The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them)

By Albert Read

In this insightful and life-affirming book, Albert Read puts the imagination back at the forefront of our lives as a “muscle” that is boundless in its potential, infinitely rewarding, and central to human achievement.

This beautifully written book explores one subject, imagination, through the lens of history and memoir, with some prescriptive aspects to it as well. The author posits that imagination, while elusive, is not just for artists and creatives, it is a muscle—an essential faculty of the mind to be trained and developed over a lifetime. Spanning prehistoric times through to the twenty-first century, from the earliest cave paintings to Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions to Steve Jobs’s approach to office design, it touches on art, music, film, literature, science, and entrepreneurship, to examine how the imagination has evolved—in shape, power, and pace—through the millennia.

Albert Read reveals how we can harness the imagination in our day-to-day lives and why, in the new age of technology, it is more pressing than ever that we do so. He explores where to find ideas, how to foster skills in observation and connection, and how to be more attentive to the fluxes of our own minds. After all, as Read expertly outlines, the imagination is our supreme gift, our biggest opportunity, our greatest source of fulfillment and our most vital asset for the future. The book is illustrated throughout with approximately 60 images.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Union Square & Co.
• Release date: Jul 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781454958147

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There is an idea at the heart of this book that I stumbled across when I was just out of university. My future was unknown territory, with no map that I could lay my hands on. I was marking time in a second-floor office in Soho, selling advertising space for theater programs—or at least trying to. At lunchtimes, released temporarily from my ignominy, I would go and buy my favorite tuna sandwich, and on the way, I would linger in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road and rifle through the hardbacks and dog-eared paperbacks stacked in boxes on the tables outside.

I was looking for something unlikely and surprising. A wise person had once impressed on me the importance of reading what no one else is reading; of cultivating a rare mind; of forming perspectives individually arrived at, perhaps different from those of my peers. The purpose of such activity was to launch my own inner journeys; to land, if I was lucky, on original alignments of thought.

It sounded like a good idea at the time and I tried to follow the advice without quite knowing where it would take me. And so I would spend the evenings with one of the old books that I had picked up inexpensively. Reading partly released me from the numbness of a deflating, unimaginative working day, but it also held the more thrilling prospect of one of those promised inner journeys that could lead me to places of which I could not yet conceive, perhaps even revealing some first hint of an imagined destiny.

One day I picked up a book called The Secret Language of Film by Jean-Claude Carrière. Carrière was a well-known French intellectual and scriptwriter, and I decided he would have been careful to cultivate his own rare mind. His films were imaginative in the best European tradition. He had worked with famous directors and won prizes in Cannes and Hollywood. His best-known collaborations were with the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, and it was at the end of their working days together that the two of them would push each other to imagine further still.

A paragraph from Carrière’s book, which I read later that evening, caught my eye:

As for training the imagination, the muscle which makes the essential breakthroughs, we did a daily exercise that required real discipline. For a half-hour, at the end of every afternoon’s work, I would stay in my room while Buñuel made his solitary way to the bar and ordered his evening cocktail. Thus separated, each of us committed himself to inventing, in half an hour, a story.… The point was to keep the imagination on its toes, to force it to arouse itself at the very hour—the end of the day—when it tends to doze off. As I entered the bar I could tell from Luis’s face whether he was pleased or let down by his day’s discovery. And this ability was probably mutual, for every face lights up at the onset of a good idea.

I re-read the passage several times. I marked it in pencil and later wrote it out in ink in my notebook (or what is sometimes still called a commonplace book).

The idea of the imagination as a muscle—as a faculty of the mind that could be trained and developed—had lodged with me.

And I have been turning it over in my mind ever since.

I abandoned my job in Soho before it could abandon me.

I eventually found my niche in creative businesses and have worked in roles that have relied in their essence on the imagination. In meetings in Tokyo, Paris and Mumbai, I have watched the interplay of culture, personality and ideas. In large and small organizations, I have observed the conditions of success and failure, and their relationship with original thinking. I have seen that a well-channeled collective imagination can make a great deal of money for a business; equally, inertia can set in where fear, mistrust or risk aversion have driven imagination out of the room. Small, incremental ideas are important, as well as big transformational ones. And in positions of leadership, I’ve recognized the need to set a culture and expectation of ideas—for myself and for others.

