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6. IMAGINATIVE MINDS

8. PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY ⭈ 147
IMAGINATIVE MINDS
Edited by
ILONA ROTH
Published for THE BRITISH ACADEMY
by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

9. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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ISBN 978–0–19–726419–5
ISSN 0068–1202

10. Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables vii
Notes on Contributors xi
Foreword by Professor Robert Foley xvi
Acknowledgements xviii
Introduction
Imaginative Minds: Concepts, Controversies, and Themes xix
ILONA ROTH
Part I Evolution of the Imagination
1. Seven Steps in the Evolution of the Human Imagination 3
STEVEN MITHEN
2. Great Ape Cognition and the Evolutionary Roots of Human
Imagination 31
ANDREW WHITEN AND THOMAS SUDDENDORF
3. Memes, Minds, and Imagination 61
SUSAN BLACKMORE
Part II Development of Imagination in Children
4. Autonomy and Control in Children’s Interactions with
Imaginary Companions 81
MARJORIE TAYLOR, STEPHANIE M. CARLSON, AND
ALISON B. SHAWBER
5. Imagination and Testimony in Cognitive Development:
The Cautious Disciple? 101
PAUL L. HARRIS AND MELISSA KOENIG
Part III Mind into Culture: Perspectives on Musical Imagination
6. Imagining Things: Mind Into Music (And Back Again) 123
NICHOLAS COOK
7. Music, Science, and Culture 147
IAN CROSS

11. vi Contents
Part IV Imagination, Cognition, and Creative Thinking
8. A Claim on the Reader 169
GREGORY CURRIE
9. Mental Imagery and Creative Thought 187
DAVID G. PEARSON
10. The Way We Imagine 213
MARK TURNER
Part V Cognitive Architecture of the Imagination
11. Specialized Inference Engines as Precursors of Creative
Imagination? 239
PASCAL BOYER
12. A Module for Metaphor? The Site of Imagination in the
Architecture of the Mind 259
DANIEL NETTLE
Part VI Atypical Imagination and Brain Mechanisms
13. Autism and the Imaginative Mind 277
ILONA ROTH
14. Imaging Imagination: Brain Scanning of the Imagined Future 307
JOHN G. GEAKE AND MORTEN L. KRINGELBACH
Index 327

12. List of Illustrations and Tables
Plates (between p. 284 and p. 285)
1 Wash Day in Pakistan by Richard Wawro.
2 St. Paul’s and St. Andrew’s Methodist Church and the
Migraine Type Lightning and the Elves by Jessica Park.
Figures
1.1 Seven steps in the evolution of the human imagination. 6
1.2 Feedbacks between dietary change, brain size, tool making,
and bipedalism during the Early Pleistocene. 9
1.3 The evolution of human life history. 10
1.4 Domain-specific intelligences of the Early Human mind. 13
1.5 The evolution of Hmmmmm, music and language. 18
1.6 Cognitive fluidity. 19
1.7 Language and the creation of cognitive fluidity. 20
1.8 The extended mind. 22
2.1 The lines leading to bonobos, chimpanzees, humans, gorillas and
orang-utans, based on the latest genetic analyses. 33
2.2 An artificial fruit being manipulated by a young chimpanzee. 37
2.3 Alternative ways of poking or pushing out bolts in an
artificial fruit. 40
2.4 Four measures of ‘creativity’ in different primates’
manipulations of a standard rope manipulandum. 43
2.5 An index of excess, absolute neural resource mass. 54
5.1 Mean looking at speaker, pictured object, and parent as a
function of type of assertion. 106

13. viii List of Illustrations and Tables
5.2 Proportion of denials as a function of age and type of
assertion. 106
5.3 Mean number of ‘yes’ responses to existence question as a
function of age and type of entity. 110
5.4 Mean number of ‘yes’ responses to appearance question as a
function of age and type of entity. 111
5.5 Mean number of encounter, source, and generalization
explanations offered by 4- to 5-year-olds for real and
scientific entities. 112
5.6 Mean number of encounter, source, and generalization
explanations offered by 7- to 8-year-olds for real and
scientific entities. 112
5.7 Three potential outcomes when children are asked to judge
the existence of three types of unobservable entity. 115
5.8 Mean number of existence, confident, and ‘other people’
judgements offered by 5- to 6-year-olds for credible, scientific,
and incredible entities. 115
6.1 A photograph of the Japanese rock formation Futami ga ura. 132
6.2 The first sketch of the overall form of Symphony[Myths]. 133
6.3 A second more refined laying-out of the overall form of
Symphony[Myths]. 134
6.4 The formalized plan for Symphony[Myths] with proportional
specifics. 135
6.5 First movement plan for Symphony[Myths]. 136
6.6 The design of the ‘male’ rock with 13 strata
(Symphony/[Myths]). 137
6.7 A detail of the ‘male’ rock design (Symphony[Myths]). 138
6.8 Bryn Harrison, être-temps for piano, p. 2. 142
6.9 Mozart, Quartet in G major, K. 387, bars 118–135. 145
9.1 Sample trial. 191
9.2 Stimuli set. 193
9.3 Sample synthesized patterns. 194
9.4 Illustration of multi-component model of working memory. 196

14. 9.5 Model of mental synthesis performance. 198
9.6 Sample stimuli. 200
9.7 Illustration of synthesized patterns with high and low
transformational complexity. 202
9.8 The Jastrow ambiguous duck–rabbit figure. 203
9.9 The effects of verbal labels on memory for ambiguous figures. 204
10.1 Blending network for Harold and the Purple Crayon. 216
10.2 Blending network for seal with a mind. 217
10.3 A Representation vital relation connecting elements in
different inputs. 222
10.4 Blend of represented element and representing element. 223
10.5 Blend of represented element and representing element, with
an additional Analogy vital relation. 223
10.6 Blend of Selkie World and Picture World. 228
10.7 Blending network for Get No Sales Tax. 231
10.8 Mental space networks for fishing and stock, under two
different initial conditions. 232
10.9 Blending network for ‘over-fishing’. 232
10.10 Blending network for ‘over-consumption’. 233
10.11 Blending network for ‘missing’ fish. 234
10.12 Blending network for Harvesting/Eating over time. 234
10.13 Blending network for Fishing/Eating food off our children’s
plates. 235
12.1 Two possible sites of the faculty of imagination in the
architecture of the mind. 261
12.2 A Barrettian mind. 263
13.1 A drawing of a horse, by Nadia, aged about 4 years. 285
13.2 Drawings of a man and dog by typically developing children. 286
13.3 View from San Giorgio Maggiore by Stephen Wiltshire. 287
13.4 Central Park by Stephen Wiltshire. 288
13.5 Place de la Catalogne (3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th arr.) and
explanatory caption by Gilles Tréhin. 291
List of Illustrations and Tables ix

15. x List of Illustrations and Tables
13.6 Symbolic Impressions MK-81 by Peter Myers. 294
14.1 Some areas of the brain involved in imagination. 309
14.2 Tentative model of the global workspace. 312
14.3 Significant clusters of neural activation, as determined by
fMRI, associated with fluid analogizing tasks. 321
Tables
2.1 Putative examples of pretence in apes in the research literature. 46
4.1 Imaginary companion (IC) status. 84
4.2 Examples of noncompliant and compliant imaginary
companions. 88
13.1 Examples of features coded by content analysis. 298

16. Notes on Contributors
*Speaker at ‘Imaginative Minds’ symposium, British Academy, 2004.
Susan Blackmore* is a psychologist and writer whose research on conscious-
ness, memes, and anomalous experiences has been published in over 60 aca-
demic papers, as well as book chapters, reviews, and popular articles. She has
a regular blog in the Guardian, and often appears on radio and television. Her
book The Meme Machine (1999) has been translated into 12 other languages
and more recent books include a textbook Consciousness: An Introduction
(2003) and Conversations on Consciousness (2005).
Pascal Boyer* is Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory
at Washington University in St Louis. He studied philosophy and anthropol-
ogy at the Universities of Paris and Cambridge. His research projects are in
three main areas: the neuro-cognitive systems which have evolved in humans
to support the acquisition of cultural knowledge, concepts, and norms; the
role of standard cognitive architecture in furnishing the recurrent properties
of religious concepts and norms in different cultures; the nature of individ-
ual and cultural memory processes, considered within an interdisciplinary
framework. He is author of Religion Explained (2001, Heinemann).
Stephanie M. Carlson is Associate Professor in the Institute of Child
Development at the University of Minnesota, where she directs research on
young children’s executive function, pretend play, and social cognition. Her
research is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development (NICHD). She serves as Consulting Editor of Developmental
Psychology and on the Board of Directors of the Jean Piaget Society.
Nicholas Cook* is Professorial Research Fellow in Music at Royal Holloway,
University of London, where he directs the AHRC Research Centre for the
History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He is the author of
articles and books on a wide variety of musicological and theoretical sub-
jects, and his Music: A Very Short Introduction has been translated into 11
languages. His latest book is a study of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker
in the cultural context of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Former editor of Journal of the
Royal Musical Association and chair of the 2001 RAE Music panel, he was
elected a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year.

17. xii Notes on Contributors
Ian Cross* teaches at the University of Cambridge where he is Director of
the Centre for Music & Science and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He has
published widely in the field of music cognition, including two co-edited
Academic Press books Musical Structure and Cognition (1985) and
Representing Musical Structure (1991), which helped to set the research
agenda in the field. His principal research focus is on music as a biocultural
phenomenon, involving collaboration with psychologists, anthropologists,
archaeologists, and neuroscientists.
Gregory Currie* is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts, University of
Nottingham. Before joining the Nottingham department he was Professor of
Philosophy and Head of the School of Arts at Flinders University of South
Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a
Past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. His most
recent book is Arts and Minds (2005, Oxford University Press) and his
current project is on irony and point of view in the arts. He is also author,
with Ian Ravenscroft, of Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and
Psychology (2002, Oxford University Press), and an editor of Mind and
Language.
John G. Geake is Professor of Education at the Westminster Institute of
Education, Oxford Brookes University where he leads the Institute’s research
in gifted education. He is also a Research Collaborator with the Centre for
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, University of Oxford,
where he conducts fMRI research into the neural correlates of analogical
thinking as a basis for high creative intelligence.
Paul L. Harris* is a developmental psychologist with interests in the devel-
opment of cognition, emotion, and imagination. After studying psychology
at Sussex and Oxford, he taught at the University of Lancaster, the Free
University of Amsterdam and the London School of Economics. In 1980, he
moved to Oxford where he was Professor of Developmental Psychology and
Fellow of St John’s College. In 2001, he migrated to Harvard where he holds
the Victor S. Thomas Professorship of Education. He is a Fellow of the
British Academy and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. For
2006–2007, he received a Guggenheim award. His latest book The Work of
the Imagination appeared in 2000 (Blackwell).
Melissa Koenig is Assistant Professor in Cognitive Development at the
Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Her primary
interests lie at the interface of language development and social cognition.
Recent publications include ‘The role of social cognition in early trust’ with

18. Paul Harris in Trends in Cognitive Sciences and ‘Word learning’ with Amanda
Woodward in the Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics.
Morten L. Kringelbach is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of
Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford and Extraordinary
JRF at The Queen’s College. His main research interests are in understanding
the functional neuroanatomy of human conscious and unconscious pro-
cessing, and in particular those aspects related to pleasure, desire, emotion,
learning, reward, and hedonic processing.
Steven Mithen* is Head of the School of Human and Environmental
Sciences, and Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. His
research interests span from the origin of Homo c. 2 million years ago to the
invention and spread of agriculture up to 5000 BC. His projects fall into three
areas: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-gatherers and early farm-
ers, the evolution of the human mind and computational archaeology. He has
directed fieldwork in Western Scotland and is currently co-directing excava-
tions in Wadi Faynan, Southern Jordan. His books include The Prehistory of
the Human Mind (1996) and After the Ice (2003). He has edited volumes on
Human Creativity (1998) and Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Archaeology
(2001). His most recent book is The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of
Music, Language, Mind and Body. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Daniel Nettle* is Professor in Psychology at Newcastle University. His inter-
ests include personality, creativity, and evolutionary psychology. He is author
of Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature; Happiness:
The Science Behind Your Smile; and Personality: What Makes You the Way
You Are (all published by Oxford University Press).
David G. Pearson is a lecturer in cognitive psychology at the University
of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research covers theoretical and applied aspects
of visuo-spatial cognition, including mental imagery and memory for
visual and spatial information. He currently serves on the Research Board of
the British Psychological Society, and the Academy of Learned Societies for
the Social Sciences. He teaches a range of courses at Aberdeen, including
Consciousness, Mental Imagery and Creative Thinking, and Human Memory.
Ilona Roth* is Senior Lecturer in Psychology, in the Department of Life
Sciences at the Open University. She studied P.P.P. at Oxford, and completed a
D.Phil. in experimental psychology. Her psychology texts, including, as editor,
Introduction to Psychology (1990) and as co-author with V. Bruce, Perception
and Representation (1995), television programmes, and audio-visual materials
Notes on Contributors xiii

19. xiv Notes on Contributors
have been studied by many thousand Open University students, and exten-
sively used in the wider academic domain. Recent publications include
‘Imagination’ in the Oxford Companion to the Mind (2004). Her current
research on poetry by autistic individuals forms part of a broader project on
imagination and self-awareness, and their manifestations in neuropsychiatric
conditions, notably autism spectrum disorders and dementia.
Alison B. Shawber is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon. Her
research areas include the development of children’s imagination, pretend
play, and the neural correlates of mental imagery.
Thomas Suddendorf is Associate Professor in the School of Psychology,
University of Queensland. His research interests include the cognitive
abilities of primates and young children, and the evolution of the human
mind. Of particular interest to him are representational capacities such as
those related to understanding of self, time, and mind. His most recent
publications include ‘The evolution of foresight’ with Michael Corballis
(Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2007), ‘Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and
two-year-old children (Homo sapiens) understand double invisible displace-
ment?’ with Emma Collier-Baker (Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2006),
‘Self-recognition beyond the face’ with Virginia Slaughter and Mark Nielsen
(Child Development, 2006), and ‘Foresight and evolution of the human mind’
(Science, 2006). He recently received the Frank A. Beach Award of the
American Psychological Association.
Marjorie Taylor is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. Her
research interests include imagination and pretend play, imaginary compan-
ions, development of the fantasy–reality distinction, cross-cultural differ-
ences in fantasy behaviour, consciousness, and creativity. She is author of
Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them (1999, Oxford
University Press). She is currently working on a book about the relationships
that develop between adult fiction writers and the characters in their novels.
Mark Turner* is Institute Professor and Professor and Chair of Cognitive
Science at Case Western Reserve University. His most recent book publica-
tion is an edited volume, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle
of Human Creativity (Oxford University Press). His other books and articles
include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about
Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (Oxford), The Literary Mind: The
Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford), Reading Minds: The Study of
English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton), and Death is the Mother
of Beauty (Chicago). He has been a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced

20. Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center,
and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is external research
professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive
Neuroscience and distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for
Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. In 1996, the Académie
française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littéra-
ture françaises.
Andrew Whiten* is Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology,
and Wardlaw Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews.
Recent research has focused on social learning, traditions, and culture in both
human and non-human primates. Recent publications have included ‘The
second inheritance system of chimpanzees and humans’ (Nature, 2005),
‘Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees’ (Nature, 2005),
‘Faithful replication of foraging techniques along cultural transmission
chains by chimpanzees and children’ (PNAS 2006), and ‘The evolution of
animal “cultures” and social intelligence’ (Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B 2007). He
is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the British
Academy.
Notes on Contributors xv

21. Foreword
There are few problems in science that are perhaps quite so tantalizing, and
so difficult, as the workings of the human mind. Over centuries, understand-
ing our thoughts has attracted interest from many fields, ranging from phi-
losophy, to neuroscience, to psychology, to computer science, to archaeology,
and to anthropology. That variety of approach has inevitably led to an
extraordinary diversity of ideas and models. Very often this has meant focus-
ing on a particular ‘trick’ of the mind which underlies its evolution, opera-
tion, power, and success. Classically, this was the rational mind, our ability to
reason our way through any problem. Many have focused on language, and
on the way it provides flexibility of thought, and extraordinary combinator-
ial faculties. Archaeologists and anthropologists have paid particular atten-
tion to symbolic thought, often as an extension to language, for the way in
which it allows detachment from the here and now, and opens up the possi-
bilities for creating a world of the mind as important as the material one. In
recent years we have seen the mind as a computer, with algorithms for every-
thing; the mind as a series of modules like a Swiss Army knife, each one spe-
cialized to carry out its particular function, and, of course, the mind as a
social diary, playing out the intricacies of our complex social lives. Music,
emotion, technology, planning, all have been recognized as playing a part.
At first sight it might seem that, in bringing together the papers of this
book to focus on imagination, Ilona Roth is simply providing yet another
‘trick’. For language, or sociality, or reason, read imagination. It is certainly
almost impossible to think of the human mind without the imagination—
indeed, it is an act of imagination just to pose the question. Imagination per-
vades our thinking very deeply. Perhaps, though, imagination is more than
just another trick.
Both across the spectrum of thinking about the human mind and across
the characteristics of the human mind itself, very different aspects are
emphasized. For some it might be the ability to construct narratives; for oth-
ers it might be Machiavellian strategic thinking and planning; for yet others
it might be making complex technologies from hand axes to computers; and
so on across the whole range of skills, even poetry and falling in love.
Different people also seem to have quite different cognitive strengths and
weaknesses across this spectrum. For each of these abilities, though, it can be

22. argued that it is the capacity to imagine that makes them so potent. Early
storytellers must have used their imagination to construct their narratives.
Proto-politicians in the Palaeolithic must have used their imagination to plot
and scheme their way to the top of the probably literally greasy pole. The
artists of the Dordogne needed to imagine in their heads the shapes and
shadows of the bison they painted deep in dark caves. And from the first tools
to be chipped out of rocks, to the extraordinary complexities of modern
material culture, there must have been a cognitive model of technology. Prior
to any action, whether it is technological, political, or aesthetic, there must be
an ‘imaginative’ mental state. So in studying evolution, the concept of the
imagination has the power to be more neutral about the actual cognitive abil-
ities that produce actions or thoughts. This provides it with greater unifying
power in looking for what makes the human mind both unique and effective.
However, while we can grasp this quite simply, and probably all agree,
somewhat unimaginatively, that this must be the case, we are still left with a
major problem. Unwrapping the word or concept ‘imagination’ is far from
straightforward. It can mean something as simple as a basic ‘what-if’ thought
about an item of food, through to the extraordinary imagination that must
have underlain the thoughts of both Shakespeare and Newton. While it is a
universal of the human mind, it also varies from individual to individual and
from mode of thought to mode of thought. So while on the one hand we have
in the concept of the imagination the possibility of finding something that
unifies the various creativities of the human mind, on the other we also have
a very poor understanding of exactly what it means—let alone the role it may
have played in evolution.
It is that hard problem that Ilona Roth has asked the contributors to this
volume to address. Appropriately enough, the papers cover an enormous
range, from chimpanzees coping with various challenges, to the pattern of
human cognitive evolution, to abilities such as music and art, and from the
limited capacities of autistic children to the flights of creativity of the imag-
inative genius. We are still a long way from a workable, let alone unified, the-
ory of how the imagination operates, but these papers represent a major step
towards a better understanding of how the human mind evolved and what
are its most special characteristics.
Robert Foley
Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution,
University of Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy
Foreword xvii

23. Acknowledgements
This collection of essays grew from a two-day inter-disciplinary symposium
on ‘Imaginative Minds’ organized with the support and funding of The
British Academy, and held at their premises on 30 April to 1 May 2004.
Professors Ruth Finnegan and Uta Frith were kind enough to sponsor my
original proposal for the meeting. Angela Pusey and Joanne Blore helped me
in organizing the meeting while Abigail Cooke coordinated the website.
Many of the current chapters are by symposium speakers (names asterisked
in the list of biographical entries), their contributions complemented by a
small number of chapters commissioned subsequently. Other symposium
speakers were Professor Karin Barber, Professor Ian Robertson, and Dr John
Harrison. Chairs were Professor Uta Frith, Dr Daniel Nettle, Dr Richard
Stevens, and Dr Ilona Roth. Discussants were Professor Margaret Boden,
Professor Robert Foley, and Professor Dan Sperber. My warm thanks are
due to all who made the original meeting such a success, and all who have
travelled with me on the journey to produce this volume. Besides the authors,
this latter group includes Ros Woodward, who has edited the material, and
Amritpal Bangard, Janet English, and James Rivington of the British
Academy publications department. Finally, I give special thanks to my
late father, Martin Roth F.R.S., F.Med.Sci., whose powers of imagination, in
his medical and scientific work, his musicianship, and his appreciation of the
arts have always been a source of inspiration to me.
I.R.

24. Introduction
Imaginative Minds:
Concepts, Controversies, and Themes
ILONA ROTH
‘The Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he
unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates bril-
liant and novel results.’ Charles Darwin (reprinted 1995)
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
Imagination circles the world.’ Attributed to Albert Einstein (quoted in
Calaprice 2005)
THE PRE-EMINENT ROLE OF IMAGINATION in human thought is one that both
Darwin and Einstein clearly recognized. Their enthusiasm for the concept is
echoed in many contemporary academic fields, and also in everyday social
attitudes. In a world in which scientific ideas and technological processes, and
even routine daily activities, are subject to rapid and frequent innovation and
change, the supreme flexibility and inventiveness of mind we associate with
imagination have become highly prized. Teachers and parents are encouraged
to promote imagination in children, and in adult life a high premium is
placed on activities, whether in business, science, the visual and performing
arts, or other branches of life, that show imagination or creativity. Yet despite
what seems the obvious relevance of imagination to psychology and the
cognitive sciences, and of these disciplines to exploring the imagination,
many researchers in these fields have been reluctant to engage directly with
the concept. This volume takes up the challenge of filling this theoretical and
empirical lacuna. It brings together explanatory perspectives from both
within and beyond the cognitive sciences, with the goal of enhancing the
salience of imagination as a construct, or cluster of constructs, relevant to
understanding human mind and behaviour.
Since the potential scope of the topic is vast, it is necessary to sample
selectively within the total field, while providing scope for the discourse and
debate across disciplinary boundaries which is a key objective of this project.

25. xx Ilona Roth
The focus of the book is the imaginative operations of the human mind:
why and in what ways are humans (and arguably some other primates) ima-
ginative? What are the consequences for their behaviour and their cultural
worlds? These questions are considered in terms of the evolutionary origins
of imagination, its expression in children, the cognitive processes and brain
mechanisms involved, and the cultural ‘products’ that both emanate from
and serve to sustain imaginative thought. The volume places a substantial
emphasis upon scientific approaches, notably those of psychology, neuro-
science, and evolutionary studies, but also embraces perspectives from philos-
ophy and the humanities. In practice there are no clear-cut distinctions here:
many of the approaches represented cross the ‘arts–science’ divide in the true
spirit of interdisciplinary integration appropriate to a construct that is both
central to the arts and humanities and a fundamental property of human
cognition.
The remainder of this introduction sets arguments for a contemporary
exploration of ‘imaginative minds’ into historical and theoretical context,
and outlines the themes and issues that structure this volume.
DEFINING IMAGINATION
We use the word ‘imagination’ frequently and take it for granted that we
know what we mean. Yet the word has multiple definitions in the Oxford
English Dictionary (1989) including the formation of mental images, usually
assumed to be visual, but also, by implication, auditory, tactile, and so on;
states of mind such as daydreaming, characterized by fantasy and the spon-
taneous flow of thought from one idea to another; the mental activity of
considering or planning possible (or impossible) courses of action—often
known as counterfactual or ‘what if?’ thinking; creative imagination—the
power of framing highly novel or original ideas and cultural products.
Literary and philosophical definitions cover a similar spectrum of meanings,
one significant addition being figurative or metaphorical thinking, in which
one concept or entity is thought of or treated as another—what might be
called ‘as if’ thinking.
The various meanings may seem somewhat unrelated. However, they have
in common a reference to the human mind’s capacity to elaborate concepts,
images, and ideas that do not correspond to current or past reality, and that
may never be actualized. In this sense, imagination appears fundamental to
the mental apparatus that differentiates humans, in degree if not in kind,
from other species. It is this that enables humans to operate flexibly and effect-
ively in highly complex social groupings, to contemplate intricate plans for
possible (and impossible) future action, and to envisage the consequences

26. without enacting them. It is this that enables humans to conceive of works
of art, literature, poetry, and music, to appreciate these cultural ‘products’,
and also to make discoveries and innovations in scientific and technological
fields. Without such creative imagination, human society would be quite
unrecognizable and very dull.
A possible objection to such a wide-ranging concept of imagination is
that the territory so delineated becomes indistinguishable from thought in
general: after all, what is human thought if it is not abstract, hypothetical,
flexible, and creative? While a full answer to this objection is beyond the scope
of this introduction, two important points can be made here. Firstly, even
without hard and fast criteria for distinguishing imagination from thought
in general, the former construct encapsulates the most quintessential and
special characteristics of cognition, and these merit special and separate
consideration. Secondly, the thinking style of some individuals on the autism
spectrum gives us a glimpse of what thought is like when stripped of much of
its imaginative quality. This apparent dissociation between imaginative
thought and other forms of cognition argues that a meaningful distinction
can be made.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO
A SCIENCE OF THE IMAGINATION
The generally low salience of imagination within contemporary psychology
and the fragmentary treatment of major constituents such as imagery,
counterfactual thinking, and creativity owe much to a turbulent past. In his
historical overview of the imagination, Thomas (1999a,b) shows how differ-
ent meanings have evolved, coalesced, and split from one another in keeping
with changing philosophical and epistemological world views. This complex
background has undoubtedly coloured the shades of meaning associated
with current notions, and the conceptual issues that dominated early thinking
find echoes in contemporary concerns that this volume will highlight.
First of these is what kind of ‘mental faculty’ is the imagination, and what
work does it do? As Thomas outlines, even Aristotle’s early conception incor-
porated components with distinct but interacting roles, prefiguring contem-
porary interest in the mind’s ‘functional architecture’—its sub-systems
and how they are orchestrated. Aristotle proposed phantasia (of which
imaginatio is the Latin translation) and koine aesthesis, which translates as
the sensus communis, as parts of a wider faculty having the role of combining
experiences into so-called phantasmata, meaning coherent mental represen-
tations. Just as sensus communis refers not to ‘common sense’ but to the
binding of outputs from sensory systems into coherent percepts, so the
INTRODUCTION xxi

27. xxii Ilona Roth
connotations of fantasy evoked by the words phantasia and phantasmata are
somewhat misleading. For Aristotle, phantasmata arose either as veridical
representations of the ‘here and now’ based on sensory inputs, or as the
remembered products of previous experiences. In short, while Aristotle’s
conception was prescient in some ways, it offered little scope for the fantasy
and counterfactual thinking that are inherent in the modern concept of the
imagination.
In mediaeval philosophies, ideas about the components and functions of
the imagination were further embellished by speculation about possible
anatomical substrates. Moreover, separating imagination both conceptually
and anatomically from the sensus communis freed it from dealing only with
present or past reality, allowing slightly more scope for fanciful ideation,
within its role of consolidating and transforming mental images for storage
in memory. A couple of hundred years on, however, Descartes reunited
imagination and sensus communis, locating them on the surface of the tiny
pineal gland as collecting point for perceptual, memory, and ‘imaginary’
images. Importantly, the functions so assembled were not part of Descartes’
concept of the rational, but incorporeal mind, but rather the point of inter-
face with it. Here then the Cartesian dualist view of the mind finds expres-
sion alongside the notion, central to modern neuropsychological thinking,
that parts of the brain may play distinctive roles in mental operations—
including imagination.
Within the empiricist and mechanistic philosophies that characterized the
flowering of science in the 17th century, the notion of sensus communis dis-
appeared, and the concept of imagination expanded to take the overall role
of associating contiguous sense impressions. Hume (1739/1740) described the
imagination as enduring traces of our transient perceptual experiences, which
deliver our belief in continuous objects existing in the external world, and our
grouping of objects into conceptual kinds represented by words. These
image-based functions for the imagination once again represent a partial sub-
set of current meanings. But Hume’s sceptical empiricism also introduced a
negative ‘valence’ which has overshadowed the concept’s subsequent develop-
ment. For Hume the imagination was ubiquitous, but also the product of an
unfortunate ‘psychological habit’ of believing in a world whose existence can-
not be rationally established. That creative works of art and literature (let
alone scientific discoveries) might emanate from this same fictive mental uni-
verse left the thinkers of the day unimpressed. Asked for his view of poetry,
Newton dismissed it as ‘a kind of ingenious nonsense’ (see Abrams 1953).
It is in reaction to this intellectual environment that first Kant and then
the writers of the 19th century Romantic movement reformulated imagin-
ation in an overtly positive way, challenging its status as a passively negligent
or decadent thought form. From the ‘super-ordinate, almost mystical role’ of

