrait of the Brain (Yale UP), and in 2012, Epilepsy and Memory (OUP) with Narinder Kapur and Marilyn Jones-Gotman.From 2007-2010 he was Chairman of the British Neuropsychiatry Association. He launched and continues to direct its training course in neuropsychiatry.I will present an anecdote, an argument, an analysis and an afterword.The anecdote relates to a seminal moment many years ago when a talk at the BNPA helped to propel me along the journey to writing The Shape of Things Unseen – a new science of imagination.The argument explores the book’s four key ideas – i) we spend much of our lives immersed in imaginative pursuits ‘in our heads’; ii) this becomes less puzzling when we reflect that the real world is, in a sense, a product of our heads; iii) in imagination we (often) run off-line the very sensorimotor systems that we employ on-line in perception; iv) a critical element in the emergence of human cognition was the evolution of our ability to share what we imagine.The analysis examines the neural and cognitive prerequisites for the creative imagination using a playful mnemonic, SkiDS. Ski stands for hard-won skills, which underly (almost) all human creativity: they are equally biological and cultural achievements. D refers to detachment, comprising cognitive control and our symbolic faculty. S refers to spontaneity, an accommodating concept under which I will discuss inspiration, the activity of the resting brain, replay, dreams, insight, flow and shivers down the spine.The afterword highlights four conclusions – i) imagination is a/the hallmark of human cognition concealing startling invisible differences; ii) imagination is ubiquitous, not the preserve of the creative few; iii) our imaginings seem utterly personal, but they are in fact profoundly social – we are cultural creatures to the core; iv) in the light of advances in neuroscience over the past three decades the brain now appears a much more congenial home for creativity that when I trained in the 1980s.",
  "authors": [
    {
      "affiliations": [],
      "name": "Adam Zeman"
    }
  ],
  "title": "The science of imagination",
  "uid": "6c3c37d7-ae6a-55ae-b58f-a338c0264ba2"
}