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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."  Albert Einstein

From memory to imagination - prefrontal Cortex is the last part of the brain to mature.  This is where the executive center resides.  It is here that we plan, abstract think (envision) and make conscious decision.  It has connections to areas where contents of memory are stored.  When circuits are activated we are able to remember and make better survival decisions  It also allows us to generate non-survival creative ideas.

The Envision Brainset is the brain activation state that facilitates imagination.  Also, provides a link between deliberate and the spontaneous pathways (See previous Posts).  It is the so called inner world.  If you find it hard to activate then your comfort zone could be Reason or Evaluate Brainset (which has not be discussed yet).  Reason is my comfort zone then what did I do to envision to activate it?  I will have to wait until I get to that chapter.  Also, it shares some features with absorb.

Mental imagery is thinking with out words; a type of cognition that employs perceptual parts of the brain.  information of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.  This is not psychotic hallucinations, but 1) they are not mistaken for reality,  2) You are consciously controlling the imagery.  This is not the case with hallucinations..  "Highly creative people appear to be able to form vivid mental images and manipulate those images both to envision creative dilemmas and to come up with creative solutions to problems.

Mental images would not be creative without hypothetical thinking.  "What if?"  Speculation Einstein claims to have used this power of hypothetical mental imaging to form his theory of relativity.  It's also a survival tool.  A thinking out of the box.

Our brain fires up differently if you are using mental imagery in the deliberate pathway than the spontaneous pathway. The most bizarre and uncontrolled mental imagery is in REM sleep -- The state when we dream.  The executive center is deactivated during REM.  One of the goals of this book is to teach us to modulate the activation of our Executive center at will so that we can enter specific brainsets to facilitate creative thought and productivity.  

When we generate visual mental imagery primarily the left hemisphere of our brain fires up.   But when we manipulate the images the same areas fire up in the right hemisphere preferentially.