Imagination: It’s Not What You Think. It’s How You Think | Charles Faulkner | TEDxIIT

The word is the thing. The word is similar to the thing. Something attracts

what

it looks like! We return to fantasy. It turns out that our logic and justifications are steeped in fantasy. But you find it hard to believe! I bet on this. So I want to show you something. Here I have some regular Morton salt. What just happened? As you watch them on the screen, has your desire to use one instead of the other changed slightly? (Laughter) Even if you laugh, you're going to do it because you saw me, but suddenly you hesitated. This hesitation suggests to you that there is something in the words;

Our words are similar to things and, furthermore, our

imagination

will make reality seem different in the blink of an eye. What I would like to say now is that words are not a reflection of reality; Words really make things the way they are in some way. We look at examples of how we

think

about ourselves, words like "winner," "loser," "success," "failure," etc., and we take this little experience that we've given a name to, and then we put a whole thing on it. reality around you. Or someone else does too. Therefore, words stimulate experiences in us, not facts.

And if you hear that and understand it, our use of a series of words will begin to emerge as we connect these experiences. What do we use? history. This is another act of

imagination

. Stories, by the way, are our first device for storing and retrieving information, and they are also our favorite way of

think

ing and the best way to enjoy our time. Let me show you how quickly you can create a story. Some of you have seen studies that show that

what

ever you do now, you will probably do something else in the next ten years. If you imagine that you have been an architect for ten years now.

How is this stage explained? What led to this? You realize that the mind can very easily select episodes from your life and link them. The important thing is that if you think about it, if you share it with your friends, and if you add a touch of your reality to it, then it will seem real to you, and then it will become something called luck or destiny. My hope, from these examples and others, is to highlight the strength and persuasiveness of this unconscious process, and of our imagination, which works non-stop. Here we quote Albert Einstein. He realized that imagination is more important than knowledge.

He supported this by writing: If knowledge is great, then imagination is greater. Any knowledge we have is a product of our preconceived ideas. I'll give you an example: Aristotle's knowledge of the universe is that heaven is an eternal and perfect place, while the Earth is constantly changing. Newton believed that if the heavens and the Earth had the same rules, then the laws of gravity would be the same. work everywhere. In other words, this is a leap of imagination on Newton's part. Because Galileo helped him in this; Galileo saw that the moon was not perfect. You may remember what Kant and Kahneman said that we don't see the world as it is, we see the world according to what our tools allow us.

The tool in this case is the telescope. Newton was able to reimagine the universe and astronomical mechanics was so successful that people accepted it as fact. They made it normal. Two centuries later, after our tools became electric and it was discovered that the speed of light was constant, the need arose to reimagine the universe, with Einstein's theory of relativity in our hands. Marshall McLuhan stated that our technologies extend us; Our machines expand, so we have a way to understand what is happening. The thing is that technical means and science advance while our tools surpass our imagination.

Then it's time to imagine the world again. I hope you will see from now on that imagination and knowledge are complementary and complement each other. It is as if they are in an endless dance guided by the imagination. Thank you all! (applause)