The Shape of Things Unseen by Adam Zeman review – the science of imagination

“T he Brain – is wider than the Sky – / For – put them side by side – / The one the other will contain / with ease – and You – beside –,” wrote Emily Dickinson. To all that the world presents to our senses, the mind effortlessly adds things that will not and cannot ever be. We can’t help it: imagination is humankind’s unbidden superpower, perhaps the capacity that most distinguishes us from other animals.

In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman attempts to explain how and why this is. It is a wide-ranging survey – too wide, offering a mass of fascinating information about creativity, mental imagery and child development bloated by superfluous discourses on the origins of life, the Covid pandemic and climate crisis. Even then it doesn’t quite resolve the mystery of why our imaginative capacity seems to far exceed what is adaptively useful. But in this Zeman simply reflects the state of play: brain science tells us a great deal about the imagination but can only ever take us so far.

The subject itself is multivalent. How much common ground should we expect between the visionary William Blake (for whom “this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination”) and physicist Paul Dirac, who apparently struggled to imagine himself into the mind of others and yet was able to dream up antimatter and single-pole magnets? Imagination seems clearly linked to creativity, empathy and the ability to conjure up mental images, yet some highly creative people, such as Pixar’s founder Ed Catmull, are “aphantasic”, innately unable to visualise anything in the mind’s eye.

Leave a Comment