Imagination is creativity in action. It can be using our brain and our senses to create an image within our mind. Imagination draws on our experiences and knowledge of the world around us and combines them with the complete unknown to make something new.
It allows us to explore beyond the constraints of our environment and our reality, into a world of dreams, where creativity and invention are at their strongest.
How does it work?
Is imagination unique to humans?
Knowledge and imagination are the key factors to do a creative project. Imagination is the first step to have ideas and execute them inside you. If you have knowledge without imagination you would lose the ability to create a good job and found yourself in the theoretical cell. Finical resources is another factor to think about!
Imagination draws upon experience. Knowledge allows the imagination to focuse. Creativity is different from wandering. As for your question, experience, imagination and focuse are crucial, but without knowledge - useless.
There is a mutual relationship between knowledge and imagination. A good example is the human brain that contains right and left hemispheres working together though they are different. Right hemisphere is the locus of imagination, creativity, intuition, images, emotions and color, while the left hemisphere is in charge of reasoning, numbers, critical thinking, logic and language. Both, knowledge and imagination, provide rationalist and mythical or mystic interpretations of the world (scientist and artists). The exceptional persons know how to use them effectively.
Imagination can occur where there is no knowledge. It is then called 'belief'.
Imagination dares to sit at the edge of the known looking out into what is not yet known, so imagination has content but imagination dreams into new ways of using that content. Then the cycle begins again.
In my understanding, imagination is more associated with talent, which of course relies on accumulated knowledge. There are concepts of an erudite person, an intelligent person and a wise person. An erudite person can know a lot but can not do anything. A smart person can know much less than erudite, but he can be able to do this. A wise person can know even less than an intelligent person, but he will never find himself in a desperate situation, in which an intelligent person may appear because a wise person can predict future events.
" A lot of studies have been made with respect to the functioning of animal brains, and the way different animals may perceive things, known and unknown. Though, it cannot be said for sure, as to whether or not animals actually bear an ability of creative imagination. Several studies and observations indicate that they definitely, to a certain extent, possess an ability to assume things. Take dogs, for instance, they have an inherent instinct to dig with their feet, and hide their possessions in the holes that they dig. Given a chance, most dogs would display this instinct. However, have you ever noticed a pet dog trying to dig the floor of your house, and then 'hiding' its favorite toy at the place that it has, well, scratched? Most people having a pet dog may have noticed this. Does this act indicate that the dog is perceiving this 'hiding spot' as some place in the wild. Does this suggest that the dog can actually imagine things? Well, that's difficult to say; however, the possibility is that the dog's brain might be forming some visual images, thus triggering its senses to act in a particular manner"
https://animalsake.com/do-animals-have-imagination
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