"What would you do if your friend had three eyes?"

"I must be ill. I want her to go to the hospital quickly. " 8-year-old Xixi said.

"Are the eyes long horizontally or vertically?" Tao Tao, 5, asked.

"wow! Can you see farther with one more eye? Like a clairvoyant? " The 6-year-old said.

……

The children's answers are varied. From their answers, we can know that some children's ideas are straightforward and simple, and some children's ideas are unconstrained and unconstrained, which makes people laugh. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of answers: imaginary and realistic.

Don't tell me why you ask such a simple question. Because most people understand the "imagination" and the real "imagination" is essentially different.

According to the network explanation, in short, imagination is the ability of people to construct unexplored things and experiences in their brains based on existing knowledge. Imagination is not to create something out of nothing, but to create "nothing" on the basis of "something".

Imagination and reality are opposites

In fact, imagination comes from reality, which is especially obvious in the creation of artists and writers.

When it comes to children's literature, many people's first reaction is full of "imagination". But in the eyes of Cao Wenxuan, a children's writer, the imagination of the creator is stronger than anyone else, and many real things have happened, which is beyond the imagination of human beings.

Cao Wenxuan said, "When we talk about imagination today, we often forget to pay attention to reality and remember it, and forget to work hard on realism."

Just like Van Gogh, the originator of abstract painting, we always think of his famous abstract painting Sunflower at the first time, but we don't know that Van Gogh painted potatoes for several years before painting abstract painting. He drew potatoes without drawing anything.

Imagination is nature, and it is gone after being destroyed.

Poet Yu Guangzhong said when talking about artistic creation:

The so-called imagination means that you have to open a hole in the wood, and at a certain time, it can suddenly penetrate.

You said it was inspiration, but it was actually the result of your practice. You've been thinking about it, or in your subconscious, and one day you suddenly figured it out, and then you wrote it.

So this kind of imagination is cultivated, not without knowledge, completely abandoning experience and thinking. Imagination is fruitless, so you must think in a certain direction.

Imagination is not innate, but accumulated on the basis of exploration and experience, and it is an acquired ability.

The more you learn, the more you destroy your imagination.

Some parents have the idea that the younger the child, the less he knows and the richer his imagination. Compared with children, adults have learned so much knowledge, but their thinking is rigid. In this case, do they destroy their imagination more and more?

In fact, learning more knowledge and enriching imagination are not contradictory and will not destroy imagination. The reason why adults are rigid in thinking is because they lack imagination training. The human brain follows the law of use and abandonment, and thinking is absent, so it is naturally farther and farther away from imagination.

In addition, on the contrary, ignoring children's cognitive development level, improving children's learning experience prematurely, or directly depriving children of the opportunity to explore the world and try and make mistakes, that is to destroy children's imagination.

For example, before the age of 6, children mainly explore the world through perception and action, and mainly think in images. At this time, it is useless for parents to insist that children learn abstract concepts.

0 1 Imagination makes children's IQ higher.

This conclusion is not casually said, but supported by neurological research data. According to the research of brain neuroscience, the number of human neural connections can reach the peak of 65.438+0.4 billion at the age of 9. After that, the brain began to integrate, the number of neural connections began to decline, and the poorly connected and rarely used neural connections disappeared, and the integration was completed around the age of children 12. After that, people's neural connections will remain at this level unless they receive special brain training.

Children with rich imagination, the more neural connections, on this basis, simplify development, the greater the original neural network connections, the stronger the new stable structure. In other words, the rich imagination of childhood largely determines the thinking level of adults, or whether they are smart.

Imagination enriches the child's mind.

Former CCTV host Zhang Quanling wrote in a letter to the children:

"If we have no eyes and can only feel the world with the touch of our hands, then we can't experience what distant mountains are and what the sky is. If we lose our imagination and curiosity, our world will never include the red giant Orion. "

No imagination, like a frog at the bottom of a well, measures the size of the sky with the wellhead.

Imaginative children know that there are more possibilities in the world, and they can always come up with different solutions to the same problem.

Let the children's world be bigger, and the "world" here also includes the inner world. Children with rich imagination must have rich hearts, and whimsical imagination games can help them learn and understand the real world better.

For example, children with more inner games are more likely to overcome their fears. They will imagine themselves as a powerful monster in the imaginary game, and the sense of control makes children feel that monsters are not so terrible.

Imagination can change the world.

Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Why do world-renowned great scientists put imagination in such a high position? Because imagination can change the world! Throughout human history, imaginative thought experiments have promoted many major scientific and ideological changes. The so-called thought experiment is an experiment done simply by imagination.

