Humans use imagination a lot, whether it be thinking about what's for dinner later tonight or trying to imagine what someone else on the other side of the world may be experiencing after reading the news. As situations become farther away from reality and more distal, imagining a situation becomes more difficult. The limits to distal imagination are known to lead to many biases, such as empathy gaps for people unlike us and difficulty saving money for a future that feels very far away. Yet, new work from a collaborative study led by Dartmouth College and Princeton University researchers finds that creativity may help us surmount these barriers to distal imagination. The results demonstrate that people with creative expertise are better at imagining distant experiences than others with otherwise similar demographics (age, education level, etc). The study also found that creative experts switch on a different neural system when imagining situations far beyond the present, which may help explain why they are better at stretching their imagination. The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
* This article was originally published here