There is, to echo Carrière, a wonderful, infectious joy in a good idea, but it needs to be induced with a lightness of touch. Ideas come where there is confidence and laughter.

I have also become more attentive to the fluxes of my own mind.

I feel my imagination’s constant mercurial nature; how it evolves in power and shape, how it shrinks and expands, ebbs and flows by the hour, by the day, by the decade. The imagination of my childhood and that of today have arisen from the same mind and yet, I reflect, how distant they sometimes feel from each other.

The imagination takes other forms and assumes new shapes with other words. Modern terms—creative visualization, manifesting—are flavors of imagining. Creativity, that other often-used term, is the imagination’s active counterpart. In order to create, first of all I have to imagine—or sometimes I imagine as I create. With all these activities, it is the imagination that is the primal force at my disposal, stretching like a viewing deck over the chasm of my memory and experience; casting down unreliably into the depths of my unconscious for its sustenance.

There are times with my imagination when, if I am lucky, I experience a quickening of thought, a sudden inner expansion. Ideas can arrive in multitudes, bringing with them a soaring feeling of possibility. They come from art, certainly, but they might also arrive in the early morning as I awaken or, as often reported, in the shower. I find the stillness at the end of a long car journey a peculiarly fertile moment for the imagination.

I also imagine well thirty minutes into a solitary walk at dusk; or on leaving a party alone and stepping out into a cold street. Others—Diderot, Wordsworth, Nabokov—discovered these beneficial moments long before I did—and made far better use of them. But they might not have fully realized that these instances have something else in common: a semi-abrupt change in physical circumstance allowing for the mind’s partial disengagement.

They are the spaces in between, allowing for quieter ideas to make their first appearance.

It is curious to me that, while we focus on our physical and emotional health, we talk less about our imaginative well-being. There is undoubtedly a connection between the three, proven by academic studies; but its conscious and systematic application in our lives is less evident.

I find it is when I have neglected my own imagination that, without always knowing it, life has felt a little flat. I now know, and the studies have confirmed this, that we are re-energized by imagining. It certainly makes me happier. It could simply be reading a novel or watching a thought-provoking film—or, better still, it could be doing something imaginative of my own. I might be part of a group that imagines a new line of business. Or it could be merely engaging across a dinner table in a surreal, humorous meander into ludicrous imaginary situations that stimulate thought, provoke warmth and a human bond.

Discovering the depths and extents of our inner journeys is the very pleasurable effect of an active mind. Virginia Woolf, who found the roaming of this inner life more liberating than the constraints of reality, declared that the only exciting life is the imaginary one. It is by occupying the imagination that life can sometimes more easily find a purpose. It is by risking oneself imaginatively that one can feel most alive.

A portrait of Virginia Woolf in 1927. Woolf once wrote: The only exciting life is the imaginary one.

With the imagination, I exist twice.

My identity rests in how I think of myself, within the bounds of my own constant inner conversation, but I also exist in the way others choose to imagine me. I am bound by the same myths and narratives as everybody else, collectively imagined in the vain hope that we might live harmoniously on the same planet. This leads to strange consequences, but ones designed for a greater collective good: I might, for example, sacrifice myself in war for a complete stranger, doing so in a shared imagining of nationhood.

My imagination binds me to society in other ways. I am tied to my family not only by love, but by the imagined structure of marriage. I entrust my money to a bank because I imagine that one day they will give it back. I buy branded goods because I imagine they denote high quality, or (secretly) that they will provoke acceptance and respect in others. I even feel a curious warmth toward someone who supports the same football team; it undoubtedly reveals an integrity and a soundness of character—or I imagine it must do so.

If I am not careful, I might equally begin to imagine that those supporting another football team—another country, another faith—think differently and are therefore my enemies.

