Funny holidays - Holiday of the fevered imagination

“Dreamers of all countries unite” - this is the slogan under which the Day of the Inflamed Imagination could be celebrated This holiday is held annually on August 14th In our country, few people have heard about him, so it’s time to correct this omission and talk a little about the possibilities of human imagination Imagination is a special form of the psyche that only a person can have This definition was considered the only correct one until in 2013, American psychologist and primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh published the results of her many years of research The zoologist found that some species of animals still have imagination Monkeys, whose abilities she devoted almost her entire life to studying, can pretend, which is impossible without imagination However, primates are not always able to distinguish their fiction from reality, therefore their imagination is more primitive than that of an adult and is more like the fantasy of a small child One of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's chimpanzee wards literally amazed scientists when, while playing, he picked up a stick in the jungle and began to treat it like another baby chimpanzee - he began to carry it like a doll, made a small shelter for it, and even tried to feed it This is not the only time that primates have proven their ability to imagine something that is not really there With the help of imagination, a person is able to better prepare himself to perform tasks in real life This can be easily verified by a simple example, when a student cannot memorize new English words assigned at school He chooses an original solution and associates each of them with some memorable images They help him, at the right moment, pull out the word he needs from his memory by pulling the image associated with it, like a thread Not so long ago, scientists made another interesting discovery - it turned out that a person learns faster in his imagination Experts from Harvard Medical School conducted an interesting experiment with two groups of people who were learning to play the piano The former attended regular lessons, while the latter played imaginary instruments The second group made great progress in learning The idea of ​​conducting such an experiment was prompted by an interesting precedent, when a famous violinist went to prison for two years, where he was naturally deprived of the opportunity to play the violin The man was not at a loss and regularly practiced on an imaginary musical instrument After his release, he not only did not lose his skill, but began to play even better than before his trial “No tangible, real charm can compare with what a person is capable of accumulating in the depths of his imagination,” wrote Francis Scott Fitzgerald Only a person’s ability to look beyond the boundaries of familiar reality allows him to create something new All great discoveries were made by great dreamers One of the main features of imagination is the creation of images that do not exist in reality We, for example, can, using the power of fantasy, imagine an object that has never caught our eye before This is the enormous potential of human imagination We not only contemplate and cognize the world around us, but also transform and change it, embodying the images that arise in fantasy Just for a moment imagine that the imagination has simply disappeared All works of art and scientific achievements would evaporate with it Painters, sculptors, composers, writers and poets - their creativity is impossible without imagination By analogy, any discoveries of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists would simply disappear into thin air, because the discovery of something new is always the result of the creation of new images in a person’s imagination