As evidenced by the many extraordinary examples of animation - animals, insects, or even inanimate objects can be endowed with robust personality and discerning their unique opinions can provide insights far beyond the expected. In addition to an endless plethora of characters we can also imagine these interactions taking place in any kind of environment at any scale, from the microscopic to the macroscopic and everything in between.

It does not matter if our imagination produces accurate determinations about the thinking of others. What matters is that the exercise allows us to examine our own thinking from a different point of view. By far the most important consideration when performing these exercises is to never loose awareness that it is our imagination creating a fantasy. Imagination is inspired by our intuition extrapolating what we think we know about someone else’s thinking, but it is still intuitive imagination at play. Awareness is especially important when imagining interactions with someone you know. When communicating with someone (or some thing) in your imagination it is critical to never loose sight of the fact that the other side of the conversation is still you.

Insights derived from these exercises will reveal a great deal about one’s own thinking, but virtually nothing of fact about theirs. In loosing self-awareness of our imagination we risk the danger of committing fantasies to memory and later accidentally confusing them with reality. False memories skew our perceptions of others along with our perceptions of how others perceive us.

Beware the Trap

Many will think it self evident, even laughably obvious, that one can always tell the difference between imagined fantasy and authentic reality. But therein lays a dangerous folly of human psychology many of us succumb to without ever realizing.

As we encounter things we don't understand we tend to rely on assumption to fill in the blanks. Where do these assumptions come from? You guessed it, assumptions are generated by our intuition and imagination, maybe with a dash of actual knowledge blended into the mix just to add enough flavor to make them believable. Left to simmer for a while without challenge or research and we have a savory dish of comfort with the convincing flavor of fact, or at least close enough to ignore the difference.

Making assumptions is so much easier than sourcing and verifying facts. We humans are lazy creatures of habit and making assumptions is an easy habit to acquire. Like a narcotic, the pleasant gratification we derive from those first few assumptions establishes a viable method of fulfilling a need. Fulfillment of need develops into a habit, which soon transitions to a comfortable addiction that alters our behavior the more we indulge. And true to addiction, the need itself grows in proportion with our ability to satisfy the need.

Over time our capacity of sound judgment diminishes while we compile an extensive inventory of cascading assumptions to draw from. In the process, what we come to believe in as rational fact grows into belief of irrational fiction. Eventually we become so comfortable and accustomed with our assumptions that what we come to perceive as reality is actually a life forever lived in self-fabricated fantasy. We may think this lamentable condition must be a rare exception, but the grim truth is that we ALL suffer from this malady; the only difference between us is one of degree.

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