My imaginings take place, inescapably, inside my own culture. I am immersed like a fish, gliding in the depths, unaware of the water around me. My mind is cultivated (to echo the root of the word culture) by my upbringing, my education and my sensory surroundings. It is this inner landscape, this strange flora and fauna of the mind—at once so personal and yet intimately connected to the world around me—that governs even my wildest dreams.

With the imagination, I wonder, are we nourished by culture, or imprisoned by it? Even the greatest of minds have only ever moved within a culture so far. Leonardo da Vinci’s analysis of color and light in his notebooks should have led quite naturally to his painting with the palette of a nineteenth-century impressionist, but the cultural sentry hovering in his mind would not permit such an artistic realization that stood so far outside the common visual experience of the late fifteenth century. Instead, the journey in shadow and light would have to be made more slowly and gradually by the succession of artists who were to follow.

Cultures move and expand when, at rare moments in time, congregations of imaginative minds descend in unison on a single place in a sudden cloudburst. We might think of fifth-century BCE Athens, eighth- to ninth-century Baghdad or Elizabethan London. The reasons for their appearances are something of a mystery. We can loosely point at common factors—mingling air currents from different cultures, underlying prosperity and high educational standards (for some). We could add that these periods were governed by broad-minded leaders who, in permitting degrees of freedom in thought, created the conditions for others to imagine.

These days an enlightened government will try and recapture these elements in the hope of more imaginative cloudbursts. They will invest in social opportunity, open platforms and research that will, over time, generate more tax revenues. They will encourage decentralized decision making and dispense with bureaucracy and protectionism. They will know in their bones that a culture that squashes the individual imagination will desiccate and eventually collapse. Leaders fail when they see what they want to see, and when the old solutions no longer work, they are unable to imagine new ones.

Even those cloudburst cultures that we remember for their ideas still prevented large sections of their societies from imagining at all. Aristotle could happily ponder the nature of arete—virtue—while being waited upon by a slave. He would even refer to the slave in his writing as a living tool. And you don’t even have to look that far back in time: cultures that we regard as modern and forward-looking today would, less than a hundred years ago, tolerate racial segregation or deny women the vote and see, within the confines of their culturally conditioned minds, nothing wrong in doing so.

Through history, most societies have decreed that it is men who should do the imagining. Men have been the ones in possession of learning and financial independence, with the ability to travel and socialize within networks. This has meant that, beyond the morality of it, the ideas driving human advancement have been drawn from a very small base. And there are still countries today where the imagination is buried beneath the burdens of discrimination, enslavement, poverty, climate and disease—as well as the forces of religious and political oppression. Imagining, if it is to be thought of at all, is still for many a mysterious and unattainable luxury.

To widen the base is the imagination’s biggest opportunity. A society grows, visibly and invisibly, from a freedom to imagine drawn from the greatest possible number of minds. It breathes and expands with a breadth of perspectives. It grows in increments of imaginative thinking that take place every hour, every minute—in research laboratories, in business start-ups, across restaurant tables and on solitary walks at dusk. A good idea has a ripple effect, leaving its mark on others who, in turn, will make it better still.

We are living through the Age of Technology.

Like the Industrial Revolution that came two centuries before it, there are tremendous advances upon us. We are on the cusp of exploring new galaxies and perhaps living with extended lifespans. Vast networks of processing power are enabling leaps forward in artificial intelligence and virtual worlds, with thrilling but still unforeseeable consequences lying ahead.

But progress depends on retaining our ability to imagine, and some studies suggest that, as the frontier of knowledge edges forward, new ideas to extend it further still are getting harder to come by. Research productivity, a proxy for our wider imaginings, is falling. One report states, To sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the US must double the amount of research effort every thirteen years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.

And there is another threat to the imagination: research funding is shifting from government and universities to companies who tend to look for short-term profitable inventions rather than longer term, big revolutionary ones. Or, even when spending remains within the public sphere, research bodies can stagnate or drift unwittingly into bureaucracy and disfunction.

At an individual level, we might also be alert to a new and insidious pressure: to imagine less.

