Two experiments tested and confirmed the hypothesis that when the phenomenological characteristics of imagined events are more similar to those of related autobiographical memories, the imagined event is more likely to be considered to have occurred. At Time 1 and 2-weeks later, individuals rated the likelihood of occurrence for 20 life events. In Experiment 1, 1-week after Time 1, individuals ...

It is perhaps an uncontroversial truth that the imagination is important for creative thought. The terms ‘creative’ and ‘imaginative’ are often used interchangeably, at least in popular contexts. And volumes have been written on the imaginations of creative artists, not to mention poems, films, paintings, and other depictions of the same phenomenon. Kant recognized a connection between imaginat...

For reasons similar to those I have propounded regarding the matter of fungi in cholera evacuations, it seems to me to have been unnecessary for Dr. Lewis, in the report before me, to enter into an explanation of the appearances presented by animalcula), common to the water of certain drains and tanks in Calcutta, and cholera stools. Not only do I fail to understand the practical advantage to b...

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical - and even psychological - reckoning with imagery and its parent concept 'imagination'. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination's ...

Thomas Beddoes’s and Humphry Davy’s accounts of the nitrous oxide experiments carried out at the Pneumatic Institution in 1799 include extravagant descriptions of its mind-altering effects. Many people, both at the time and subsequently, have considered these descriptions to be the product not of the gas but of its subjects’ overheated imaginations. To what extent were these effects ‘all in the...

Thomas Beddoes’s and Humphry Davy’s accounts of the nitrous oxide experiments carried out at the Pneumatic Institution in 1799 include extravagant descriptions of its mind-altering effects. Many people, both at the time and subsequently, have considered these descriptions to be the product not of the gas but of its subjects’ overheated imaginations. To what extent were these effects ‘all in the...

influence of The Sociological Imagination, they think of such concepts as the intersection of biography and history, the distinction between personal troubles and public issues, the predilection for psychologisms instead of social structural explanations, and the pitfalls of abstract empiricism and grand theorizing. As is well established, Mills’s insights on these matters are particularly rele...