"Imagination is full, reality is skinny." This is what people often say. In life, we often have an experience. When we expect something to happen, we keep imagining the picture of its realization in our minds. Think better. But when the day came true, I always felt that something was missing. It was far less beautiful than imagined, or even worse. Why are imagination and reality so different?
How do we distinguish imagination from reality?
Conceptually speaking, "imagination" is the process of processing and transforming existing representations in the human brain to create new images. Psychologist Zhang Gaofeng gave the following example using the familiar Sun Wukong image:
The imaginary image comes from objective reality and is a reflection of the objective reality by the human brain. For example, the image of Sun Wukong in "Journey to the West" is a new typical image with a rebellious spirit created by the author after processing and conceiving the images of humans and monkeys in his mind. The images of "demons and ghosts" in mythology are nothing more than animal heads and human bodies transformed into bull heads, horse faces, huge teeth and tusks, which are things that are abominable and terrifying in reality.
In life, sometimes imagination and reality are confused, that is, imaginary things are regarded as real things. For example, children in early childhood sometimes describe the things they desire as things they have already obtained, and regard what they hope to happen as things they have already obtained. Describe things that have already happened. When children participate in games or appreciate literary and artistic works, they are often as immersed in the scene as the characters they play, or they may share the same excitement or sorrow as the characters in the play, and have the same emotional reactions. This is also due to the confusion between imagination and reality, which is very obvious in some young children.
Since there is confusion between imagination and reality, how does our brain distinguish between imagination and reality? Scientists believe that the most important means for humans to distinguish between reality and imagination is the unified verification of multi-dimensional sensory perception . For example, when we are hungry, we imagine that we are eating a big meal. Although there is a sense of picture and saliva is secreted, the stomach does not feel full. In this way, the visual and taste perceptions created by the imagination are not unified with the tactile perception of the abdomen. So we know that the meal was a figment of our imagination.
Those who cannot distinguish between reality and imagination.
This principle can also explain many mental illnesses and psychological phenomena. Many mental patients cannot distinguish between imagination and reality during the onset of illness. For example, mental patients with delusions of persecution will always feel that someone is trying to kill them. The reason for this situation is the dysfunction of the brain of the mentally ill patient or the disability caused by organic disease. In this state, the mentally ill patient does not have enough intelligence to analyze too many dimensions, so it is very likely that the brain hastily checked Once one or two single dimensions are completed, it is considered that unity has been achieved, which makes it easier to cause misjudgments and confuse reality and imagination.
For example, it is obviously just the TV playing songs, but due to the illusion caused by the dysfunction of the auditory center, these songs become the words of others scolding themselves in the ears of the mentally ill. In this way, the anxiety in perception is unified with the hearing, so the persecution delusion The person will be extremely convinced that someone is really trying to harm them.
In addition to mental patients, people who are drunk or depressed can also be like mental patients and cannot distinguish between reality and imagination. In a drunken state, due to the decrease in the efficiency of the brain's crisis recognition functional area, people will not be able to recognize whether the environment they are in is dangerous, and instead treat their imaginary scenes as real scenes. In a depressed state, because you cannot feel pleasure and cannot judge your true situation in the social environment, you will also mistakenly think that you are very bad and worthless, so you will easily give up completely when you encounter setbacks, and then feel that life is meaningless. This can lead to world-weariness and even suicide.
It can be seen that it is not that easy to distinguish between imagination and reality. Since the information received by the brain is transmitted by external receptors, the brain fuses this information to produce the so-called realistic image, so the reality that the brain is aware of is actually imagined. .Take dreams as an example (dreams are also imagination, it is a special form of imagination). Sometimes they are very absurd and bizarre, but they are still the result of the disordered combination of perceived things as "materials". The so-called "Think about it every day and dream about it at night."
So, the ultimate question about this world is: Is the reality we feel real, or is it a virtual world? Cutting-edge scientists are studying this question, but no one can give an answer.