28. the imagination in Kant’s philosophy (O’Connor and Aardema 2005) to the
Romantics’ rehabilitation of ancient associations with originality, passion,
and fantasy, the concept was reframed. Within Romanticism the role of
imagination in perception became that of an active force that enables humans
to mentally construct reality. Beyond this, as Thomas (1999a) describes, links
with cognitive theory and epistemology were loosened in favour of tighter
links to aesthetics. Thus the concept acquired positive new associations with
creativity and dreaming.
Of course the Romantic movement embraces subtle variations which can
only be hinted at here. For instance, celebration of the non-rational nature
of imaginative thought is strongly associated with the Romantics, hence
William Blake’s comment to Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘What has reason to do
with the Art of Painting? . . . one power alone makes a poet; Imagination,
the Divine Vision’ (see Wittkower 1973, p. 306). Yet Wordsworth (1850/1971)
identified imagination with ‘Reason in her most exalted mood’. Similarly,
while fantasy is both extolled within Romantic ideology and explored within
its canon, there are dissenting voices. Thus Byron writes of literature: ‘But
I hate things all fiction. . . there should always be some foundation of fact
for the most airy fabric—and pure invention is but the talent of a liar’ (see
Marchand 1982, p. 335).
Notwithstanding such qualifications, the central role of imagination in
the Romantic philosophy of mind did little to recommend it to subsequent
critics of the movement. With the growth of 19th century science, the conno-
tations of unfettered and dreamy thinking meant that imagination came,
once again, to be viewed as primitive, antithetical to science and to other
activities requiring ‘organised thought’ (Daston 1998). This recurring nega-
tivity served to undermine the status of imagination as a useful attribute of
mind, or as one worthy of scientific investigation. Consequently, apart from
the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, it virtually disappeared from both philosophy
and mainstream psychology in the early twentieth century (O’Connor and
Aardema 2005).
Behaviourism and Psychoanalysis
During the heyday of Behaviourist (stimulus–response) psychology in the
early decades of the twentieth century, the repudiation of imagination as a
psychological construct was reinforced within a wider project to relegate
complex attributes of mind to theoretical obscurity. At its most extreme, the
behaviourist view was that phenomena such as consciousness and imagin-
ation were meaningless because they comprise unobservable (i.e. mental)
events, which do not lend themselves to objective measurement. J. B. Watson
INTRODUCTION xxiii

29. xxiv Ilona Roth
famously denied that he experienced mental images (see Pearson in Chapter
9), let alone acknowledged more recondite phenomena of the imagination.
Yet some of the same attributes that had contributed to the demise of ima-
gination—as a primitive, associative, and non-rational form of thought—
resonated strongly with psychoanalytical models of mind, originating in
Freud’s own work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freud
and his disciples embraced imagination, equating it with fantasy, dreaming,
and pathology—forms of ‘primary process’ thinking guided by the Pleasure
principle, as distinct from ‘secondary process’ thinking guided by the Reality
principle (Freud 1911/1961). The psychoanalytic movement thus deserves
credit for keeping some psychological interest in imagination going during
the dark days of behaviourism, though ironically their theoretical take on
this concept has also helped to keep it beyond the pale of mainstream
experimental psychology.
FROM 20TH TO 21ST CENTURY: CHALLENGES FOR
A SCIENCE OF THE IMAGINATION
With the decline of behaviourism in the 1970s, and the rise of cognitive
approaches, which treat the workings of the human mind as their central
focus, topics such as the psychology of consciousness have been substantially
rehabilitated into the mainstream of psychology. By contrast, the psychology
of imagination has remained somewhat at the margins until just recently. This
low salience is reflected in the infrequent appearance of imagination as an
index term, let alone a topic, in dictionaries and textbooks. An entry on
imagination in the 2nd edition of the Oxford Companion to the Mind was
written by the present author partly to address this lack (Roth 2004).
Several theoretical tensions have worked together to impede the develop-
ment of imagination as a coherent field within psychology and the cognitive
sciences. These interwoven issues are set out here as reference points to bear
in mind when reading the chapters in this volume.
Rational or Irrational Thought?
This distinction, framed here by Ulric Neisser (1967) as a general explanatory
challenge for cognitive psychology, strongly echoes the early philosophical
debates about the nature of imagination:
Historically, psychology has long recognised the existence of two different
forms of mental organisation. The distinction has been given many names:
‘rational’ vs. ‘intuitive’, ‘constrained’ vs. ‘creative’, ‘logical’ vs. ‘pre logical’,

30. ‘realistic’ vs. ‘autistic’,1
‘secondary process’ vs. ‘primary process’. To list them
together casually may be misleading . . . Nevertheless, a common thread runs
through all the dichotomies. Some thinking and remembering is deliberate, effi-
cient, and obviously goal-directed; it is usually experienced as self-directed as
well. Other mental activity is rich, chaotic and inefficient; it tends to be experi-
enced as involuntary, it just ‘happens’. It often seems to be motivated, but not
in the same way as directed thought; it seems not so much directed towards a
goal as associated with an emotion. (Neisser 1967, p. 297)
Neisser went on to argue that these dichotomies could be reduced, via a com-
putational analogy, to the difference between sequential and parallel mental
processing. In the former, items of information are dealt with one at a time,
the outcome of each stage influencing the next one. In the latter, many items
are processed simultaneously, the outcomes being potentially richer, but less
predictable. Neisser argued that each of these human processing modes could
be scientifically explored using appropriate methods. But he was optimistic in
supposing that cognitive psychology would resolve the conceptual and epis-
temological difficulties so neatly. The mental processes distinguished by
Neisser appear as mutually exclusive categories: as either rational or intuitive,
constrained or creative forms of thought, and the belief that one set of these
phenomena lies beyond the legitimate subject matter of scientific psychology
has not disappeared. Forms of thinking that are ‘deliberate, efficient and
goal-directed’ are typically considered not only more rational, but also much
more accessible by the methods of science than those that are ‘rich, chaotic
and inefficient’, and this has served to circumscribe the field in which cogni-
tive scientists have operated.
Yet imagination is par excellence the conceptual cluster that straddles the
divide represented by Neisser’s distinctions. It embraces forms of thought
that can be both rational and intuitive, both logical and prelogical, though
not necessarily at the same time. For instance, Martindale (1999) is one of
several researchers who suggest that both ‘convergent’ or logical and ‘diver-
gent’ or creative thinking are involved in such activities as scientific discovery
and the solving of logical problems. The initial phase, which may be experi-
enced as the focused mental work, is dominated by logical, reality-oriented
reasoning. Following this there is typically an incubation period, in which the
person may experience a lack of progress or ‘block’. Finally there is an illu-
mination or solution, often when the individual’s mind has not been focused
on the problem for a while. Martindale proposes that both incubation and
INTRODUCTION xxv
1
Autistic is used here not in its current sense, but as the psychiatrist Bleuler (1951) used it
to represent free-associative, wishful thinking characteristic of dreaming, day-dreaming, and
children’s play.

31. xxvi Ilona Roth
illumination phases are characterized by the free-associative, ‘primary-
process’ thinking, which has traditionally been viewed as playing no role in
the scientific process.
The challenge, then, is to approach the imagination within a framework
sufficiently broad in its theoretical scope and eclectic in its methodological
perspectives to transcend this conceptual and empirical divide. In this vol-
ume, we encounter imagination both in its seemingly less rational guise, as the
source of inspiration for fiction, poetry, and music, and in its more reality-
oriented role of solving everyday problems and predicting the behaviour of
others.
Imagery and Imagination
As has been shown, the idea that mental imagery is an integral component of
imaginative thinking has long antecedents. From Aristotle onwards the func-
tions of imagination have been closely linked to perception, and to the notion
of perceptual experience which persists in the absence of sensory input.
According to this view, when we imagine, we do so, at least in part, by bring-
ing mental images to mind. However, philosophical analyses that emerged
after the early twentieth century moratorium on the imagination, notably by
Ryle (1949) and White (1990), have challenged its connection with imagery
(O’Connor and Aardema 2005). According to these accounts imagination
should be considered as a form of pretending (Ryle) or counterfactual think-
ing (White) mediated by ‘propositional’ thought processes. Such language-
like, non-pictorial cognition is, on the face of it, distinct from mental imagery,
considered as ‘seeing pictures in the mind’s eye’, or equivalent in the ‘mind’s
ear’. Equally, as Thomas (1999b) notes, imagination of the creative kind can-
not be reduced to just the ‘separation and recombination of parts of pictorial
images’, the model that seems most consistent with an account of imagery as
pictorial mental representation.
Yet it would be perverse to introduce a survey of the imagination by fore-
closing on the relationship between imagery and imagination. It is generally
acknowledged that imagery need not be reduced to the naive form of ‘picture
theory’ critiqued by Ryle, and with this insight new possibilities emerge.
Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) argue that imagery plays a role in what they
call ‘recreative’ imagination—the capacity to imagine something from a dif-
ferent perspective or viewpoint. And there is both anecdotal and systematic
evidence that imagery is involved in some forms of creative imagination.
In short, the inclusion of imagery in an account of the imagination can be
readily justified.

32. Distinct, Linked, or Unified Phenomena?
Faced with such an apparently complex and Janus-faced construct as the
imagination, it is not surprising that cognitive psychologists have tended
either to ignore it altogether, or to approach it in a fragmentary way. Thus
several aspects of the imagination have been developed as separate fields of
psychological enquiry, notably:
● mental imagery;
● developmental phenomena—especially pretence, defined as the
childhood activity of imbuing events, objects, or entities with ima-
ginary properties; fantastical beliefs, for instance in fairies, magic,
and imaginary companions;
● theory of mind—the capacity to conceive of the thoughts and feel-
ings of others, considered as social imagination in some accounts;
● counterfactual thinking—imagining ‘what might have been’or ‘what
if . . .’;
● creativity.
Undoubtedly each of these fields has gathered considerable momentum
during the cognitive era, but separate theoretical development has rein-
forced the notion that the imaginative processes under consideration are
essentially distinct, or even that a particular approach encompasses the full
extent of the concept. Thus Thomas (1999b) notes that cognitive imagery
theories are sometimes presented as if they covered all that there is to
know about imagination.
In this context, work emphasizing the links between imaginative phenom-
ena is to be welcomed. Leslie (1987; Leslie and Roth 1993) pioneered an influ-
ential theory linking pretence and theory of mind as aspects of the capacity
to suspend disbelief in order to conjure with hypothetical possibilities,
whether imagining that a stick is a gun, or imagining what someone else
might be thinking. Work by Suddendorf and Fletcher-Flinn (1997), Hobson
(2002), and others has highlighted relationships between children’s capacity
for theory of mind and their ability to think creatively. Much of this work is
informed by the characteristic pattern of deficits in Autism Spectrum
Disorders (ASD). These include difficulties in a range of imaginative skills,
perhaps indicating a common substrate for these capacities (see Craig 1997
and Roth in Chapter 13). Research by Finke and colleagues (1992) and oth-
ers (see Robertson 2002) provides evidence that promoting people’s capacity
for mental imagery enhances certain aspects of creativity, though Boden
(2004) questions this relationship. Further important contributions are
Thomas’s (1999b) proposals for a theoretical synthesis of imagery and
INTRODUCTION xxvii

33. xxviii Ilona Roth
imagination, and Byrne’s (2006) work on the relationship between counter-
factual (‘what if?’) imagination and creativity.
The extent to which such empirical and theoretical links call for a uni-
fied treatment of the imagination is a matter of debate. For instance, Currie
and Ravenscroft (2002) draw a clear distinction between creative imagin-
ation, as the capacity to ‘do things in a new way’, and recreative imagina-
tion as the capacity to ‘put ourselves in the place of another, or in the place
of our own future, past or counterfactual self’. They argue, with Tomasello
(2000), that while creativity qua inventiveness may play a role in some forms
of human recreative imagination, the former is a less sophisticated skill also
seen in some non-human primates, while the latter involves the complex and
exclusively human skill of perspective taking.
This volume makes new contributions to both the integration and differ-
entiation of forms of imagination. For instance, Mithen (Chapter 1) pro-
poses the evolution of a cumulative sequence of imaginative capacities
culminating in the exceptional creative imagination of modern humans.
Whiten and Suddendorf (Chapter 2) echo Currie and Ravenscroft in consid-
ering inventiveness, at least, a cognitively less demanding form of imagining,
though especially well developed in great apes. They differ in emphasizing the
scope for elements of recreative-like imagination in the cognitive repertoire of
these primates.
Cultural Expressions of the Imagination
The debate about how far forms of imaginative thinking can be explained in
terms of common operating principles must be informed, above all, by their
strikingly diverse cultural manifestations. Hence this volume considers differ-
ent areas of human life that evoke imaginative behaviour, and highlights
both commonalities and differences among the processes involved. Among
the cultural domains considered here are music, visual art, fiction, poetry,
religion, and supernatural beliefs.
To explain such diverse activities in terms of a similar set of imaginative
processes is certainly a challenge. Chapters 10–12 by Turner, Boyer, and
Nettle offer different perspectives on the question of common or distinct
operating principles.
Individual Minds and Imaginative Contexts
A psychological focus on imaginative minds encourages us to consider the
processes of individual cognition. Moreover, individuals are said to differ in
imaginative capacities, notably for imagery (Cornoldi and Vecchi 2003) and

34. creativity (Simonton 2002). Recent accounts of creativity temper the excep-
tionality implied by such differences by emphasizing the ‘everyday’ creativity
that all individuals display in tasks such as cooking, gardening, and nurtur-
ing children (Boden 2004), and by stressing the creative potential of people
working in groups (Paulus and Nijstad 2003).
To understand imagination in all its forms, we need to range yet further
from individual minds to acknowledge the sociocultural contexts in which
they are situated. For imagination is not just a unidirectional process in which
minds, whether individually or collectively, generate imaginative thoughts
and outputs. Beyond these mental operations, culture furnishes the material
for imagination, notably, but by no means exclusively in ‘high-end’ forms
such as works of literature and art, music, dance, and drama, all of which
depend for their meanings on the imaginative engagement that they evoke in
individual minds. A story, for instance, has no impact if it does not trigger an
imaginative response in which the reader enters the world that it sets out to
create. And its impact will be even greater if it evokes a similar response in
different minds. To this extent imaginative minds are in continuous interplay
with culture, both augmenting and shaping its materials, and being sustained
and altered by them. There are strong arguments, then, for combining the
theories and methods of psychology and cognitive science with wider cross-
disciplinary perspectives that address this interface.
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
While imagination has received fragmentary treatment in psychology, strik-
ing insights are emerging from approaches that have reconfigured traditional
disciplinary boundaries. For instance, the field of cognitive archaeology uses
studies of artefacts and archaeological remains from early prehistory to draw
inferences about the evolving imaginative capacities of the minds which cre-
ated them (see Mithen 1996 and Chapter 1). Cognitive anthropology com-
bines the theories and methods of experimental psychology with those of
anthropology and evolutionary theory, to study the interplay of cultural phe-
nomena with universal modes of imaginative thought (see Boyer 2001 and
Chapter 11). Other fruitful fusions include literary studies with cognitive sci-
ence (Fauconnier and Turner 2002 and Turner in Chapter 10) and musicology
with evolutionary theory (Cross 2003 and Chapter 7).
The application of philosophical analysis to psychological phenomena
has, of course, a long history. But the current rapprochement of philosophy
and psychology, in the approach known as philosophy of mind, is especially
strong, and also particularly fruitful for the study of imagination (see for
instance Currie and Ravenscroft 2002 and Currie in Chapter 8).
INTRODUCTION xxix

