The dictionary defines imagination as, the ability to create images not present to the sensory system and is one of evolution’s highest achievements. This capacity to create inner images is the foundation of all higher learning, belief systems, social orders, art, philosophy, and our so called spiritual unfoldment. All allow us to transform the outer according to an inner image. This most important capacity is inseparable from language, symbols and metaphors. And its development is nurtured by the use of symbols and metaphors not concrete images found on television and computers.

It was Einstein who said that imagination was more important than knowledge.  He understood that our greatest discoveries and most profound works of art have come to us through imagination and play.  Far from being idle day dreaming, the fantasies of childhood, build the foundation for all higher learning.  We are about to explore Imagination and Play with Joseph Chilton Pearce.  He is the author of numerous books including Crack in the Cosmic Egg, his national best seller The Magical Child and most recently, Evolution’s End.  Joe considers play to be one of nature’s highest achievements.  Play it the freedom and safety to move beyond the limitations we have accepted for ourselves and discover and develop something new about ourselves.  Please join Joseph Chilton Pearce, and a group of parents, educators and health care professionals as they examine Imagination and Play.

Joe Pearce
The dictionary defines imagination as, the ability to create images not present to the sensory system.  Literally.  That's right there in the dictionary.  What does that mean?  All right, let's go back to that trying brain again.  Here's that sensory system bringing in its messages about the physical world.  Here's the emotional cognitive system, and of course, it sends it on up to the great system up here.

Now, if the image is not presented through the physical world process through our senses, the image can be created up here, see.  Richard Restock was the medical doctor's name, it slipped me a while ago, Richard Restock said, "You can come in higher up the evolutionary stream and the whole image process is there.  If it's not present to the eyes here, it's present to the inner eyes of the mind, and that's the great capacity of imagination". If we knew the critical nature of imagination, how it's the very core, the very foundation of all higher stages of learning and intellectual life, we would certainly look at the child differently.

Let's try to approach this from, starting back,...I would say, first of all that play is the major intelligence of the first seven years and even the first 11 years of life.  Again, we'll put up our birth, age one, age four, seven and 11, and we will go on and put 15 for now, as our major developmental stages, regardless of whether you agree with all the Piaget content of those stages, we do know those stages are biologically unfolding at those times.

Then, let's go back and look at the effect on the brain's sensory motor body system.  From the seventh month in utero, what happens?  From the seventh month in utero, before a child is born, every time the mother uses a word, each phoning name of the word, and we are talking about vibrations, a word is just a vibration of sound, each vibration, called a phoning, brings about what, a muscular response in the infant.  

So, from the very beginning, there is this intimate connection between body, body movement, the brain, and its word structure, and its formation of word structures.  By the time the child is born in the world, this is myelinated; it's locked in as a permanent thing.  We then have a cessation of real verbal action for quite a while.   

In the first few months, what we call the in arms period, the eyes have it.  Things aren't auditory; half so much as they are visual in those first few months.  Why?  Because we couldn't develop vision in utero, and so the first few months, immediately after they are out, everything is visual to that child.  They are looking, looking, looking, and absorbing enormous amounts about their visual world.  Around six to 12 months, we have what *PIJ called object constancy.  He was wrong in his idea of what was happening, but he was right that it does take place. The child's visual world, simply, suddenly stabilizes.  We know this is brought about by myelination of the axons involved in all sorts of other maturation processes.  

In the sensory fields of the brain, the auditory fields and the visual fields of the brain, they stabilize, they mature enough so that this total entrainment of locked in on the visual process is no longer needed, around, somewhere around the first year of life.  That's when we shift into the great limbic structure and this emotional child appears and so on.  And language and walking appear.