Aspects of the digital space that we now occupy can erode our will by design: our spare moments, once given over to imagining, now possess the niggling fear of wasting time, not keeping up, of missing out. And a modern imperative is emerging: to remain in agreement with ourselves; never to imagine that we might be wrong. The new Age of Technology makes it easier than ever to swipe away from the uncomfortable and the disagreeable; from ideas which, on reflection, might have positively altered our mind’s course.

To imagine something different takes more courage than it used to. When every observation and thought is transmitted and parsed in real time by an anonymous and unforgiving digital audience, why would you risk a bold new idea?

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave students a warning of this grim, unfolding scenario in his 2019 Stanford commencement speech:

In a world without digital privacy, even if you have done nothing wrong other than think differently, you begin to censor yourself. Not entirely at first. Just a little, bit by bit. To risk less, to hope less, to imagine less, to dare less, to create less, to try less, to talk less, to think less. The chilling effect of digital surveillance is profound, and it touches everything. What a small, unimaginative world we would end up with. Not entirely at first. Just a little, bit by bit.

He added, Your generation ought to have the same freedom to shape the future as the generation that came before.

There is, for some, a worrying sense of the future closing in on the human spirit; too much change taking place too quickly; a loss of human agency; and our roles within this future feeling more uncertain. Constant bursts of shallow information from devices that never leave our grasp can make it worse, creating an anxious and enervating existence in a fragile physical environment. This is a period of anxiety, as it was for the early nineteenth-century Romantic poets. They surveyed the burning smokestacks of Northern England and worried about a severance with the natural world, and our continued ability to breathe—physically and imaginatively.

There are many of the same concerns today.

And so it might again be a time to reassess and reaffirm the worth of Homo sapiens to the world; to reflect more deeply on our purpose and conclude that, even when everything else feels like it is falling away or has been surrendered to technology, there is a treasure, the imagination, that remains emphatically ours.

The imagination is what we’ve got. We need to understand it, and we need to cherish it. And we need to use it. If we can foster its greater presence in our lives then we should do so—with more focus, greater energy and even with some urgency.

The aim of this book is to pin down the imagination; to examine it as we would a rare butterfly. To draw out the behavior that leads to new thinking; to remind ourselves where good ideas come from; to try and grasp the underlying mechanics of its activity so that we might rediscover the imaginative impulse that lies within all of us.

Think of the examination of imagination as you would a rare butterfly, such as this Kaiser-i-Hind (Teinopalpus imperialis), native to Nepal and Southeast Asia.

The imagination is a muscle, Carrière tells us, not an organ of animal tissue and fibres but a figurative muscle that resides mysteriously somewhere in the mind or the soul. It is not imposed on us like a fixed quota—it is malleable: contracting, stretching, and gaining stamina through the regular pulse of movement and exertion. Its engagement could be uncomfortable at first, like an unencountered glute muscle, but it will become supple once prodded into the rhythm of action. It will assume a shape and size specific to the individual; not everyone will begin from the same starting line or follow the same course, or reach the same destination, but each will have at least embarked on their own imaginative journey.

The clues to the existence of such a muscle lie in the historic activities of the imaginatively muscular; the breadcrumb trails of those that are remembered above all for their ideas—the artists, the poets, the scientists, the entrepreneurs and the non-conformists. We can acquire some of their practices: to fully observe the world around us, be more comfortable with risk, make leaps across disciplines, have better conversations, build spaces that engender connection, understand the techniques of imagining and rediscover our profound relationship with nature.

This attempt to describe such an amorphous subject does not pretend to be definitive. It is subjective and singular in its perspective and angle of approach. It is a call to arms, a reminder that the imagination sits at the center of human achievement; that it helps us visualize scenarios, test hypotheses, anticipate bad outcomes, foster empathy and absorb other people’s views. In observing what has been imagined in the past, we can map a better path to the future.

The imagination remakes assumptions, reconfigures the status quo, connects the unconnected and always entertains the possibility that life might be otherwise. It is the healer. It is the swell of the human spirit; the valve easing the crush of reality. It is the liberator from a self-centered world. It is the instigator of our own possibility; the grand revealer of truth and beauty. It is the thread that links today’s finite known with the future’s infinite unknown.