35. xxx Ilona Roth
Finally, rapid developments in the field of cognitive neuroscience, includ-
ing the use of techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imaging) to monitor the activity of the brain during thought processes,
potentially offer powerful insights into the brain and neural substrates of the
imaginative mind. This approach is represented by Geake and Kringelbach in
Chapter 14.
This brief overview has sought to demonstrate that the study of imagin-
ative minds is a field with a promising future, which stands to benefit,
appropriately, from the creative confluence of different theoretical and
methodological perspectives. We now turn to a discussion of the six sub-
themes that structure the chapters in this volume, and the issues and debates
that underpin the discussion throughout.
THEMES
Evolution of the Imagination
The book opens with a focus on how, when, and why the modern human
capacity for imagination evolved. Drawing upon evidence from the archaeo-
logical and fossil record, Mithen argues that the imaginative capacities of our
chimpanzee-like hominid common ancestor 4.5 million years ago were lim-
ited to the everyday planning and decision-making necessary to hunt or fash-
ion stone tools. Presenting creative imagination as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of
the imaginative capacities of modern humans, he constructs a seven stage
model showing how the limited imaginative repertoire of our common ances-
tor might have evolved, through cumulative and perhaps overlapping steps,
into the elaborate panoply of modern human imaginative skills. He sees ‘cog-
nitive fluidity’—the capacity to transpose ideas between different cognitive
domains—as fundamental for this. With cognitive fluidity laws that apply in
one domain of ‘folk’ knowledge, such as our intuitive understanding of biol-
ogy or physics, can be broken in another. Thus a child engaged in a pretend
fight readily treats an ordinary twig as a sword; an adult may believe in life
after death, or that supernatural beings can travel through solid objects.
Also working within the explanatory framework of biological evolution,
but using the methods of comparative psychology, Whiten and Suddendorf
consider common ancestors of humans and great apes as far back as
14 million years, and come to somewhat different conclusions from Mithen
concerning their likely imaginative repertoire. Drawing upon a range of
experimental and observational studies of contemporary chimpanzees and
other apes, they infer that the common ancestors which these species resem-
ble would have been both inventive and capable of secondary representa-

36. tion—that is, operating with multiple non-veridical representations as is nec-
essary for pretence, mirror self-recognition, and ‘mind-reading’ the intentions
of others. Much of the difference between Mithen’s and Whiten’s positions
arises less from conflicting empirical evidence than from a slightly different
conception of the orchestration of human imaginative capacities. Mithen
sees creative imagination as the most complex and sophisticated cognitive
skill, for which mind-reading is one of the evolutionary building blocks.
Whiten argues that inventiveness, a significant, though not the only, compo-
nent of human creativity, is less cognitively complex than the suite of skills
subsumed by secondary representation.
Finally in this section, Blackmore considers imagination within a frame-
work presented as radically different from the biological evolutionary
approaches exemplified by Mithen and Whiten and Suddendorf. She chal-
lenges the view that genes for imaginative cognition would have been selected
because they confer an adaptive and reproductive advantage on individuals
who possess them, with an alternative mechanism based on memes—cultural
replicators that serve to ensure the spread and prevalence of certain innova-
tory ideas and practices within and across cultures. Nonetheless, there is a
sense in which this ‘memetic’ approach, built upon an idea of Richard
Dawkins (1993), is advanced as complementary to, rather than contradictory
of, the biological model.
Development of Imagination in Children
In this section the focus shifts from the development of imagination across
evolutionary history to development within the childhood years. Two chap-
ters focus on different ways in which imagination both colours the mental
world of the child and lays the foundations for adult cognition, social inter-
action, and cultural learning. Both chapters are cast within the develop-
mental psychology paradigm and are extensively informed by findings from
experimental and observational studies of young children.
Taylor and her colleagues consider a striking and perplexing form of
counterfactual or ‘what if?’ imagining, in their fascinating account of chil-
dren’s interactions with imaginary others. Far from being invariably compli-
ant and well behaved, a significant proportion of these childhood ‘friends’ are
disobedient or badly behaved. The capacity not only to conjure such non-real
companions, but to furnish them with traits beyond the child’s own control,
is impressive indeed. Further, the psychological outcomes for children who
have imaginary companions are almost all positive, underlining the impor-
tance of this form of counterfactual imagination in cognitive and emotional
development and social adjustment.
INTRODUCTION xxxi

37. xxxii Ilona Roth
Harris and Koenig broaden the focus from thinking about non-real
beings, considering also how children deal with entities and events which,
though real, have not been directly observed by them. They point out that the
role of imagination extends to just such situations. Faced with a claim such
as ‘the Earth is round’ the child draws upon imagination to form a working
model that incorporates this view. However, his or her acceptance of such
imagined entities is critically modulated by evaluation of the testimony that
generated the claim: children do not accept unreliable testimony on trust.
In this sense, they are cautious disciples in their readiness to assimilate
potentially fantastical concepts into their store of real-world knowledge.
Mind into Culture: Perspectives on Musical Imagination
From a consideration of the ways in which imagination scaffolds the child’s
individual and social development, the emphasis shifts to one of the most
universal cultural manifestations of the human imagination—music.
Though not everyone has the imaginative capacity to compose music, musi-
cal imagination is universal in the sense that everyone, except those rare indi-
viduals with amusia, has the capacity to engage with music through
performing and/or listening. Cook outlines how ‘improvisatory imagination’
infuses both the process of composition and the creative act involved in per-
forming and listening. Moreover, he argues, the interpretation of music, even
something as complete as a Mozart score, is a social act, in which the inter-
pretive responses of individuals must be coordinated and interwoven to
achieve a creative result.
This integration of individual and social elements in musical imagination
is a continuing thread in the chapter by Cross, which has a special focus on
music outside the Western tradition. In this arena, the roles of composer, per-
former, and listener, and the boundaries between music and dance, are fre-
quently much less clear-cut than in classical Western music. Consequently, he
argues, scientific approaches that analyse the ways in which music has its
impact on the human auditory system, and musicological approaches that
emphasize the ways in which music is embedded in social and cultural tradi-
tions, must be closely integrated if we are to fully understand what music
means.
Imagination, Cognition, and Creative Thinking
From the interplay between mind and culture, the focus shifts to some of the
mental operations which underpin imaginative thought. Currie’s chapter
emphasizes once again that imagination is not the exclusive preserve of

38. exceptionally creative individuals such as composers or writers, but is equally
at work in the mind of the beholder. He considers the forms of imagination
that enable a reader to engage with a narrative, arguing that this must be
understood not only in terms of the imaginative content of the reader’s
thoughts about the story, but also the stance or point of view which the
reader adopts, this being subtly or implicitly prescribed by the narrative itself.
While Currie sees the mental images that the reader may conjure while
reading a story as incidental to the processes at the heart of narrative engage-
ment, mental imagery is the central focus of Pearson’s chapter. There are
many celebrated anecdotal accounts of the role of visual imagery in the cre-
ative thinking of scientists, composers, writers, and others. Pearson shows
how the methods and models of cognitive psychology have provided a more
robust foundation for some of these claims, elucidating the factors that may
enhance or undermine the creative quality of image-based thinking. He con-
cludes by addressing the controversial question of the phenomenal status of
mental imagery and just what causal role it might play in creativity.
Echoing Mithen’s emphasis on cognitive flexibility as a key evolutionary
foundation for modern human imagination, Pearson’s analysis centres on the
notion of creative mental synthesis—the process of manipulating different
sources of information and combining them to generate entirely new ideas or
insights. Turner argues that an analogous process—the capacity for concep-
tual integration or ‘blending’—lies at the core of all imaginative cognition.
Blending enables humans to draw simultaneously upon different conceptual
frameworks, articulating their elements within novel frameworks from which
powerful new ideas emerge. Turner illustrates how pervasive characteristics of
human cognition, including attributing mental states to both humans and
other animals, understanding fiction and pictorial representations, can be
interpreted as sophisticated forms of blending.
Cognitive Architecture of the Imagination
The chapters by Boyer and Nettle continue the theme of operating principles
for the imagination and consider how such processes might be organized and
instantiated within the cognitive system. Both chapters draw upon the notion
of domain-specificity (Cosmides and Tooby 1994), according to which the
mind consists of a set of modular cognitive mechanisms, each specialized to
deal with a different class of knowledge about the world. Their conclusions
regarding the application of this principle to the imagination are subtly
different.
Boyer argues that the bases for ‘high-end’ imaginative activities, in which
category he includes engaging with fiction, religious belief, and ritual, are to
INTRODUCTION xxxiii

39. xxxiv Ilona Roth
be found in more everyday ‘productive’ imagining rooted in counterfactual or
‘what if?’ type inference processes. Though such tacit everyday inferences are
a generic property of cognition, their character is specialized and specific to
different domains of knowledge. For instance our inferences about the behav-
iour of intentional agents such as humans are different from those about
inanimate objects. If we strike another human being, we might expect them
to cry out, show signs of pain, and perhaps to retaliate. If we strike a vase,
our expectations are different—for instance that the vase will shatter or spill
water on the floor. Boyer argues that imaginative premises, for instance about
the activities of gods and ancestors, may arise from fairly minor violations of
the default set of expectations for the relevant domain. Since imaginative
premises in stories, religions, and other fields often concern the same cul-
turally universal themes, he suggests that these premises are pre-selected by
a process that favours their survival and replication over other potential
premises with less memorability and cognitive relevance.
Nettle’s chapter shifts the focus again from the kind of imaginative ideas
that many individuals share, to the more exceptional imagination of highly
creative individuals. It has long been thought that creative artists have tem-
peramental and cognitive attributes similar to those of people with mental
disorders. Thus Redfield Jamison (1993) explored the likely incidence of
bipolar disorder in the families of famous writers such as Tennyson. Nettle
presents important new data on the raised incidence of schizotypy in artists
and poets. He extrapolates from this connection to a model of the imagin-
ation that marries domain-specificity with a form of interdomain cross-talk.
There is a generic operating principle here akin to Mithen’s notion of cogni-
tive fluidity but, like Boyer, Nettle repudiates the notion of a general ‘faculty’
of the imagination.
Atypical Imagination and Brain Mechanisms
Nettle’s chapter demonstrates that much can be learned about the imagin-
ation from atypical cases. This theme continues here with Roth’s exploration
of imagination on the autism spectrum. People with ASD are usually
assumed to have impaired capacity for many of the forms of imagination dis-
cussed in this volume. Yet some individuals have talent in fields usually asso-
ciated with creativity, notably visual art, music, and poetry. Roth considers
the dimensions and implications of this profile of deficits and skills, and
describes the insights from her own work on autistic spectrum poets.
The complex picture of continuities and discontinuities among forms of
imagination that emerges from both this and earlier chapters call for a
mapping of the relevant cognitive processes onto brain mechanisms. While

40. studies of these mechanisms are at an early stage, Geake and Kringelbach
offer a valuable survey of what is known. They range widely across different
phenomena, and shed light on the way common operating principles
nonetheless recruit many different brain areas and networks in support of the
exquisite complexity of the imaginative mind.
Note. My thanks to Elizabeth Archibald, Lesel Dawson, and Mirka Horova for
their helpful comments.
In this book ‘hominid’ denotes ancestral relatives of humans since the divergence
from the chimpanzee lineage. The term ‘hominin’ is gradually superseding this usage.
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42. Part I
EVOLUTION OF THE
IMAGINATION

44. 1
Seven Steps in the Evolution of the
Human Imagination
STEVEN MITHEN
Abstract. The archaeological and fossil record suggests that our
hominid ancestors and relatives possessed imaginative abilities
that were used in day-to-day living, such as when thinking about
hunting and gathering or making stone tools. But there is no evi-
dence that they possessed a creative imagination, the type we usu-
ally associate with activities such as art and science. This was most
likely restricted to Homo sapiens, which appear in the fossil record
at c.200,000 years ago. I argue that the creative imagination of
H. sapiens was the product of a long evolutionary history within
which seven key developments in biological and cultural evolu-
tion can be identified: the evolution of theory of mind capacities,
a distinctively human life history and domain-specific intelli-
gences, the origin of music, language, and cognitive fluidity, the
extension of mind by material culture, and the appearance of
sedentary farming communities.
INTRODUCTION
MODERN HUMANS ARE THE PRODUCT OF at least six million years of evolution
since the divergence of our lineage from that which led to the chimpanzee. It
is normally assumed that the common ancestor was similar to the chim-
panzee because of the ape-like brain size and post-cranial characteristics of
the earliest hominid species, which date to 4.5 million years ago. If the com-
mon ancestor also had a mind like the chimpanzee, we must conclude that its
imaginative powers were limited. How limited depends on how one defines
the imagination and interprets the behaviour of chimpanzees today.
Proceedings of the British Academy 147, 3–29. © The British Academy 2007.

45. 4 Steven Mithen
One aspect of the human imagination is that which we use every day, per-
haps every waking moment of every day, as we go about our business of
working and living. We constantly have to make decisions and often do so by
imagining future scenarios from the choices we have available—which type
of sandwich to have for lunch, whether to travel by car or train, who to sit
next to at a dinner party. Such decisions involve both foresight and the
contemplation of alternatives. It is conceivable that chimpanzees, and per-
haps a wide variety of other animals, have an imagination of this type as it
appears to be synonymous with consciousness, which some ethologists and
philosophers claim is found among many species (Dawkins 1993). So when a
chimpanzee manufactures a stick for extracting termites, it may be engaged
in foresight—imagining the process of poking the stick into a hole, extract-
ing it, and then licking off the termites—and it may also be contemplating
alternative choices, with regard to either what size of stick to use or whether
to eat termites or fruit. It may, however, entirely lack both foresight and abil-
ity to select between options—we simply do not know, and perhaps we can
never know. We can, however, be confident that chimpanzees lack another
aspect of the modern human imagination, that which we can refer to as the
creative imagination.
Precisely how the ‘creative imagination’ should be defined is a subject of
considerable debate, as explained by Ilona Roth in her Introduction. The def-
inition I will adopt for this chapter is the ability to combine different types of
knowledge and ways of thinking to create novel ideas and insights. This is the
imagination we invoke when attempting to explain how Shakespeare was able
to write his plays or Darwin discovered the principles of natural selection.
Although none of us may aspire to, let alone attain, such achievements, we
all have the potential for a creative imagination and may employ this to write
poetry, to paint pictures, and to undertake science.
While a creative imagination is unique to modern humans in the world
today, the extent to which a creative imagination of this type was found
in other now extinct species of the Homo genus remains unclear. The
Neanderthals, for instance, had brains as large, and in some cases larger, than
modern humans and survived for more than 250,000 years during the Middle
and Later Pleistocene in Europe, a period of considerable environmental
change and stress (Stringer and Gamble 1993; Gamble 1999). They made
complex stone artefacts, engaged in big game hunting, and undertook some
activities that required black pigment (D’Errico and Soressi 2002). All of
these required the ‘day-to-day’ type imagination, such as for planning hunts
and selecting nodules of stone for tool making. Whether they also possessed
a creative imagination is more contentious as there is no unambiguous evi-
dence for this in the material record, although some artefacts remain subject
to debate (e.g. the Berekhat Ram ‘figurine’, see D’Errico and Nowell 2000).

