Bill Dahl

Sometimes, language blows my brain up – blows my hair back. I am going to get to an extensive review of this book here in a few days:  Smart World – Breakthrough Creativity and the new Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle – Harvard Business School Press Boston, MA USA Copyright © 2007 by Richard Ogle.

Until I do, blow your hair back with the essence of the following excerpt:

Imagination is not the poor cousin of reason, trafficking in desire-driven fantasy, dreaming, and delusion, but rather, as Fauconnier and Turner show, the very basis on which intelligent, sense-making thought builds. Independently, the philosopher Colin McGinn has reached a similar conclusion in his recent book Mindsight, arguing that without the faculty of imagination, there could be no thought, rational or otherwise. To think intelligently is to create webs of meaning about how the world might be, and this is the work of imagination. Reason follows, creating the rational links and chains of inference that validate and extend our knowledge of reality. Fundamentally we are, as McGinn asserts, Homo imaginans. P. 72

Photography by Bill Dahl – All Rights Reserved – 2010