And finally we might ask ourselves, were we all to be attentive to our imagination muscle, what capacity for kindness would we unleash? What new appetite for problem solving and social entrepreneurship would we create? What individual potential would pour forth?

HOW WE IMAGINE

The Anger of Achilles

For most of history, the imagination was not examined like a rare butterfly—in fact, it was not much thought of at all. It emerged naturally as an active space for the mind, its precise form only hinted at unknowingly. It was melded with perception, memory and dreaming, or blended with the mystery of the divine.

Those engaged in the early oral traditions of storytelling used the imagination in language, in rhythm and rhyme, to bring invisible worlds to life, to assert a group’s values and to build systems of belonging. The imagination was a place of psychological refuge. It was a crutch to explain away the preoccupying mystery of human existence. The stories, recited in gatherings or at religious festivals, were generally tales of mythical ancestors, and they are still some of the best stories that we have today.

Homer’s Iliad tells of the Trojan War, the anger of Achilles and the death of Hector; the Odyssey of the wandering of Odysseus and his encounters with the Cyclops, Circe and the Sirens. The telling and re-telling of these stories around three thousand years ago fostered a flowering of thought and language. Feeling was evoked through imagining, not only in the rage and sadness of war, but in the longing felt by Odysseus for his wife, Penelope, and for his home in Ithaca. The minds of those listening were expanded by simile and epithet: in the Iliad, men are but leaves on the trees, now green in youth, now withering on the ground; an Achaean army is likened in its movement to a dense cloud of bees; the sea is wine-dark; and dawn is rosy-fingered. Through this freshly minted language, the audience were making new connections so that two ideas—rosy and fingered—might enrich a third—dawn. They were co-creators, in their own minds, of these luminous tales of distant, heroic (and largely imagined) ancestors.

Fragmentary relief (c. 600 BCE) depicting Achilles, mythical Greek hero of the Trojan War, with a shield and spear standing over a fallen figure.

On all continents, this casting and recasting of mythical worlds was born of a compulsion to imagine and, with its growing richness and complexity, there was soon a need for the specialist. In West Africa, the storyteller known as the griot long occupied an exalted role within the group—a position handed down from one generation to the next. The griot was (and still is) part-storyteller, part-musician—recounting, in The Epic of Sundiata, stories of ancient Mande kings and their long genealogies. The words were accompanied by tunes plucked from the strings of the griot’s kora, an early form of guitar.

In the medieval Islamic world, during the long warm evenings, the hakawatis would tell similar stories in the town squares of Cairo and Damascus. The hakawati was both storyteller and actor. They would recite episodes from epic poems such as Sirat Bani Hilal, or recount magical fables from The Thousand and One Nights—with stories like Aladdin that are still told today. The hakawati also perfected the suspenseful ending or cliff-hanger, drawing the story to a close at a point that would ensure their audience returned the following evening to hear what happened next. One well-known hakawati, Ahmad al Saidawi, made one story last 372 nights, until the governor of the province required him, by force, to disclose its ending.

Griots of the Shambaa people of Tanzania, in an engraving from 1890.

The imagination and its deployment of language crossed into religion and commerce. In Japan, a form of storytelling known as rakugo was invented by Buddhist monks to hold the attention of their listeners. In its more remote rural areas, traveling tinkers and bamboo weavers regaled villagers with stories picked up on their travels. Their arrival would be eagerly anticipated: the greater the stock of their tales, the warmer their welcome and the better business they did.

In ancient India, the texts of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism were first preserved through oral transmission. The Sanskrit teachings contained in the Vedas are older than Homer, spoken by their sages since the second millennium BCE. They are still recited today, as much for their meaning as for their sounds, which are considered in Hinduism to be the primordial rhythms of creation.

The rhythm of language has been passed down in Aboriginal mythology for even longer. Tjukurpa, usually translated as Dreamtime or The Dreaming, represents a time when the ancestral spirits roamed the earth. According to legend, they were able to shift their shapes between animal, plant, rock, tree and human form—and