Imagination Vs. Extrapolation

A recent weekend essay in The Wall Street Journal claimed that adults imagine better than children, contrary to the wisdom of numerous stories (from The Chronicles of Narnia to Roald Dahl’s work (who, I like to say, is essentially the Stephen King of children’s literature)), and centuries of anecdotal observations.  Now, these essays are inconsistently insightful at best, and this would not have alone prompted a post if I had not also seen similar claims in several other sources.  It seems that stealing imagination from children has become a trend, but there are significant flaws in the logic underpinning these claims.

As writers imagination is, in a sense, our business, for it is essential to inventing these stories we share.  Most writers eventually come to understanding imagination as a muscle, and mental technique that can be trained, something requiring effort.  That is mainly an effort of recognition – it is about experiencing reality in such a way as to prompt the what-if that transforms mundane observations into a story’s genesis.  “What if” is the core of imagination, but that’s not what researchers are “experts” are using when they examine imagination in adults versus children.

Instead, they’re studying something called counterfactual thinking.  One of the human brain’s many marvelous capabilities is to consider what could have happened, not just to remember what did happen (and we’re rather poor at the latter, as it turns out).  As trivial or obvious as this might seem, it is quite remarkable, and one of the thought processes that enables us to adapt to new circumstances and environments.  Counterfactual thinking enables us to imagine, and implement, an animal falling into a pit trap for the first time, and it is the same process that makes us breathe a sigh of relief after a narrow escape, because we can imagine what might have been.

In claiming that adults can imagine better than children, researchers reduce imagination purely to counterfactuals.  In essence, since adults have a more complete understanding of how the world works, they can more effectively generate complex counterfactuals.  Studies ask children and adults to consider counterfactuals for a common situation, and find that the adults are more likely to countenance the unlikely-but-possible options than are the children.  If counterfactual capacity is imagination, then the adults are imagining better than the children; however, there is far more to imagination than simply considering what could have been.

While counterfactual thinking is a component of imagination, it is not the complete story.  In fact, I’d argue that counterfactual thinking is less imagination than it is extrapolation, and that’s the easy part of imagination.  When I’m writing, 90% of what I’m doing is extrapolating, taking a common starting point and spinning it out in some new direction.  Call it extrapolation, innovation, or counterfactual thinking: these are all faces of the same concept, taking a known circumstance or set of facts and tweaking it to see what could happen.  Then 10% that makes extrapolation into imagination is both much harder to do and much harder to define.  Call it whimsy, perhaps, or counterpossible thinking.

Whatever you choose to call it, it is that aspect of imagination that in adults requires suspension of disbelief just to countenance, much less to implement for themselves.  It is the part of imagination that is wholly ungrounded in fact.  It’s drawing a spaceship that looks the way you want it to, not based on design principles or riffing on existing transportation.  It’s falling through a cubbyhole in a desk into a realm in which physics no longer applies.  It’s painting a dinosaur pink for no other reason than wanting to use the pink crayon.  This is the element in which children will usually exceed adults, because children have fewer preconceived notions of how things can or should or ought to be.  The more you assume you know to be true, the more you restrict this aspect of your imagination.

Of course, this isn’t something that can be easily measured, and it doesn’t have apparent, immediate, practical value the way that counterfactual thinking does, so it is simply not considered.  Yet, in fields requiring true, original creativity – storytelling, invention, and the like – this 10% component of imagination is what separates the derivative from the original, what sees, not masterpieces wrought, but something new created.  Imagination isn’t just thinking about what could be.  It’s asking what if anything could be.