For example, the text "Two Iron Balls Touching the Ground at the Same Time" we learned in primary school is about the iron ball experiment made by Italian scientist Galileo through imagination.

Finally, the concept of acceleration put forward by Galileo not only changed the physics in the Middle Ages, but also constituted an important part of Newtonian mechanics, and profoundly influenced the basic principles of general relativity several centuries later.

In addition to Galileo's thought experiments, many revolutionary scientific breakthroughs began with imagination. For example, Newton imagined what would happen if the apple tree grew to the moon, which led him to discover the theorem of gravity; Einstein imagined whether he could catch up with the light, which prompted him to deduce the theory of relativity. ...

Mankind's boundless thoughts can break through the limitations of the real world, so sometimes, the thought experiment existing in imagination is more important than the real experiment, which is more helpful for scientists to discover new knowledge and change the world.

Imagination affects the breadth of children's lives and determines how far children can go, which is so important to children. For adults, imagination is equally important. It can make us more insightful, change our thinking in work and career more easily, find business opportunities and succeed more easily.

First, establish a reserve knowledge base in the brain.

From the perspective of brain science, cognition is the basis of imagination. Imagination sounds amazing, but its essence is the output of information. The process of imagination is: information is input to the brain → the brain understands and analyzes information → information is output. It can be said that there is no imagination without the initial information input.

Psychologists have done an experiment. Put a toy on a high place so that children can't get it, and put a tool where children can easily get it. This tool can help children hook toys that he can't reach.

The experimental results are as follows: 18 months old children can quickly find out how to use tools and successfully remove toys with tools. But 15 months old children can't think of such a way. This experiment indirectly shows that imagination is based on the perception of reality, and the cognition of the surrounding world formed by children in the process of growing up is the basis of imagination.

There are two very simple ways to build a reserve knowledge base:

One is reading.

Zhang Quanling said: "The best way to make the world grow is reading. There is someone else's world hidden in the book. Understand, your world will expand. "

The second is experience: traveling, or putting the ideas in your head into action.

As a reporter, the experience of going to war made Zhang Quanling feel:

I am always so eager to go where others have never been, to experience things that others have never experienced, to meet people that others have never seen, and to talk to them about life experiences that others don't know.

A reporter's life is like other people's life, so my world is very big.

Secondly, establish your own imagination model with the method of "constantly asking questions"

Storing knowledge base is only the basis of cultivating imagination, and our purpose is to establish our own imagination model. When we have enough knowledge, when we can optimize this knowledge, recombine this knowledge to develop new functions and even "change the world", then our imagination model is successfully established.

How to build your own imagination model on the basis of storing knowledge? The method is simple: keep asking questions.

For example, when Galileo carried out the iron ball experiment in his mind, he just thought in a way of constant questioning:

What if the big iron ball landed before the small one, and tied the two iron balls together with a rope and threw them down?

If the small iron ball drags the big iron ball, it will definitely fall slower than a single big iron ball.

However, if the iron balls tied together are regarded as a whole, and the total weight of this whole is greater than the weight of a single big iron ball, then it is reasonable to say that it should fall faster.

Why do you get the opposite result when you think from different angles? The only possible explanation is that no matter how heavy the iron balls are, their falling speed is the same.

In history, Socrates, a great philosopher, is a representative figure who can get to the bottom of the casserole. In his view, education is to cultivate students' inquiry consciousness and imagination of unknown fields in the process of constantly asking questions.

In the process of children's growth, there will be 100 thousand why they ask questions all day. Parents should answer patiently or ask their children "Why?" It is through answering questions with parents that children can develop their thinking ability while knowing the world.

Finally, practice knowledge transfer ability by analogy.

Liu Run, CEO of Runmi Consulting, said:

For example, there are usually three steps:

Find the essence of this strange thing you want to describe;

Then in your model library, match something familiar with the same essence;

Then use this familiar thing to explain that strange thing.

Metaphor is a very imaginative activity, because to make a good metaphor, you not only need to keep the old model, but also need to build a new model, and the most important step is to connect the old model with the new model in series. Especially can exercise a person's insight.

Writer Lin Yutang said: "A speech is like a woman's mini-skirt, the shorter the better." What does the speech have to do with the skirt? Lin Yutang said that at that time, he thought of winning more with less, so he had a brainwave and put things from all over the world together.

Liu Run said that the ability of analogy is particularly "advanced", and only when a person understands the essence of two things at the same time will he be surprised.

For example, it is actually the ability to transfer knowledge. The highest expression of imagination is to transfer knowledge from one field to another, and perhaps change the world.

For children, the world is too big for them to imagine, and the world is too small to put all the known and unknown into their hearts. How to get out of the width and length of the inner world in the real world? Give the child a pair of imaginary wings.