The Nature of Musing

[branchandroot]

Read this essay in its new home.

Comments

Re: imaginary friends/muses

[branchandroot]

I'm rather tempted to send a reply to that article. Something along the lines of 'well, duh'. Honestly, I really think more clinical psychologists should stop studying people and start talking to them a little. Everything in that article seems perfectly straightforward and self-evident to me, nothing that should have taken years of research to figure out. *sighs*

Re: imaginary friends/muses

[tallihensia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. But sometimes in reasearch, they have to study the self-evident just in order to counterdict the "accepted" way of thinking. I think that was the point of this one -- her branch was going against the 'normal' psych thoughts, so they had to do research to show why.

For several decades, psychologists have generally assumed that imagination peaks in the preschool years and then dwindles as children grasp the difference between pretense and reality.

Taylor belongs to a contingent of researchers who regard imagination as a thinking tool.