Research into the use of the imagination

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Research into the use of the imagination

Postby Judith » Wed Nov 20, 2013 1:53 pm

Using your imagination positively....hard to know which forum to post this in--but here goes...

Professor Sue Thomas’s take on how to use the imagination (Hello World, Travels in Virtuality) seems vital for us to take on as cancer thrivers..

As I know, it’s all too easy to get sucked in by the ‘grave looks’ of both doctors and people who doubt that what we’re doing is any good at all—going to hospital for tests can drain away any optimism and hope as you are surrounded at a psychological level by the inevitable fears of patients visiting oncology departments... I hope this does not sound too wacky but many cancer thrivers have shown that it is possible to build a different world inside your mind which can then affect both your future outcomes and how you respond to them. As Sue Thomas says below, ‘It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember’.And I quote below:

In Walden, Thoreau describes how in his imagination he bought several farms, although in reality he never owned any at all. He explains how he worked so hard to imagine landscapes, buildings and harvests that he was able to fantasise entire sagas of negotiation, purchase and sale. Even without money or legal ownership of a piece of land he still ‘annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow’. In other words, his ability to simply savour a landscape enabled him to reap a valuable harvest – the sheer imagined experience of it. ‘I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.’ (1) If it existed in his brain, it was real.
farm.jpg
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Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we all have been and indeed where we will all end up. After all, what could be more virtual than the unvisited and yet fully imagined place we call Heaven? But let us define our terms.
I’m talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions.
I’m talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own.


(1) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 76.
Posted by Sue Thomas on Apr 14, 2004 at 10:49 PM in 06 Thoreau |

As we have evolved we have created new prosthetics to reinforce and support the sensorium with spectacles, hearing aids, computer-generated voices and now we have extended that sensorium into virtuality too. We are locating a wider range of inputs, often configured in forms which were previously unknown to us. Or perhaps, only forgotten until now. The configurations of connectedness.


On 24 February 2004 BBC News Online reported that 'Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain. Dr Hunter Hoffman, research fellow at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, has tested his virtual worlds on victims of burns injuries who suffer excruciating pain during their daily dressing changes which conventional drug therapy fails to control.' These worlds are designed 'to immerse the user so deeply in the virtual experience that their attention is distracted away from the pain.'
Posted by Sue Thomas on Mar 03, 2004 The lived body |
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