Our #1 Pastime? The Pleasures of Imagination?

I misunderstood, and was disappointed. The article's title suggested a question and answer at first both surprising and intriguing. I really liked the idea, the possibilities, too. But as it turned out, not so much. It's all in defining the terms of reference, isn't it? But I'd not thought carefully enough about the question: what is our favorite pastime? Nor had I given much thought to what the answer categories might be, how they might be defined, how inclusive they might be. From The Chronicle Review:

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.

--"The Pleasures of Imagination," by Paul Bloom, The Chronicle Review (5.30.10)

My natural inclination was to think of "pleasures of the imagination" in terms of one's own imagination, fantasy, creative thinking or work. I would not have naturally extended it to invitations to enter and experience someone else's, including their novels, plays, movies, video games or comics. Those things can constitute imagination or fantasy, to be sure, just not ours. The personal imaginative initiative, the creativity and related enjoyment are absent. We are most often vicarious participants, passive observers of others' imagination and creative process, even if we emotionally enter into it and are experientially carried along with it. That would have constituted another category or two for me. I was not thinking of the broader treatment of experiencing all things that are not "real" (in the sense that they are not phenomena in the external world), as opposed to all things that are.

So I was immediately disappointed with the definition and scope of the topic, and the mostly pedestrian observations and statements made about it. For if we are to include novels, video games, computer media, even television in broad brush, whatever the programming or genre, and whether or not it really constitutes imagination or fantasy--well, those are such broadly inclusive and commonplace experiences that it is hard to be intrigued or surprised by commonplace observations about them. My immediate reaction was, So what? Tell us something most people do not already know. Tell us something new and life affirming; tell us something illuminating about who we are and what our highest potential is.

For me, at least, the better, more broadly understood and acceptable definition of these pastimes addressed is simply entertainment, broadly defined. And again, whether or not there is any personal imagination called into play in experiencing the medium, whether it provokes or inspires imagination on the part of the viewer, the entertained, is very much open to question. And, accepting that, the observations, speculation and conclusions that followed are for the most part rather unexceptional, even predictable, except on the one point, which is imaginatively speculative. Still, they are worth visiting just as a useful reminder of what we should know, and what some social scientists are doing and thinking. Dr. Bloom:

Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: "I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends."

One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones. This is a powerful idea, one that I think is basically—though not entirely—right. (Certain phenomena, including horror movies and masochistic daydreams, require a different type of explanation.)

The capacity for imaginative pleasure is universal, and it emerges early in development. All normal children, everywhere, enjoy playing and pretending. There are cultural differences in the type and frequency of play. A child in New York might pretend to be an airplane; a hunter-gatherer child will not. In the 1950s, American children played Cowboys and Indians; not so much anymore. In some cultures, play is encouraged; in others, children have to sneak off to do it. But it is always there. Failure to play and pretend is a sign of a neurological problem, one of the early symptoms of autism.

Developmental psychologists have long been interested in children's appreciation of the distinction between pretense and reality...The pleasure children get from such activities would be impossible to explain if they didn't have a reasonably sophisticated understanding that the pretend is not real...

Why do we get pleasure from the imagination? Isn't it odd that toddlers enjoy pretense, and that children and adults are moved by stories, that we have feelings about characters and events that we know do not exist? As the title of a classic philosophy article put it, how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series led to similar tears. A friend of mine told me that he can't remember hating anyone the way he hated one of the characters in the movie Trainspotting, and there are many people who can't bear to experience certain fictions because the emotions are too intense. I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.

These emotional responses are typically muted compared with the real thing. Watching a movie in which someone is eaten by a shark is less intense than watching someone really being eaten by a shark. But at every level—physiological, neurological, psychological—the emotions are real, not pretend....

In the end, though, those brought to tears by Anna Karenina are perfectly aware that she is a character in a novel; those people who wailed when J.K. Rowling killed off Dobby the House Elf knew full well that he doesn't exist. And even young children appreciate the distinction between reality and fiction; when you ask them, "Is such-and-so real or make-believe?," they get it right.

Most often, it seems, Dr. Bloom is merely surveying explanations for these commonplace phenomena that are reasonably well understood, experientially if not neurologically or cognitively. And when he doesn't, he indulges speculation that cannot be proven about things already understood in part in terms of existing behavioral science and research. For example, he embraces the notion of an "alief," a concept developed by a colleague:

Why, then, are we so moved by stories?

In an important pair of papers, Gendler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it "alief." Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, "Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!"

We all instinctively understand this. And research by learning theorists in classical and operant conditioning go further in providing useful understandings than the more imaginative observation offered by Dr. Bloom and friends. His need to explain things in terms of deeper psychological elements or faculties would seem to turn us back toward neo-Freudian intuition, analogy or metaphor that does not really advance scientific understanding--even if it may be more fun and provide to some a more appealing explanation of things.

No, if better understandings are to be had, they will more likely be found in the complex predispositions and dictates of the human genome, genetic complexities that capture and control many of our most useful, adaptive behavioral traits and responses. But, aren't the good professor's observations helpful in understanding why such behaviors evolved, why they are useful and adaptive, why they were likely captured and transmitted in our genetic material? To some extent, yes. But I fail to recognize any advancement in research findings or theory that adds anything both new and credible to our understanding or insight into those "why" questions. Just my view.

Still, it is entertaining to be invited into the experience of Dr. Blooms more speculative, imaginative suggestion. Some may enjoy this vicarious sharing of the more creative side of his spirit and thinking. All good, as long we bear in mind what it is and what it isn't. And, although I find his concluding statement as prosaic as most of his broader observations, I share it with you because it so appropriately brings them to closure:

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

I know I have been unappreciative, even uncharitable toward this article which, if nothing else, is a thoughtful and unoffending survey. And I know that his broader topic is worthy and the work useful. But wouldn't it have been so much more interesting and illuminating, so much more uplifting and life enriching, if he had actually spoken to the topic offered in his title: "The Pleasures of Imagination"--personal imagination and creativity, that is. If a new or more definitive statement could have been made about the operation, importance and possibilities of that exciting topic, that would have been something really worth writing about--and worth reading, to be sure. I know, it's not what he intended to do, not what he did. I just wish it were.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Pleasures-of-Imagination/65678