Adam Zeman (Bloomsbury Circus)
Just imagine! No, seriously, just imagine: an apple, perhaps, or a cartful of apples, or even a kingdom in which monstrous apples are fought by oranges on horseback. Our imaginations are capable of this – and much more. They are responsible for films, novels and paintings, as well as buildings, computers and governments. They are unfathomably powerful.
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And yet the imaginings themselves are gossamer – hard to hold onto, hard to pin down. I might be able to describe the apple I am thinking of, but what about the feeling I can conjure up of a loved one’s presence? Or the acute memory of an apparently uneventful walk? It is literally all in my head, which makes it difficult to put into yours.
Enter Adam Zeman, a neurologist whose latest book, The Shape of Things Unseen: A new science of imagination, is a fine guide to the tricky science of the imagination. And tricky it is. Zeman begins by saying that he wants to make this “accessible”, and he certainly pulls that off, but he has to do a lot of complexifying in the process.
After all, while we might think of imagination as mostly a visual feat – a sort of “seeing” by “the mind’s eye” – there are instances where we smell something through “the mind’s nose”. Then there are people like Ed Catmull, co-founder of the Pixar animation studio, with no visual imagination at all – a mental characteristic Zeman has studied and named “aphantasia”. Nothing is straightforward here.
So Zeman takes us on a necessarily meandering path; explaining, complicating, explaining again and, delightfully, trampling over various fences along the way. For a subject like the imagination, a certain breadth is to be expected, but his book is admirably wide-ranging. Zeman interviews the novelist Philip Pullman and the astrophysicist Martin Rees. He describes paintings and the functioning of synapses. This is a book that concerns art almost as much as it concerns science.
Though how could it not? As Zeman says, in one of his best aphorisms: “Science uses imagination to show us, so far as possible, how things really are; art, just as importantly, to show us how they feel.” Both are highly imaginative acts.
If there is one thread running through The Shape of Things Unseen, it is the notion that “the ‘real world’ is almost as much a product of our creative minds as its countless virtual cousins”. This idea of a “predictive brain” that generates and updates mental models to anticipate the world around it won’t be news to anyone who read two of the best science books of 2023, Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine and Camilla Nord’s The Balanced Brain. But Zeman isn’t claiming novelty: his book can be read as a follow-on in one of the most exciting experimental areas in neuroscience.
There is too much else to mention, which, in a way, is the major flaw here. For every cut-out-and-keep explanation of how neural networks operate, there is a brief history of the greenhouse effect that is less inexplicably concise than it is inexplicably there. For every case study of a man who convinced himself he was brain-dead, there are short Wikipedia-ish passages on Niccolò Machiavelli, Bernie Madoff and how Mary Shelley came to conceive of Frankenstein during a summer holiday in… yawn.
Even the interviews with Pullman and Rees feel rushed. I would have preferred Zeman to expand on his thinking across two or three volumes, to create an entire imaginarium, in fact. Which is both a criticism and a compliment – if you can imagine such a thing.
Peter Hoskin is books and culture editor at Prospect magazine
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