46. The likely use of black pigment provides us with the greatest dilemma as this
could be for utilitarian or symbolic purposes—my own preference is for the
former (Mithen 2005).
The apparent absence of Neanderthal rock art and other signs of a
creative imagination might reflect the absence of the necessary social and
economic conditions for this to have become manifest rather than the absence
of the requisite cognitive abilities in this species. Alternatively, the relevant
evidence may simply have not survived or not yet been discovered. I think it
more likely, however, that Neanderthals lacked the cognitive capacity for a
creative imagination. More generally, it appears from the archaeological evi-
dence that the creative imagination is restricted to the single member of the
Homo genus that has survived today, Homo sapiens, and that the survival and
pre-eminent success of our species can be partly explained by the possession
of that imagination (Mithen 1996, 2001). In this regard, Homo sapiens’s
ability to think more creatively about making tools, exploiting the landscape,
constructing social relationships, and even about supernatural worlds of gods
and ice age spirits enabled them to out-compete the Neanderthals and all
other members of the Homo genus for resources. This creative imagination
also enabled them not only to survive but also to flourish through the harsh-
est periods of environmental change during the late Pleistocene.
Although restricted to modern humans, the creative imagination can-
not have simply sprung from nothing with the origin of Homo sapiens at
c.200,000 years ago. It is the product of a long evolutionary history, involv-
ing both biological and cultural change that began soon after the divergence
of the two lineages that led to modern humans and the African apes. I believe
we can identify seven critical steps in that process (Figure 1.1). I will describe
these in chronological order and with some indication of the dates at which
they most likely emerged. This is, however, a simplification: each of the steps
should be thought of as a gradual evolutionary process rather than a discrete
event, although a process that often provided the necessary foundation for
the next step towards the modern creative imagination.
STEP 1: A THEORY OF MIND, 6.0–1.8 MILLION YEARS AGO
Having a ‘theory of mind’ is normally understood as possessing the ability to
know that other individuals have beliefs and thoughts that are different from
one’s own. It is, however, a complex and rather ill-defined phenomenon, or
rather one open to multiple interpretations (Carruthers and Smith 1996).
There are likely to be at least two elements which are logically separable: (1)
the ability to know that other people have beliefs and thoughts (i.e. that they
have minds) and (2) that these beliefs and thoughts are different from one’s
SEVEN STEPS IN EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION 5

47. 6 Steven Mithen
own. In principle, one could know that other people have beliefs and
thoughts, but assume that these thoughts are the same as one’s own, i.e. lack
the ability to take the perspective of another.
Since the late twentieth century, there has been a considerable amount of
research on theory of mind in the fields of developmental psychology, ethol-
H. neanderthalensis
H. heidelbergensis
Paranthropus spp.
A. ramidus
A. anamensis
A. afarensis
Australopithecus
africanus
H. rudolfensis
H. habilis
H. ergaster
H. erectus
H. helmei
Homo sapiens
Millions of
years ago
0
0.25
0.5
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
6.0
1. Theory of
mind
2. Childhood
7. Sedentary lifestyles
6. Extended mind
5. Cognitive fluidity
4. Language and music
3. Domain-
specific
intelligences
Figure 1.1. Seven steps in the evolution of the human imagination. Rather than discrete steps,
these should be envisaged as evolutionary processes occurring over long periods of time, especially
with regard to theory of mind and the evolution of childhood.

48. ogy and palaeoanthropology (e.g. Byrne and Whiten 1988, 1992; Whiten
1991; Povinelli 1993, 1999; Baron-Cohen et al. 1999). Although widely recog-
nized as being a critical cognitive ability for modern humans, considerable
disagreement continues as to what constitutes a theory of mind, hence the
title of Carruthers and Smith’s 1996 book Theories of Theories of Mind.
Similarly, the evolutionary history of theory of mind capacity and how this
relates to the evolution of language remains unclear (Dunbar 1998; Mithen
1999).
Despite some strong claims, it has proved surprisingly difficult to estab-
lish whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind (Whiten and Suddendorf in
Chapter 2). The tests undertaken on human infants and children rely to a
large extent on the children telling the experimenter what they think. Because
chimpanzees are unable to communicate with humans in a sufficiently detailed
and unambiguous fashion, trying to establish what they know about another
chimpanzee’s mind is inevitably fraught with methodological problems.
Increasingly complex experimental designs have been formulated without any
widespread agreement. My own view is that chimpanzees have a limited, if
any, understanding of other minds. As such, the fully fledged theory of mind
capacity seen in humans must have evolved after the split with the common
human–chimpanzee ancestor at around six million years ago.
One useful manner in which to characterize varying theory of mind
capacities within and across species is by using the terminology of ‘orders of
intentionality’ as introduced by the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1996). By
having a belief, one has a ‘single order of intentionality’. If I were to have a
belief about your belief, I would have a second order of intentionality. If I
were then to have a belief about what you believe a third party believes, I
would have a third order of intentionality. And so on. In this respect chim-
panzees would be designated as having one, or at very most two, orders of
intentionality, while modern humans routinely engage in thoughts that
require four and sometimes even five orders of intentionality. Dunbar (2004)
has argued that one can track the evolution of increasingly greater levels of
intentionality through the fossil record by estimating brain size; this relies on
his ‘social brain’ hypothesis—that the enlargement of the brain during
human evolution has been a consequence of selection for ever more complex
social skills.
A major problem with Dunbar’s (2004) social brain hypothesis is that it
requires Neanderthals and other large-brained non-modern Homo to have
the same order of intentionality as Homo sapiens, even though their patterns
of behaviour and thought appear quite different from the archaeological
evidence they have left behind.
Although Dunbar’s arguments are unlikely to be correct for the latter
stages of human evolution, they appear to have great veracity for the earlier
SEVEN STEPS IN EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION 7

49. 8 Steven Mithen
stages—for the appearance of the first members of Homo with brains signif-
icantly larger than the c.450 cm3
of modern chimpanzees. Homo habilis and
Homo rudolfensis had brain sizes that exceeded 500 cm3
and 700 cm3
respec-
tively, while some specimens of Homo ergaster at 1.75 million years ago (mya)
had brain capacities that exceeded 850 cm3
(Johanson and Edgar 1996),
although other specimens remained below 700 cm3
(Gabunia et al. 2000). In
light of a correlation between group size and brain size among modern non-
human primates, Dunbar argues that these earlier species were living in larger
groups than modern-day chimpanzees and that this would have created selec-
tive pressures for theory of mind capacities and enhanced communication
(Dunbar 1996, 2004; Aiello and Dunbar 1993). With more individuals to
potentially compete and cooperate with, those who could anticipate the
behaviour of other individuals by ‘imagining’ what they were thinking would
have gained a reproductive advantage.
The need to live in relatively large groups can be explained by the environ-
mental changes of the early Pleistocene, most notably the increasing open-
ness of the landscapes and the increased role of hunting and scavenging
(Aiello and Wheeler 1995). Nevertheless, it is not easy to identify a clear
cause and effect as there would have been feedbacks between brain size,
diet, technology, and social interaction as illustrated in Figure 1.2. That the
evolution of a theory of mind—perhaps up to three orders of intentional-
ity—was a central feature of this nexus of interactions during the early
Pleistocene is a persuasive argument. This would have provided the first step
in the evolution of the imaginative capacities of the modern human mind.
STEP 2: THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN LIFE HISTORY,
2.0–0.1 MILLION YEARS AGO
Human life history contrasts with that of modern apes in several key respects
(Bogin 1999, 2003). First, there is the phenomenon of ‘secondary altriciality’.
This refers to the combination of a long gestation and the period of relative
infant helplessness after birth during which brain size continues a foetal rate
of growth for another year. Second, there is the developmental phase that we
call ‘childhood’, which lies between weaning and the capacity to feed and
protect oneself. Third is the adolescent growth spurt, and fourth the extensive
post-menopausal lifespans that are uniquely found in the human species. For
chimpanzees and gorillas, death follows soon after the loss of reproductive
capacity.
Each of these life-history phases can be argued to contribute to the fully
evolved and developed human imagination. Infancy and childhood are peri-
ods when brain growth occurs within cultural settings that will influence the

50. type of neural networks that are formed; adolescence is a period of adult
capabilities but usually without adult responsibilities; the elderly play a key
role in the transmission of information to younger generations and are able
to draw on long-term experience when formulating ideas.
The evolution of modern human life-history patterns has become a key
topic within evolutionary anthropology during the past decade, but remains
little understood (Thompson et al. 2003) (Figure 1.3). Bogin (1999) has sug-
gested that childhood first appears with the earliest Homo, and adolescence
only with H. sapiens, while O’Connell et al. (1999; Hawkes et al. 1997) have
argued that post-menopausal lifespans evolved with H. erectus. Although
the specific details remain to be established, it is clear that changing life-
history patterns were partly a consequence of the evolutionary conflicts
SEVEN STEPS IN EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION 9
Bipedalism
'Stand tall and
stay cool'
New foraging
niche
Higher quality diet
Smaller gut
Larger brain
Larger group
size
Increased
predator risk
Enhanced
planning
Development
of open
landscapes
Frees the
hands
Manufacture
and carrying of
stone tools
Figure 1.2. Feedbacks between dietary change, brain size, tool making, and bipedalism during
the Early Pleistocene, based on arguments in Aiello (1996) and Aiello and Wheeler (1995).

51. 10 Steven Mithen
arising from bipedalism, large body, and large brain size (Key and Aiello
1999). To be effective, bipedalism requires a narrow pelvis, which then
inhibits the birthing of large-brained infants. To resolve this, humans have
evolved to give birth to infants whose skulls literally become temporally
deformed during birth, and who then continue their foetal rates of growth.
The necessary outcomes are relatively helpless infants that require consider-
able investment from nursing mothers. The probable reason why post-
menopausal lifespans may have been selected is that those infants and
nursing mothers who gained support from their grandmothers/mothers had
increased chance of survival, while the grandmothers would have been
enhancing the survival of their own genes into the next generation
(O’Connell et al. 1999).
If the evolution of large brains and bipedalism are indeed related to the
appearance of a human-like life-history pattern, then the key species of
concern is H. ergaster, appearing in the fossil record at c.1.8 million years
ago. The KNM-WT 15000 fossil, otherwise known as the Nariokotome boy
Adolescence
Adult
Juvenile
Childhood
Infant
A. africanus
2.5 mya
H. habilis
1.9 mya
H. erectus
1.0 mya
H. sapiens
0.17 mya
20
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Age in
years
Figure 1.3. The evolution of human life history (after Bogin 2003).

52. (Walker and Leakey 1993), is the best-preserved specimen. Ageing this spe-
cimen has been difficult with estimates ranging between 11 and 15 years old,
but it evidently had a modern human stature and bipedal gait. This specimen
had a cranial capacity of 880 cm3
, estimated to have reached 909 cm3
as an
adult—twice as large as that of a chimpanzee but only equivalent to a
modern human child. As such, H. ergaster appears to be a species with-
out any useful living primate analogy, and with a life history that was most
probably intermediary between modern humans and modern apes (Krovitz
et al. 2003).
Quite when the fully modern human life history evolved remains unclear.
Recent studies of the growth lines on Neanderthal teeth indicate that
Neanderthal children may have grown up significantly quicker than those of
modern humans (Rozzi and Bermudez de Castro 2004) and hence it may have
been only in the H. sapiens lineage after the split from the Neanderthals that
the fully modern human life-history pattern evolved with an extended period
of childhood. This may well have a causal relationship to what appears to be
the unique presence of symbolic thought and language in H. sapiens and the
overall greater capacity for imagination in our species when compared with
all of our hominid ancestors and relatives.
Several hominid species existed after 1.6 million years ago, all character-
ized by modern stature, bipedalism, and relatively large brains. These include
H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and, more
controversially, H. antecessor and H. helmei. While these exhibit significant
differences in their cranial and post-cranial morphology and may have had
different technological traditions, and linguistic and cognitive capacities, I
believe they are sufficiently similar to be referred to by the collective term
‘Early Humans’. Hence in the following text I will use this term for the
bipedal, large-brained hominids of the Middle and late Pleistocene, with the
exclusion of H. sapiens.
STEP 3: DOMAIN-SPECIFIC INTELLIGENCES,
2.0–0.25 MILLION YEARS AGO
Human creative imagination is often characterized as the ability to combine
different types of knowledge and ways of thinking to create novel ideas and
insights. This is closely related to Boden’s (2004) ideas regarding the explor-
ation and transformation of conceptual spaces and provides the basis for
the term ‘blending’ as used by Turner (1996, and Chapter 10), as well as my
own notion of cognitive fluidity (Mithen 1996). It can only happen, of course,
if human minds have ideas and ways of thinking to combine in the first
place. In this regard, a key step in the evolution of the human imagination
SEVEN STEPS IN EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION 11

53. 12 Steven Mithen
was the appearance of cognitive domains or mental modules dedicated to
specific types of thought and behaviour that provided the ‘raw material’ for
imaginative thoughts.
We have already considered one of these—the theory of mind.
Understanding that other people have minds and that these minds may con-
tain beliefs and desires different from one’s own is likely to rely on specialized
neural networks that have evolved/developed for this specific purpose and
that can be usefully referred to as a mental module. This module appears to
be inhibited from working in those individuals who suffer from autism as
they typically have an impaired ability to empathize with other individuals
(Baron-Cohen 2003; Roth in Chapter 13). Similarly, language, music, and
mathematics appear to rely on distinct mental modules as each of these
capacities can be lost while leaving other mental capacities unaffected (Pinker
1997; Butterworth 1999; Peretz and Coltheart 2003; Mithen 2005). Some
evolutionary psychologists argue that the whole of the human mind is con-
stituted by mental modules that originally evolved to ‘solve problems’ that
our ancestors faced in Pleistocene and earlier environments (Cosmides and
Tooby 1994). In contrast, some development psychologists argue that mental
modularity is principally a product of brain maturation in cultural contexts
(Karmiloff-Smith 1992).
The fossil and archaeological records appear to support the evolutionary
psychologists’ position that distinct ways of thinking and stores of knowl-
edge evolved in human ancestors to address problems they faced in their
social and natural environments (Mithen 1996; Figure 1.4)—although how
these are moulded by the developmental context remains unclear. By 1.4 mya
two key events in human evolution had occurred. First, hominids had dis-
persed out of Africa. Precisely when, why, and how this was achieved remains
unclear (Straus and Bar-Yosef 2001; Mithen and Reed 2002). Crucial evi-
dence comes from the site of Dmanisi in Georgia, where H. ergaster was
present by 1.7 mya. H. ergaster/H. erectus fossils have been claimed in Java by
1.8 mya.
The most startling of recent discoveries has been the discovery of a
dwarfed species of Homo in the Indonesian island of Flores, designated as
Homo floresiensis (Brown et al. 2004). The known species date to the late
Pleistocene but stone artefacts from the island have been dated to 0.8 million
years (Morwood et al. 1998) and suggest colonization by H. erectus. Isolation
of this species on a small island in the absence of predators may have then led
to a reduction in its size, a process that has been frequently recorded for
mammals such as elephants and deer.
The evidence from Flores Island raises two key issues regarding creativity.
First, does the 0.8 million year old arrival of H. erectus on that island (if that
is indeed what happened) indicate more advanced levels of technology and

54. planning, such as to build sea-going rafts, than have previously been attrib-
uted to this species? I suspect not, as the necessary isolation of H. erectus on
Flores to result in the dwarfing process suggests a lack of regular movement
between the islands. I suspect they arrived on Flores by some form of eco-
logical accident rather than through deliberate purpose. The second issue
raised by Flores is more profound: the brain size of H. floresiensis was less
than 400 cm3
—less than that of a modern-day chimpanzee. And yet this
species appears to have manufactured stone artefacts and engaged in what
amounts to big game hunting. What we do not understand, of course, is what
happens to the structure and organization of brains during an evolutionary
SEVEN STEPS IN EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION 13
General
intelligence
Social
Social
Intelligence
Intel igence
Social
Intelligence
Technical
echn al
intelligence
i t ll e
Technical
intelligence
Natural history
intelligence
intell gence
Natural history
intelligence
Figure 1.4. Domain-specific intelligences of the Early Human mind (after Mithen 1996).

