Imagination in the Contemporary World and the Legacy of Romantic Literary Thought

physiological evidence available now that visual imagery and imagination are neurologically generated and can, in the future, no doubt be controlled:

“Neurological patients who have lost the retinotopically mapped regions in one cerebral hemisphere, leaving them blind in the corresponding half of their visual field, show certain impaired imaginary abilities in the blinded hemifield… However, other patients suffering from cortical blindness due to damage in these areas seem to have relatively normal imagery. Furthermore, some patients with localized damage in the retinotopically mapped areas experience vivid, well-formed “visual hallucinations” (i.e. imagery that is outside of conscious control–they do not typically mistake it for reality) precisely in the affected (blind or “blindsighted”) parts of their visual fields.  This suggests that these brain areas cannot be essential for visual imagery” (http: Are Theories of Imagery…..6).

The above quotation may offer the reader a glimpse of the mechanistic and rigid way in which ideas and definitions of “imagination” and “imagery” are currently being approached by leading investigators of imagery and imaginative phenomena  in the late twentieth cenury (the above quote refers to some of the results of recent investigations of Kosslyn, et al (1992-1997).  There is not much room for any living, breathing corpus of an evolving definition for imagination here.  It has already been decided that everything that emanates from that lump of complex tissue and fluids known as the ‘brain’ is limited by its physiological characteristics, parameters, and functions.

It is rather like analyzing Kubla Khan as the mere product of the influence of opium–as if there will ever be another

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23