How humans came to have imagination Comments Off

From all the traits that make humans the dominant species on Earth, with all the good and the bad that comes with it, imagination is on top of the list. Sure, we have opposable thumbs to hold tools, we walk on two legs, so our hands are free, we can talk to each other, but without the power of imagining new tools, new goals, new situations, without the power of day dreaming, we would still be using our thumbs to pick up stones, walk on two legs just to have our hands free to carry some more stones and food and would talk about where we found that tasty rat everybody enjoyed so much yesterday.

But where does imagination come from? Evolution tells us that we didn’t just woke up one day and voila, we had imagination. It had to evolve from something. My theory is that imagination had to develop as a competitive advantage that gave us the ability to tell what our prey, enemies and friends were going to do. To imagine the next move, to look at some tracks on the ground and be able to imagine what the animal did to leave those tracks.

If we have imagination and it evolved, it is likely that other mammals in the evolutionary chain have it too. The best example I could think of is a cat stalking it’s prey. I’ve never seen a cat attacking a real mouse but I saw cats playing. And what anybody that has seen a cat play can tell you is that it will attack the toy prey only after it goes out of sight.

The cat must be able to imagine what the mouse, or whatever other victim, would do after it leaves the direct field of vision. A cat that is able to imagine better will most likely have a competitive advantage, get more food, have more descendants. The smarter the animals are, the better equipped they seem to be to imagine how the environment and the animals inhabiting it, will react to one or the other stimuli.

The human capacity to imagine must have evolved on a similar path. So there you have it! Human imagination came from our furry ancestors stopping to chance their tales and imagining what they prey would do.

What do you think of my theory?