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56. fact. Wonderful turf. It’s a pleasure to fall on it, honest! Hear from
your old man yet?”
“Hardly,” replied Myron drily. “What have you been doing?”
“Me? Sweating, son, mostly. Practising football some, too.”
“Oh! I didn’t know you played.”
“Me? That guy Camp and I wrote the rules! Looks like we had
enough fellers to build forty teams. Must have been ’most a
thousand of ’em over there. Every time I turned around I trod on
some one. You didn’t go over, eh?”
“No, I—I was busy. Besides, I didn’t know they were holding
practice today. I supposed they’d start tomorrow.”
“Been at it three days already, I hear. Got a coach here that looks
like he knew his business, Foster. Ever try football?”
“I’ve played some,” answered Myron, with a smile that seemed to
combine patience and pity. “I expect to go out for it when I get
settled somewhere.”
“Still thinking of leaving, are you? You’re going to lose a mighty
good school, son. I sure do like this place. Well, I’ve got a hunger
like a river-boss. Guess I’ll get back to store clothes and find the
trough. You going now?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Well, tell ’em to save a little of everything for me.” Dobbins’ voice
came muffled from above the basin in the bedroom, and Myron,
remembering the towel, hurried out.

57. CHAPTER IV
MYRON DECIDES TO STAY
At dining hall it appeared that places had not yet been assigned
and Myron was conducted to a seat between a large, stout youth
who seemed afflicted with asthma and a shy, red-cheeked boy who
promptly upset his glass of milk when Myron asked for the biscuits.
Rather to his surprise, the food was excellent and plentiful. There
were many tables, each seating ten boys, and most of them were
filled when Myron reached the hall. There was a good deal of noise,
as was natural when nearly four hundred normally healthy boys
were being fed. At Myron’s table no one appeared to be acquainted
with any one else and in consequence there was little conversation.
The asthmatic youth wheezily ventured a remark, but Myron’s reply
was not encouraging and the youth gave all his attention again to
dropping bits of biscuit in his stewed pears and salvaging them
noisily. Myron was glad when the stout chap, finding nothing else to
devour, sighed heavily and left the table. His place was filled again,
however, a moment later by a clean-cut fellow of about nineteen
years, a good-looking, neatly-dressed boy of what Myron mentally
called his own sort. Conversation with him seemed natural and
desirable, and Myron broke the ice by offering the biscuits. The
newcomer accepted one, said “Thanks” politely and cast a brief and
appraising glance over his neighbour.
“They’re not bad,” said Myron.
“No, they never are,” answered the other. “I wonder if you can
reach the butter.”
Myron could and did. “Not up to the biscuits,” he offered.
“No? What seems to be wrong with it?”

58. “Too salty for me.”
“I see. Well, you’d naturally like it fresh.”
Myron shot a covert and suspicious glance at the other. It seemed
to him that there had been a faint emphasis on the word “fresh.”
Perhaps he had only imagined it, though, for his neighbour’s
expression was quite guileless. He was leisurely buttering a portion
of the biscuit and appeared to have forgotten Myron’s existence.
Myron felt faintly uncomfortable and applied himself silently to his
food. Across the board another chair was pushed back and, almost
before its occupant was out of it, again taken. Myron observed
rather annoyedly that the new occupant of the place was Dobbins.
He nodded across and dropped his eyes to his plate. He hoped that
Dobbins wouldn’t try to converse. Somehow, he didn’t want the chap
at his right to think him a friend of Dobbins’. But Dobbins, after an
approving look about the table, did just what Myron had hoped he
wouldn’t do.
“How you making out, Foster?” he inquired. “Grub meeting your
approval?”
“Yes, thanks,” responded Myron coldly.
“That’s good. I see you—Hello!”
“Hello,” said the boy at Myron’s right affably. “How do you feel
now?”
“Great! It sure was hot, though. Bet you I dropped five pounds
this afternoon. But I’ll get it back right now if they’ll give me half a
chance!” Dobbins chuckled and Myron’s neighbour smiled
responsively. Myron wondered how Dobbins and this chap beside
him happened to be so chummy. He wondered still more when, a
minute later, his neighbour changed his seat for one just vacated
beside Dobbins, and entered into an animated conversation with
him. Myron couldn’t catch more than an occasional word above the
noise of talking and clattering dishes, but he knew that the subject
of their discourse was football. He was glad when he had finished his
supper and could leave the table.

59. There was a reception to the new students that evening at the
Principal’s residence, but Myron didn’t go. What was the use, when
by noon tomorrow he would have shaken the dust of Warne from his
shoes and departed for a school where fellows of his station and
worth were understood and appreciated? Joe Dobbins, however,
attended and didn’t get back to the room in Sohmer until nearly ten
o’clock, by which time Myron had exhausted all the reading matter
he could find and, pyjama-clad, was sitting at a window and moodily
looking out into the dimly lighted yard. Joe entered in his usual
crash-bang manner and breezily skimmed his hat toward the table.
It missed the table and went to the floor, where, so far as its owner
was concerned, it was allowed to stay. Myron reflected that it wasn’t
hard to account for the battered condition of that hat.
“Heard from your old man yet?” asked Joe, dropping into a chair
and stretching his long legs across the floor.
“Meaning my father?” asked Myron stiffly.
“Yep. Has he telegraphed?”
“No, unless he’s sent a night message. He might. Sometimes he
doesn’t get back from the yard until rather late.”
“Yard? What sort of yard?”
“Shipyard. He builds boats.”
“Oh, boatyard, you mean. I know a fellow in Portland has a
boatyard. Makes some crackajack sloops.”
“We build ships,” corrected Myron patiently. “Battleships,
passenger ships, cargo carriers and such. Some of them are
whopping big ones: sixteen and eighteen thousand tons.”
“Gosh! I’d like to see that place. I suppose you’ll be going to work
with him when you get through here.”
“Not exactly. I shall go through college first, of course.”
“Oh! Well, say, honest injun, Foster, do you think a college course
cuts any ice with a fellow? The old man says I can go to a college—if

60. I can get in,—but I don’t know. I wouldn’t get through until I was
twenty-two or twenty-three, and seems to me that’s wasting a lot of
time. What do you think?”
“Depends, I suppose, on—on the individual case. If you feel that
you want to get to work in the chewing-gum factory and can’t afford
to go through college——”
“Where do you get that chewing-gum factory stuff?” asked Joe.
“Why, I thought you said your father made spruce gum.”
“No, the Lord makes it. The old man gathers it and sells it. Spruce
gum is the resin of spruce trees, kiddo.”
“Oh,” said Myron vaguely. “Well, I dare say he will need you to
help him gather it. In your case, Dobbins, going through college
might be wasting time.”
Joe laughed.
“What’s the joke?” asked the other suspiciously.
“Well, I was having what you call a mind picture of the old man
and me picking that gum. Know how many tons of the stuff he
handles in a year? Nearly a hundred and thirty: about two hundred
and fifty thousand pounds! He has over a hundred pickers employed,
and buys a lot from fellows who pick on their own hook.”
“Oh!” said Myron. “Well, how was I to know? You distinctly said
the Lord made it and your father gathered it, didn’t you?”
“That’s right; my error, kiddo——”
“Kindly cut out that——”
“Sorry; I forgot. Well, I don’t have to worry about college just yet,
do I? We’ll see first if I can stick here long enough to get my time! I
wouldn’t mind playing football on a good college team, though:
Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth or one of those big ’uns.”
“Probably not,” replied Myron drily. “Nobody would. I wouldn’t
myself.” Somehow he managed to convey the impression that in his

61. case such a thing was not only possible but probable, but that for
Joe to set his hopes so high was absurd. Joe’s greenish-grey eyes
flickered once, but he made no comment. Instead:
“You played much?” he asked.
“Quite a bit,” answered the other carelessly. “I captained the Port
Foster High team last fall.”
“Must have then! Where’d you play?”
“Position? Left half. End the year before that. What do you play?”
“Me? Oh, most anything in the line. I’m not fussy. Played tackle
most of last year. Like to play guard better, though. Football’s a great
game, isn’t it?”
“Not bad,” acknowledged Myron. “By the way, who was the fellow
you were so thick with at supper tonight?”
“Him? Name’s Keith or something. Played on last year’s team and
was coaching the linemen today. Nice guy. Bet he can play, too.”
“Looked rather light to me,” commented Myron.
“Think so? Maybe. Anyway, he knows how to drill the line, or I’m a
Dutchman. What time is it? I’m getting sleepy. You weren’t over at
the party, were you?”
“No, it didn’t interest me. As I’m not going to stay, why be bored
by that sort of thing?”
“Hm,” said Joe.
“What’s ‘Hm’ mean?”
“Nothing. Just thinking. Say, what’s your objection to this place,
Foster? If it’s just me, why, say, I’ll get out gladly. Fellow I met
tonight told me he has a dandy room in the village. I’m not fussy
about living on the campus.”
“Oh, it isn’t just that,” said Myron. “I don’t like the—the
atmosphere here.”

62. “Well, it is sort of close tonight, but I guess it would be anywhere
in this part of the country. September’s likely to——”
“I wasn’t referring to the air,” corrected the other loftily. “I used
the word in its other sense.”
“Didn’t know it had another sense,” said Joe cheerfully. “All right.
But I was just thinking that if you had to have this place to yourself I
could beat it, and no hard feelings.”
“They’d stick some one else in here, I guess. Besides, I wouldn’t
want to put you out. After all, you’ve got as much right here as I
have, I suppose.” That statement had a rather dubious sound,
however, and again Joe’s eyes flickered and the very ghost of a smile
hovered for an instant about the corners of his wide mouth.
“Yeah, but the next chap might be more your style, Foster. I’m
sort of rough-and-ready, I guess. Don’t run much to etiquette and
wouldn’t know what to do in one of those silk collars you wear. I
should think they’d make your neck awfully warm.” And Joe ran a
finger around inside his own very low linen collar apprehensively.
“I hope I haven’t said anything to make you think that I—that you
——”
“Oh, no, you haven’t said anything: at least, not much: but I can
see that I’d be persona non compos, or whatever the word is,
around these diggings. You think it over and let me know. I guess
that Hoyt guy wouldn’t mind if I got a room outside somewhere.
Well, here’s where I hit the hay.”
“There’s no sense in my thinking it over,” answered Myron a bit
querulously, “as I tell you I’m not going to stay here.”
“Don’t think there’s any doubt about it, eh?”
“Certainly not!”
“All right. I was only thinking that if you did stay——”
“I haven’t the least intention of staying. I wish you’d get that fixed
in your mind, Dobbins.”

63. “Sure! I’ll go to sleep and dream about it!”
If Myron dreamed of anything he had no recollection of having
done so in the morning. He awoke in a far more cheerful frame of
mind to find a cool and fragrant breeze flapping the curtain and a
patch of golden sunlight lying across his bed. He had slept like a log.
A glance at the neighbouring bed showed that Joe Dobbins was up,
although Myron’s watch proved the time to be still short of seven-
thirty. From across the campus a bell was ringing loudly. It was
doubtless that sound that had awakened him. Usually he turned over
and had a nap before getting up, but this morning, although he
buried his head in the pillow again, sleep didn’t return to him.
Perhaps it was just as well, he reflected, for that telegram from his
father ought to be along soon, and he would probably have a busy
morning getting away. So far he had not considered what he would
do in case they couldn’t take him at Kenwood. He rather hoped they
could, though. It would be a big satisfaction, and an amusing one,
too, to play on the Kenwood eleven and show these unappreciative
fellows at Parkinson what they had missed! Myron could play football
and knew it, and knew as well that in losing his services Parkinson
was losing something worth while. It would be fun to say carelessly
to some Parkinson fellow after he had aided Kenwood to beat her
rival: “Yes, I did think of going to your school: in fact, I actually
spent a night there: but they treated me rather rotten and I got out.
They promised me a room to myself, you know, and then tried to
make me go in with another chap. It was rather coarse work, and I
told them so before I left.” Whereupon the Parkinson boy would tell
it around and there’d be regrets galore.
That was a pleasing dream, and under the exciting influence of it
Myron jumped out of bed and sought a bath. While he was shivering
in the icy water he recalled the fact that there was such a thing as
chapel or morning prayers or something, and he wondered if he was
under obligations to attend that ceremony. He decided the question
in the negative and, returning to his room, dressed leisurely,
selecting a grey tie with a yellow figure and a yellow handkerchief
with a narrow grey border. The bell had long since ceased its

64. clamour and peace had settled over the yard. Dressed, he went
downstairs. In the corridor, close by the entrance, was a notice
board and a letter rack. He didn’t bother to peruse the few notices
nor would he have paid any attention to the rack had his fleeting
glance not been arrested by the sight of a buff envelope. He stopped
and looked more closely. It was a telegram and, yes, it was
addressed to Myron W. Foster, Parkinson School, Warne, Mass. In
blue pencil was “S 17.”
At last! He took it to the entrance and paused on the top step in
the sunlight and tore off an end of the envelope very carefully. Then
he withdrew the folded sheet of buff paper and with a satisfied smile
began to read it. But the smile vanished in the next instant and,
although he read the message through a second and even a third
time, he could not make the sense of it correspond with his
expectation.
“Your mother and I very sorry about your room letter
from school arrived after your departure explaining
satisfactorily Think you had better stay there however for
the present and arrange for single suite when same can
be had Love from us both Father.”

