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Home » Imagination: It’s Not What You Think. It’s How You Think by Charles Faulkner (Transcript)

Imagination: It’s Not What You Think. It’s How You Think by Charles Faulkner (Transcript)

Charles Faulkner at TEDxIIT

Here is the full text of neuro-linguistic expert Charles Faulkner’s talk titled “Imagination: It’s Not What You Think. It’s How You Think” at TEDxIIT conference.

TRANSCRIPT:

Charles Faulkner – Author of Success Mastery with NLP

This idea is at least 275 years old. But moreover, it has been rediscovered at least 50 times that I can find, often found in fields and by people who would be very famous if I were to mention them.

And they all call it something different, but I don’t think that’s why the idea is unknown. I think it’s unknown because it goes against our cultural ideals, our personal experience and the way the brain works.

WHAT IS THE IDEA?

That imagination isn’t what we think, it’s how we think.

Now, I’d like to go to the originators of this, and that would be David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who noted that the imagination is situated between our perceptions and our understanding.

As Kant wrote in 1780, that we do not see the world the way it is; we see the world according to our instruments. This also could have been a quote from Daniel Kahneman’s best-selling book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” in 2011. Which kind of gives you an idea of where we are with this.

Well, first, most people wouldn’t disagree with that. They’ll go, “Yeah, of course, I don’t see as well as an eagle. I don’t hear or smell as well as my dog does.”

Our perceptions are limited. But Kant and Kahneman are saying something much more important. They’re saying that our instruments of perception, our instruments of understanding are such that some things are going to be easy for us to perceive and understand, some of them a little bit difficult, and some of them are going to be impossible.

It means the universe around us is hidden in plain sight; we can’t see it.