A Never-Lonely Mind

When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company,” I am not sure he had months of lockdown and a global pandemic in mind. The last few months have tested everyone’s ability to deal with loneliness intensely. But even as things begin to move and shift, I feel like that loneliness is still lurking; a funk in the room, an aftertaste in your mouth, a cloying on your skin. During the pandemic, I listened to some interesting takes on dealing with feelings of isolation, and one approach stuck with me.

It is an idea that has been nurtured by various academics and psychotherapists and it is the power of the imagination to assuage an immense emotion like loneliness. Imagination as a refuge, a tool of wellbeing and one we know is second nature to children. They create whole worlds when they are alone, or even with a friend and from that comes this great social experience. But as we get older we fundamentally lose our ability to connect with these skills of make-believe, and so cut ourselves off from an enormous emotional and mental resource that is actually in place for a really valid reason, and whose benefits are profound and far-reaching.

But why do we lose the connection? Some argue that this is more of a recent phenomenon, the fundamental capacities needed to have an active imagination; sensitivity, lateral thinking, to be able to dream, has been dulled by the modern predicament of having all the imagining done for us, through TV, movies etc, so we get little time to practice it. Daydreaming in particular, one of the loveliest of imaginative mental exercises has for years been denigrated, suppressed in school as a form of disobedience. But its immense benefits are being increasingly appreciated.

For adults, structured daydreaming has been studied for its ability to deliver real change.

This isn’t the process of imaging winning the lotto or being married to a movie star, this is where you set a realistic, but very much desired goal, and spend about 20 minutes thinking it through to its happy conclusion. You imagine circumnavigating the obstacles to what you are aiming towards and play out all the scenarios. You engage all five senses and really live the experience. In many instances, it has shown to have a real and practical impact.

That the imagination is a creative tool is well documented, but it is giving it that space that we find difficult. Yet time and space are crucial, and something adults are often in short supply of. Often we are working through lists, ticking off tasks, using these very external forms to affirm our achievements and productivity. Letting our mind roam free is not something you can quantify.

But also the quality of the imaginings matter. There are those that say a belief is just a thought you continue to practice. So it follows that those with the strongest self-belief are just continuing to think really good thoughts about themselves. This is not always depending on external forces always being good. But they are habitually imagining good things happening around them, to them. And it stands to reason that if you don’t, you can quickly end up in a more nightmarish thought space than that of a dream.

BRAIN HEALTH

But leaving aside the elements of creativity, the sheer cognitive exercise of imagining seems to be fundamentally important to our brain health. In 2008 for instance, the journal of Psychological Science looked into why younger adults were better at telling details of past experiences and remembering events than older adults. They discovered it was largely to do with activating the hippocampus part of the brain, the area that recalls episodic memories as opposed to a series of facts. The hippocampus pulls multiple strands together to recall a memory, so what you heard and how you felt at the time etc, and it is the part of the brain which studies have shown to degenerate over time. Memory and imagination are unsurprisingly inextricably linked with people who experience amnesia known to also have issues connecting with their imagination. Another study found that if you continued to use your imagination later in life, you were 73 per cent less likely to develop the memory problems that lead to dementia.

And even in terms of how the brain processes vision, most of the information they now know is not coming from the eyes, but from memory. “In fact,” wrote artist Jennifer Bornstein in her essay Perception of Vision, “it is now estimated that visual perception is 80% memory and 20% input through the eyes. In other words, sensory information is not transmitted to the brain; it comes from it.” Bornstein looked at the extraordinary instances of ‘blindsight’ where a profoundly unsighted person could navigate an obstacle course for instance and so possessed “an innate ability to negotiate a relationship between one’s body and objects in the world.”

So this powerful resource that we have, this extraordinary ability to imagine our way around real hurdles is also capable of overcoming what can be really profoundly distressing feelings. But we are forgetting to use it. In fact, our loneliness is getting more entrenched, as we spend over 11 hours per day on average listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media just to avoid feeling it. All the while, we are using the wrong tools for the job. “He does not need opium,” Anais Nin once wrote, “he has the gift of reverie.” This is the time to dream.

Jessie Collins, August 2020