65. CHAPTER V
ON THE GRIDIRON
Myron’s connection with Parkinson School began inauspiciously.
After an eleventh-hour effort to get his studies scheduled, and the
discovery that he was required to take two courses he didn’t want to
take and to omit one that he did, a summons came to him to visit
the Office. There Mr. Morgan, assistant to the Principal, reminded
him that attendance at chapel was compulsory and then announced
that there appeared to be some doubt that he could enter the
second class owing to the fact that his Latin was not up to the
requirements. That was disheartening, for Myron had coached on
Latin during the summer and been pronounced fit for the third-year
class at Parkinson or any other preparatory school. Yesterday he
would have received the announcement with unconcern, but today,
since the arrival of that disappointing telegram, he found cause in it
for real alarm. At well past seventeen one doesn’t like to be put in
with fellows who average sixteen, Myron held. As a matter of fact,
the third class contained more students of his age than it did of
fellows younger, and he would not have found himself out of place
there. But he didn’t know that, and as a result he pleaded very hard
to be allowed to enter the class above. In the end, after much
hesitation, and with no very good grace, Mr. Morgan consented.
“But you’ll have to do some hard work, Foster, if you’re to stay
there. Unless you’re willing to, I’d advise you to go into the third.”
“I’ll work, sir. Maybe I could coach in Latin.”
“Yes, you could do that. If you like, I’ll give you the address of a
fellow who does a good deal of tutoring and gets excellent results.”
He wrote the address on a slip and Myron tucked it in his pocket.

66. “Well, that’s all, I think. I hope you will get on nicely, Foster. Let me
see, your adviser is——”
“Mr. Cooper, sir.”
“Good. Don’t hesitate to consult him. He’s a fine man and you’ll
like him immensely, I think. Good morning.”
Myron had a spare hour after dinner and spent it unpacking.
When some of his things had been distributed around the study the
place really looked fairly homelike and attractive, and he began to
look forward to a year at Parkinson with more equanimity. If only he
wasn’t handicapped with his Latin, he thought, things wouldn’t be so
bad. With Dobbins out of the way and the study and bedroom to
himself, he guessed he could get along fairly comfortably. There was
a half-hour of physics at three, and after that he was through for the
day. He returned to Sohmer and changed into his football togs,
which, unlike the nondescript garments worn by Joe Dobbins, were
fairly new and of the best materials. When he had examined himself
critically and appreciatively in the glass he sauntered downstairs,
skirted the end of the gymnasium building and had his first real look
at the playfield.
Nearly twelve acres of still green turf stretched before him, his
view uninterrupted save by the grandstand directly before him. To
his left were the tennis courts, both clay and grass, and about them
white-clad figures darted. Nearer at hand, the blue-grey running
track inclosed the first team gridiron. Beyond that two more pairs of
goal-posts met his sight, and then the baseball diamonds filled the
balance of the field. Track and gridirons and diamonds were already
occupied, and the nearer grandstand held a handful of boys who had
gathered in the warm sunlight to watch the activities. Football
practice was called for three-thirty, and it was nearly four when
Myron reached the field. He was in no hurry to join the panting and
perspiring squads that trotted around over the turf, and so he
perched himself on one of the lower seats of the stand and looked
the situation over.

67. Not far away the manager and assistant manager, both earnest-
looking youths, talked to a stout man in a faded brown sweater who
later turned out to be the trainer, Billy Goode. Myron wondered
where the coach might be, but he couldn’t find any one who much
resembled his idea of what that gentleman should look like.
However, with more than a hundred fellows at work out there it was
easy enough to overlook him. A squad of advanced players trotted
near, going through elementary signal work. Rather to Myron’s
surprise, Joe Dobbins was amongst them, sandwiched between two
capable-looking youths in togs quite as disreputable as his. Joe was
acting as right guard, it seemed. Myron’s opinion of Joe as a football
player went up a peg, for it was fairly evident that this squad was
made up of last-year fellows and probably contained the nucleus of
what in a few days would be known as the first squad. About this
time Myron became aware that some of the fellows about him on
the grandstand were viewing him curiously. Doubtless they were
wondering why, being in playing togs, he didn’t get down there and
go to work. Of course it was none of their business, but maybe it
was time he found the coach and reported.
He made inquiry of the manager, a slim, very alert youth armed
with a formidable notebook in which he was making entries when
Myron approached. “Mr. Driscoll? He’s around here somewhere.” The
manager, whose name was Farnsworth, looked frowningly about the
field. “Yes, there he is down there, the man with the blue sweater.
Are you just reporting for practice?”
“Yes,” answered Myron. “I wasn’t out yesterday.”
“What’s the name?” asked Farnsworth briskly.
“Foster.”
“Foster?” The manager fluttered the leaves of the big notebook
until he found the F’s. Then: “What are the initials, Foster?”
“M. W.”
“Class?”

68. “Third.”
“Ever played before?”
“Naturally.” Farnsworth shot a quick glance.
“Where?” he asked.
“Port Foster High School Team, Port Foster, Delaware. I played two
years there.”
“Line or backfield?”
“Backfield: before that at end.”
“Had your physical exam yet?”
“No, I didn’t know about it. Where do I take it?”
“See Mr. Tasser, in the gym. Any time between ten and twelve and
four and six. Better do it today. Rules are rather strict, Foster. All
right. Report to Cummins. He’s handling the new men. You’ll find
him down there by the east goal: ask any one.”
“I though I’d tell the coach——”
“Not necessary. Cummins’ll look after you.”
Myron shrugged mentally and turned his steps toward the
indicated location. “One of those smart Alecks,” he thought. “Thinks
he’s the whole push. All right, it’s not my business to tell him his. If
they want me to waste my time with the beginners it’s their funeral.”
Cummins wasn’t difficult to find. Myron heard his bark long before
he reached him. Nearly thirty youths, most of them youngsters of
fourteen and fifteen, although here and there an older boy was to be
noticed, were learning to handle the ball. Cummins appeared to be
about eighteen, a heavily-built chap with a shock of reddish-brown
hair and a round face liberally spattered with freckles. Just now the
face was scowling ferociously and Cummins was sneering stridently
at his charges. Myron took an instant dislike to Mr. Charles Cummins,
and, or so it appeared, Mr. Charles Cummins took an equal dislike to
Myron.

69. “Well, well, well, WELL!!” barked Cummins as Myron came up.
“What do you fellows think this is? A lawn party or a sewing circle or
what? Maybe you’re waiting for the ice-cream to be served? Listen
just one minute, will you? Stop that ball, you long-legged fellow!
Now then, let’s understand each other. This is football practice. Get
that? The idea is to learn to hold that ball without having it get away
from you, and to catch it and to pass it. We aren’t doing aesthetic
dancing or—or acting in a pageant. This is work, W-O-R-K, work!
Any of you who are out here just to get the air or to tan your necks
can quit right now. I’m here to show you hopeless ninnies how to
handle a football, and I propose to do it if it takes from now to
Christmas, and the sooner you put your minds on what you’re doing
and try a little, the sooner you’ll get through. Now start that ball
around again and, for the love of limes, remember some of the
things I’ve told you. When you catch it, grab it with both hands and
hug it. It isn’t an egg. It won’t break. That’s the idea, Judson, or
whatever your name is. Go ahead, go ahead! Get some ginger into
it! Pass it along! Don’t go to sleep. I said hug it, not fondle it,
Whittier! When you—Hello, more trouble?”
“The manager fellow told me to report to you,” said Myron as
Cummins turned a baleful gaze on him.
“Oh, the ‘manager fellow’ told you that, did he? What does the
‘coach fellow’ say?”
“I haven’t seen the coach yet,” answered Myron coldly.
“Haven’t you? Why, say, maybe you won’t like him! Don’t you
think you ought to look him over first? It would be fierce if you didn’t
happen to approve of him. What’s your name?”
“Foster.”
“All right, Foster, you push right in there and show me how you
catch a football. Something tells me that my troubles are all over
now that you’ve joined this aggregation of stars!”
Myron suppressed the angry retort that sprang to his lips and took
his place in the big circle. “Bounder!” he muttered as he did so. The

70. boy next to him on the left heard and snickered, and Cummins
guessed the reason. Unseen of Myron, he grinned. “When you can
get ’em mad,” he said to himself, “there’s hope for ’em.”
When the ball was passed to Myron he caught it deftly, bending
his body over it, and then promptly sped it on to the youth who had
snickered. The latter was unaccustomed to such speed and was not
ready, and the ball bounded away. He lumbered after it and scooped
it up, returning to his place with an accusing scowl for Myron.
“Think you’re smart, I suppose,” he grumbled.
“Sorry,” said Myron, “but you ought to be ready for it.”
“Is that so? Well——”
“Cut out that talking!” barked Cummins. “Speed it up, fellows!”
There was ten minutes more of the dreary work, during which
Myron mechanically received the pigskin and sent it on to the next in
the circle without a hitch. If he expected to win commendation from
Cummins, however, he was disappointed. Cummins was eloquent
with criticism, but never once did he utter a word of approval. At
last:
“That’ll do for that, fellows,” he called. “You may rest a minute.
Maybe some of you’ll get your strength back.” He approached Myron
with an accusing scowl. “What are you doing in this bunch?” he
demanded. “You don’t belong here.”
“I was sent here,” replied Myron warmly.
“Didn’t you have sense enough to tell Farnsworth you weren’t a
greenie? Think I’ve got nothing to do but waste my time?”
“Well, you’re not the only one who’s doing it, are you? What about
my time?”
“That’s your affair. I didn’t want you, believe me! You ought to
have told him you knew something about a football. He’s no mind-
reader, you know.”

71. “I told him I’d played two years on a high school team——”
“Oh! That explains it. You high school ginks usually don’t know
enough football to make the first year team. Guess Farnsworth
thought you were like the run of ’em.”
“Maybe,” replied Myron indifferently, “but it’s not my business to
teach you fellows how to run your affairs.”
“Hard luck for us, isn’t it? Well, say, Mr. ’Igh and ’Aughty, you trek
across there and tell Farnsworth I say you’re graduated from my
bunch. Get it? Tell him to put you somewhere else, and tell him I
don’t care where it is!”
“Thanks,” returned Myron with deep sarcasm. “I’m horribly sorry
to leave you, though. It’s a real pleasure working under such a
gentlemanly instructor, Mr. Cummins.”
Cummins watched him for a long moment with his mouth open.
“Well, what do you know about that?” he murmured at last. “The
cheeky beggar!” Then he grinned again and, surprising amused and
delighted expressions on the countenances of those of his squad
who had been near enough to overhear the conversation, quickly
changed the grin for a scowl. “All right now!” he barked. “Line up
along there. Who’s got the ball? Let’s see what you pin-heads know
about starting.”
Myron’s message to Farnsworth resulted in his finishing the
practice with a group of fellows whose education had progressed
beyond the rudimentary stage. Toward the last of the period he was
put to catching punts with a half-dozen other backfield candidates
and performed to his own satisfaction at least. There was no
scrimmage today, nor was there any for several days following, and
at five o’clock Coach Driscoll sent them off to the showers. Later
Myron went upstairs and found the physical director and underwent
his examination, obtaining a chart filled with perplexing lines and
puzzling figures and official permission to engage in “any form of
athletics approved by the Committee.” After which he returned
rather wearily to Number 17 Sohmer and Joe Dobbins.

73. CHAPTER VI
“A. T. MERRIMAN”
The next forenoon Myron set off in a spare hour to find the tutor
whose address Mr. Morgan had given him. If he had cherished the
notion of possibly getting along without coaching in Latin his
experiences that morning had banished it. Mr. Addicks, or Old Addie,
as he was called, was a likable sort and popular with the students,
but he was capable of a gentle sarcasm that was horribly effective
with any one whose skin was less thick than that of a rhinoceros,
and an hour or so ago he had caused Myron to heartily wish himself
small enough to creep into a floor crack and pull some dust over
him! No use talking, Myron told himself as he set forth for Mill
Street, he’d have to find this chap and get right to work. He wouldn’t
face that horrible Addicks again until he had put in a solid week of
being tutored. It would get him in bad at the Office, maybe, if the
instructor called on him very often in that week, for he would just
say “Not prepared,” but anything was to be preferred to standing up
there like a jay and letting Addicks make fun of him!
When he reached the head of School Street he pulled the slip of
paper again from his pocket and made sure of the address. “A. T.
Merriman, 109 Mill Street,” was what was written there. He asked his
way at the next corner and was directed across the railroad. “Mill
Street runs at right angles to the track,” said the citizen who was
directing him. “You’ll see a granite building after you pass the
crossing. That’s Whitwell’s Mill. The street you want runs along the
farther side of it.” Myron thanked him and went on down School
Street. The obliging citizen gazed after him in mingled surprise and
admiration.

74. “Well, he’s certainly a dressy boy,” he murmured. “Must be Old
John W. Croesus’s son!”
Mill Street wasn’t far and 109 was soon found, but the character
of the district wasn’t at all to Myron’s liking. Ragged and dirty
children overflowed the sidewalks and played in the cobbled
roadway, slatternly women gossiped from open windows, dejected-
looking men lounged at the corners, stray cats rummaged the
gutters. The houses, frame structures whose dingy clapboards were
flush with the street, had apparently seen far better days. Now dust
and grime lay thick on them and many a window was wanting a
pane of glass. The prospect of penetrating to such a place every day
was revolting, and, having found the numerals “109” above a
sagging porch, Myron was strongly inclined to turn back. But he
didn’t, and a tinkle that followed his pull at the rusty knob beside the
door brought a stout and frowsy woman who wiped her hands on
her apron as she pulled the portal open.
“Mr. Merriman?” inquired Myron.
“I don’t know is he in, sir. One flight up and you’ll see his name on
the door. If you come again, sir, just you step right in. The door ain’t
never locked in the daytime.”
Myron mounted a creaky stairway guiltless of carpet and found
himself in a narrow hall from which four doors opened. In spite of
dinginess and want of repairs, the interior of 109 was, he had to
acknowledge, astonishingly clean. One of the doors did present a
card to the inquiring gaze, but in the gloom its inscription was not
decipherable and so Myron chanced it and knocked. A voice
answered from beyond the portal and nearly simultaneously a dog
barked sharply. Myron entered.
The room was large and well lighted from two sides. It was also
particularly devoid of furniture, or so it looked to the visitor. A large
deal table strewn with papers and piled with books stood near the
centre of the apartment where the cross light from the two pairs of
windows fell on it. The floor was carpetless, but two scraps of straw

75. matting saved it from utter bareness. There was a bench under the
windows on one side and a flattened cushion and two faded pillows
adorned it. What seemed to Myron the narrowest bed in the whole
wide world, an unlovely thing of black iron rails, was pushed into a
corner, and beside it was a box from which overflowed a grey
blanket. Three chairs, one a decrepit armchair from whose leather
covering the horsehair stuffing protruded in many places, stood
about. There was also a bureau and a washstand. On the end of the
former stood a small gas-stove and various pans and cooking
utensils. Books, mostly sober-sided, dry-looking volumes, lay
everywhere, on table, bureau, window-seat, chair and even on the
floor. Between the several articles of furniture lay broad and arid
expanses of unpainted flooring.
At first glance the room appeared to be inhabited only by a tall,
thin but prepossessing youth of perhaps twenty years and a Scottish
terrier whose age was a matter for conjecture since her countenance
was fairly well hidden by sandy hair. The youth was seated at the
deal table and the terrier was halfway between box and door,
growling inquiringly at the intruder. At Myron’s entry Merriman tilted
back in his chair, thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and said
“Good morning” in a deep, pleasant voice. Then he added mildly:
“Shut up, Tess, or I’ll murder you.” The terrier gave a last growl and
retired to the box. As she settled down in it a series of astonishing
squeaks emerged. Myron looked across startledly and Merriman
laughed.
“Puppies,” he explained. “Six of them. That’s why she’s so
ferocious. Seems to think every one who comes upstairs is a
kidnapper. I tell her the silly things are too ugly to tempt any one,
but she doesn’t believe me.”
“Will she let me see them?” asked Myron eagerly.
“Oh, yes.” Merriman drew his long length from the chair and led
the way to the box. “Now then, old lady, pile out of here and let the
gentleman have a look at your ugly ducklings.”

