The Loss of Imagination

When I was young I took it for granted that everyone could visualize things in their head. Most of my friends could do this. Since I've become a teacher I've begun to notice that a lot of kids and teens cannot visualize things. In fact, lack of ability to use the mind to visualize images and words must be on the rise because current public school curriculum has begin to focus lessons around visualization...ie. teaching visualization by rote. For the last four years I've been wondering why children in this decade need to be taught concrete methods of visualization.

Many of the kids I've worked with can visualize. However, I've noticed two kinds of creative visualization.

The first is what I catagorize as "rehashing story lines in a rather two dimensional manner". I've worked with some kids I initially thought were very creative until I realized the stories they were telling me were a reassemblage of ideas from cartoons and movies they had seen on television and theaters. Many of their dialogues were exact expressions or quotes from a show. Has the rehashing of media oriented data, in fact, become a cognitive trend and is it the result of excessive exposure to electonic games and media? I'm not sure.

I feel the second kind of visualization tends to be more original, intuitively creative, multisensory and complex. Children with little or controlled exposure to electronic media and video games tend to have this type of visualization. I suspect it is based on a synthesis of random mental, physical, emotional and spirital experiences in the real world. The real world is not predictable and we use all the senses to experience it. Therefore a child who plays in the woods is observing many different random events in real life, real time, three dimensions and is using his/her entire brain to make sense of the wide variety of incoming data. Because data is natural and unpredictable, the brain, in order to best survive in this environment, stores and synthesizes sensory information in such a way as to allow for flexible and creative responses, intense visualization and intuitive leaps. The child's entire brain is engaged.

Current brain research suggests the brain of a young child who plays outside in the real world is wired differently than a child who spends most of their time watching predictable, two dimensional, often animated, electronic images. Limited sensory and real-life social experience, and, possibly, static eye movement (lack of wide ranging eye movement is another possible cause of cognitive changes being noticed in children) could account for some children's difficulty decoding social cues, experiencing culturally normative emotional responses, lack of ability to visualize images and words, increasing focus on their external selves, and the ease with which Americans fall prey to commericalized values and images.