ABSTRACT
This chapter is an in-depth exploration of human imagination which considers both philosophy and applications when it considers the age-old question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ by exploring how creative ideas form. If imagination can be viewed as a muscle then periods of silence and solitude (volitional or otherwise) are necessary to strengthen it. Using accounts from the lives of writers, scientists, and philosophers that explicitly ascribe their creative talents to lonely childhoods, with nothing but silence and their burgeoning imaginations to keep them company, this examines the cognitive changes that come from prolonged periods of loneliness and silence, such as a more developed ‘poet’s eye’, and a greater love of the natural world, along with detrimental effects. Asking if a childhood of loneliness and silence is worth the heightened creativity and imagination that can result, this chapter shows how practical engagement with silence as method casts a wider light on our understanding of the human cognition.