76. The terrier made no objection to being removed, but the puppies
cried dismally at the parting. Myron chuckled. “Funny things!” he
exclaimed. “Why, they haven’t got their eyes open yet!”
“No, they’re only six days old. How’s this one for a butter-ball?
Isn’t he a fat rascal? All right, Tess, we won’t hurt them. I vouch for
the gentleman. He never stole a puppy in all his innocent young life.”
“I never did,” Myron corroborated, “but I’d like to start right now!”
“Like dogs, eh?” asked the host.
“Yes, indeed. Funny thing is, though, that I’ve never owned one.”
“No? How does that happen?”
“I don’t know. My mother thinks they’re rather a nuisance around
the house. Still, I dare say she’d have let me kept one if I’d insisted.
I don’t suppose you—you’d care to sell one of those?”
“Oh, yes, I would. I’ll have to either sell them or give them: unless
I send them off to the happy hunting ground.”
“Really? How much would they be?”
“The lot?” asked Merriman, a twinkle in his eye.
“Gee, no! One!”
“Five dollars. Tess is good stock, and the father is a thoroughbred
belonging to Terrill, the stableman on Centre Street. Got a place to
keep him?”
“I’d forgot about that,” owned Myron. “I’m afraid not. They
wouldn’t let me have him in Sohmer, would they?”
“Scarcely!” laughed the other. “All right, old lady, back you go. Sit
down—ah—What’s the name, please?”
“Foster. Mr. Morgan gave me your address. I want some tutoring
in Latin, and he said he thought you could take me on.”
“Possibly. Just dump those books on the seat there. What hours
do you have free, Foster?”

77. “This hour in the morning and any time in the evening.”
“What about afternoon?”
“I’m trying for the football team and that doesn’t leave me much
time afternoons. Still, I guess we’re usually through by five.”
Merriman shook his head. “I’d rather not waste my time and
yours, Foster. Football practice doesn’t leave a fellow in very good
trim for tutoring. Better say the evening, I guess. How would seven
to nine do?”
“Two hours?” asked Myron startledly.
“Yes, you can’t accomplish much in less. I can’t, anyhow.”
“Very well. Seven to nine. Shall I come here or——”
“I’ll come to you. What’s the number in Sohmer? Seventeen? All
right. We’ll begin tomorrow. My terms are a dollar an hour. You pay
for the time it takes me to get to you, usually about ten minutes.
Can you arrange with your room-mate to let us have the place to
ourselves at that time?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Myron confidently.
“Good. Now pull your chair over here, please, and we’ll see what
the job is.”
Merriman had a lean face from which two dark brown eyes looked
keenly forth. His mouth was broad and his nose straight and long. A
high forehead, a deep upper lip and a firmly pointed chin added to
the general effect of length. You couldn’t have called him handsome,
by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something
attractive in his homeliness. Perhaps it was the expression of the
eyes or perhaps the smile that hovered continuously about the wide
mouth. He dressed, Myron reflected, as wretchedly as Joe Dobbins:
more wretchedly, in fact, for Joe’s clothes were at least new and
good of their kind, whereas Merriman’s things were old, frayed, ill-
fitting. His trousers, which bagged so at the knees that they made
Merriman look crooked, had been a positive shock to the visitor. But

78. in spite of attire and surroundings, Myron liked this new
acquaintance. Above all, he liked his voice. It was deep without
being gruff and had a kind of—of pleasant kindliness in it, he
thought. After all, it was no fault to be poor if you couldn’t help it,
he supposed; and he had known fellows back home—not intimately,
of course, but well enough to talk to—who, while poor, were really
splendid chaps.
Presently Merriman finished his questions and finished jotting
down little lines and twirls and pot-hooks on a scrap of paper. Myron
rather wished he knew shorthand too. It looked ridiculously easy the
way Merriman did it. “All right, thanks,” said the latter as he laid his
pencil down. “I think I know what we’ve got ahead of us. Frankly, I
don’t see how they let you into the third with so little Latin, Foster.
But we’ll correct that. How are you at learning, by the way? Does it
come easy or do you have to grind hard?”
“Why, I think I learn things fairly easily,” replied Myron doubtfully.
“Of course, Latin looks hard to me because I’ve never had much of
it, but I think—I hope you won’t find me too stupid.” Afterwards,
recalling the visit, it struck him as odd that he should have said that.
Usually he didn’t trouble greatly about whether folks found him one
way or another. He was Myron Foster, take him or leave him!
“I shan’t,” answered Merriman. “I’ve had all sorts and I always
manage to get results.”
“Do you do much tutoring?” Myron asked.
“A good deal. Not so much now as later. Spring’s my busy time.”
“I shouldn’t think you’d have time for your own studies.”
“I’m not taking much this year. Only four courses. I could have
finished last spring, but I wasn’t quite ready for college then. By the
way, if you hear of any one wanting a nice puppy I wish you’d send
them to me. I can’t keep all that litter and I’d hate to kill the poor
little tykes.”

79. “I will,” Myron assured him. “And—and I’m not sure I shan’t buy
one myself. I suppose I could find some one to keep him for me.”
“I think so. Well, good morning. Say good-bye to the gentleman,
Tess.”
The terrier barked twice as Myron closed the door behind him.

80. CHAPTER VII
WITH THE AWKWARD SQUAD
“Sure! That’s all right,” said Joe Dobbins. “If I want to dig I can
trot over to the library or somewhere. Seven to nine, you said?”
“Yes, but it won’t be for very long, I guess: maybe only a couple
of weeks. Merriman seemed an awfully clever sort of a chap.”
“Must be if he can teach Latin! I never did see the good of that
stuff, anyway.” Joe fluttered the pages of the book he had been
studying. After a moment he said: “Say, Foster, you’re a sort of
sartorial authority—how’s that for language, eh?—and you know
what’s what in the line of clothes, I guess. Now I wish you’d tell me
honestly if there’s anything wrong with the things I wear. They look
all right to me, but I notice two or three of the fellows sort of piping
’em off like they were wondering about ’em. What’s wrong with the
duds?” And Joe glanced over the grey suit, with the large green and
blue threads running through it, that he was wearing.
“Why, they——” But Myron paused. Three days before he would
not have hesitated to render a frank opinion of the clothes; would
have welcomed the opportunity, in fact: but this afternoon he found
that he didn’t want to hurt Joe’s feelings.
“Spit it out, kiddo—I mean Foster! Let’s know the worst.”
“Well, I suppose they’re good material and well made, Dobbins,
but the fact is they—they’re different, if you see what I mean.”
“I don’t. What do you mean, just? Style all wrong by Fifth Avenue
standards?”
“By any standard,” replied Myron firmly. “They look ready-made.”

81. “But, gee, they are ready-made! I never had a suit made to order
in my life. Why should I? I’m not hump-backed or—or got one leg
longer than the other!”
“Some ready-made clothes don’t look it, though,” explained
Myron. “Yours do. Did you get them in Portland?”
“Sure. We’ve got some dandy stores in Portland.”
“Did that suit come from the best one?” asked Myron drily.
“N-no, it didn’t, to tell the hideous truth.” Joe chuckled. “You see,
the old man has a friend who runs a store and we’ve both got sort of
used to dealing with this guy. He’s a pretty square sort, too; a
Canuck. Peter Lafavour’s his name. But I guess maybe Peter doesn’t
know so much about style as he makes out to, eh? I always sort of
liked these duds, though: they’re sort of—er—snappy, eh?”
Myron smiled. “They’re too snappy, Dobbins. That’s one out with
them. Then they don’t fit anywhere. And they look cheap and badly
cut.”
“Aside from that they’re all right, though?” asked Joe hopefully.
“Perhaps, although gentlemen aren’t wearing pockets put on at an
angle or cuffs on the sleeves.”
“And Peter swore that this suit was right as rain!” sighed Joe.
“Ain’t he the swine? How about my other one?”
“Well, it’s better cut and hasn’t so many queer folderols,”
answered Myron, “but it looks a good deal like a grain-sack when
you get it on, old man.”
“What do you know about that!” Joe shook his head dismally, but
Myron caught the irrepressible twinkle in his room-mate’s eyes.
“Guess I’ll have to dig down in the old sock and buy me a new
outfit,” he continued. “I suppose those tony-looking duds you wear
were made to order, eh? Think your tailor could make me a suit if I
wrote and told him what size collar I wear?”

82. “I’m afraid not, but I saw a tailor shop in the village here today
that looked pretty good. Why not try there?”
“Blamed if I don’t, kid—Foster! I don’t suppose you’d want to go
along with me and see that I get what’s right? I’d hate to find I had
too many buttons on my vest—I mean waistcoat—when the things
were done!”
“I don’t mind,” answered Myron after an imperceptible moment of
hesitation, “although you really won’t need me if the chap knows his
business. No first-class tailor will turn you out anything that isn’t
correct.”
“Yeah, but—well, I’d feel easier in my mind if I had you along.
Maybe tomorrow, eh? Somehow these duds I’ve got on don’t make
such a hit with me as they did! Coming over to the gym? It’s mighty
near time for practice.”
“In a minute,” answered Myron carelessly. “You run along.” Then
he reflected that if he was to go with Joe to the tailor’s the next day
he might just as well start in now and get used to being seen with
him. “Guess I’m ready, though,” he corrected. “Come on.”
The distance from Sohmer to the gym was only a matter of yards,
and it wasn’t until the two reached the entrance of the latter building
that they encountered any one. Then, or so Myron imagined, the
three fellows who followed them through the big oak door looked
curiously from Joe’s astounding attire to his own perfectly correct
grey flannels. He was glad when the twilight of the corridor was
reached, and all the way down the stairs to the locker-room below
he was careful to avoid all suggestions of intimacy with Joe.
Football was still in the first rather chaotic phase. An unusually
large number of candidates had reported this fall, and, while in
theory it was a fine thing to have so much material to select from, in
reality it increased the work to be done tremendously. On the second
day of school one hundred and twelve boys of all sizes and ages and
all degrees of inexperience were on hand, and coach, captain and
trainer viewed the gathering helplessly. Today a handful of the

83. original number had dropped out of their own accord, but there
were still nearly a hundred left, and when Myron, having changed to
his togs, followed the dribble of late arrivals to the field he wondered
what on earth would be done with them all. Perhaps Coach Driscoll
was wondering the same thing, for there was a perplexed frown on
his face as he talked with Billy Goode and contemplatively trickled a
football from one hand to the other.
Myron rather liked the looks of Mr. Driscoll. So far he had not even
spoken to the coach and doubted if the latter so much as knew of
his existence, but there was something in the coach’s face and voice
and quick, decisive movements that told Myron that he knew his
business. “Tod” Driscoll was about thirty, perhaps a year or two
more, and had coached at Parkinson for several seasons. He was a
Parkinson graduate, but his football reputation had been made at
Yale. He was immensely popular with the students, although he
made no effort to gain popularity and was the strictest kind of a
disciplinarian. Today, while Myron, pausing at the edge of the
crowded gridiron a few yards distant, viewed him and speculated
about him, the coach showed rather less decision than usual, for
twice he gave instructions, once to Billy and once to the manager,
and each time changed his mind.
“We’ve got to find more instructors,” Myron heard him say a trifle
impatiently. “How about you, Ken? Know enough football to take a
bunch of those beginners over to the second team gridiron?”
“I’m afraid not, Coach,” answered Kenneth Farnsworth.
“You don’t need to know much. What do you say, Billy? Who is
there? I’ve got most of the veterans at work already, and there isn’t
one of them that shouldn’t be learning instead of teaching.”
Myron didn’t hear the trainer’s reply, for at that moment a well-
built, light-haired, somewhat harassed youth of apparently nineteen
strode up to the group. “Look here, Coach,” he began before he was
well within talking distance, “what about the backs? We’ve got to
have some get-together work before Saturday’s game, haven’t we?

84. Cater says you’ve got him in charge of a kindergarten class, Brown’s
sewed up the same way, Garrison hasn’t shown up——”
“I know, Cap. But what are we going to do with this raft of talent?
Some one’s got to take hold of them, and I can’t take more than
twenty. Cummins is about ready to go on strike——”
“It is a mess, isn’t it?” Captain Mellen turned and viewed the
scene puzzledly. “The worst of it is that there probably aren’t a
dozen in the whole lot worth troubling with.”
“True, but we’ve got to find the dozen,” answered Mr. Driscoll. “We
can’t afford to miss any bets this year, Cap. We’ll call the first-choice
backs together at four. That’ll give us half an hour for kindergarten
stuff. But I want a couple more fellows to take hold. Who are they?”
“Search me! Why not double them up, sir?”
“They’ve been doubled up—or pretty nearly. Cummins has about
thirty to look after and Cater twenty-four or five. That’s too many.
Sixteen’s enough for a squad. How about Garrison?”
“He isn’t here. I don’t know what——”
“He’s cut,” interposed Farnsworth. “Got a conference at four.”
“Conference! Gee, why couldn’t he have that some other time?”
asked Jud Mellen.
“Time to start, sir,” said Farnsworth, looking at his watch.
“All right, let’s get at it. But I wish I could think—Who’s that fellow
there, Mellen?” Mr. Driscoll dropped his voice. Mellen turned and
looked at Myron and shook his head.
“I don’t know him, Coach. Who is he, Ken?”
“I think”—Farnsworth turned the pages of his book until he had
found the F’s—“I think his name is Forrest. No, Foster. High school
fellow. Two years playing. Passed a corking physical exam.”
“Foster!”

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