Your Brain on Imagination

What if spiritual transformation begins in the imagination rather than in decision? New neuroscience suggests the brain learns from imagined experiences almost like real ones. In other words, the futures we rehearse internally may shape our desires, habits, and relationships. The Kingdom living you envision today could become tomorrow’s lived reality.ⁱ

But imagination isn’t just private mental theater—it’s survival equipment. Psychologists now argue that imagination fuels resilience by helping people envision possibilities beyond present limitations. Cynicism shrinks the soul; hope expands it. Spiritual formation may depend less on information transfer and more on whether people can still imagine redemption is possible.ⁱⁱ

Then comes the surprising twist: imagination is contagious. Researchers found that people who imagine hopeful futures together become more socially connected than those merely completing tasks together. Shared vision creates shared belonging. Maybe the church’s deepest crisis isn’t strategy or attendance—it’s losing the collective imagination necessary to envision the Kingdom together.

i. Whatever else they brought to the ancient world, the prophets of Israel brought unprecedented  power of sanctified imagination. The images they employed to describe shalom—’the way things are supposed to be’ in Neil Plantinga’s wonderful phrase—are shaking and shaping the world still.  By the way—Neil’s chapter about Shalom in his book Not the Way It's Supposed to Be is still worth reading 30 years later.

ii. 'Super’ is a fairly literal description of the power of imagination.  Dallas Willard writes in Hearing God about how creation begins with ‘the word.’  This is true of God in Genesis. But it is true for us.  Whatever comes into being through a human—a meal, or a chair, or symphony, or a new furniture arrangement—begins in the unseen realm, in the mind, in the imagination. “Let there be cake”—and there was cake.