what is imaginative intelligence, and how does it work?

A couple of years ago, my creative collaborator James Navé came up with the phrase "imaginative intelligence." It is so clearly what the Imaginative Storm work is based on: accessing your imaginative intelligence, igniting your imaginative intelligence, allowing your imaginative intelligence to inform what you write. But what exactly is imaginative intelligence?

We’ve just started to understand it in the last few weeks.

Before artificial intelligence, I didn't really have a concept of what intelligence is and how it functions. I found artificial intelligence rather frightening and was inclined to avoid it, but Navé has taught himself to use ChatGPT as a powerful tool—and in doing so, has taught ChatGPT to become that powerful tool for him. He'll write more about that in another post. What intrigues me is the way that artificial intelligence gives us a lens through which to understand imaginative intelligence.

Wondering how to illustrate this piece, I thought of this image, “The Cantankerous Cat” by Mike Savad, We used it as a writing prompt one week. As living beings, we are complex data-processing machines.

Artificial intelligence takes in billions and billions (let’s just say zillions) of pieces of information of varying kinds and, using pre-programmed code, processes those zillions of pieces of information and then organizes and exports them on command, according to what is asked of it. So, intelligence is the capacity to hold information and draw from it selectively, outputting it in new arrangements, which with our ordinary rational intelligence might be decisions or deductions or new thoughts and theories based on the information we've taken in throughout our lives, run through the codes of our beliefs and experiences.

Imaginative intelligence does the same thing, but the imagination is an exponentially more powerful processor than the rational mind. We don't remember far more than we remember. We aren't aware of zillions of bodily sensations that affect bodily processes, and bodily processes that affect our rational minds through mood and feelings of physical wellness or pain. Yet all this is stored in our body's memory, along with information we may not even know exists. I believe the imagination has access to all of this, because the imagination is that limitless aquifer of knowing below the rational mind. That's why, when you hear or see something totally irrational, your imagination is immediately able to make some sense of it—and often the more irrational the idea or combination, the more satisfying the imaginative sense is.

So, there's the imagination, with access to this cosmos, or aquifer, of information—just as ChatGPT has access to the cosmos of nearly everything ever posted online. It's all there, at the imagination's fingertips: instant access. Then, the information is processed through code: not code written by programmers, but code written by nature and by life experience in your DNA, your hormones, your nerves, the structure of your cells. Each one of us is an incredibly powerful processor, and we all process differently because we are running a unique combination of code. When called upon, by for example a writing prompt, the imagination whizzes through a search of everything somehow related to the prompt: relations of logic or circumstance or sound-alike or look-alike or what somebody once said—who knows! And it starts popping these out in a loose organization of its own, which we organize a little further by writing it down. If the rational mind interferes, the imaginative intelligence slows down, because in effect the rational mind is throwing a wrench into the works. Depending on the size of the wrench, the imagination carries on working (though possibly with diminished range of access), or packs up completely.

And that is what’s called writer’s block.

Some expert on artificial intelligence or neuroscience may tell me that this is all entirely wrong. That's possible with intelligence: ChatGPT has been shown to make up facts, and how often have you been convinced that something is true only to be shown that it isn't. My own imaginative intelligence enjoys this picture of my imagination-suffused body as a vastly powerful processor. We've been told for decades that we only use a small fraction of our brains, and this explanation underpins the satisfying sense I've had over the last few years of twice-weekly Imaginative Storm writing: that I am tapping into a source of creativity and insight and speculation that I didn't know how to access before. Maybe it’s not that we only use a small fraction of our brains, but simply that the rational mind only occupies a small fraction of the brain.

Funnily enough, our first title for what became the book and the course Write What You Don't Know was "Imaginative Storm Writer Training." We conceived of what we do as a kind of imaginative workout, stretching and strengthening the imaginative muscles. Intelligence training isn't the image we had in mind then, but it is now.

Here’s another interesting parallel: you train artificial intelligence by telling it what you want, not what you don’t want. In other words, you praise it for success, rather than criticizing it for flaws or failure. This is also the way you train imaginative intelligence: with that hit of dopamine you get when you read what you wrote and something surprises you, or a phrase or image or insight delights you. You’re telling your imaginative intelligence: yes! Give me more of that! Some people think it’s wussy to praise and not criticize—because ”good” writing demands judging and criticizing. But who knows how many people have been put off writing forever by that model of creative writing classes in which you read your work aloud, or circulate it to the class, and everyone criticizes it in the hope of impressing the teacher?

Navé has been saying, as long as I've known him, that creativity is our human birthright. That there is no such thing as an uncreative person: even those people who say, "I don't have a creative bone in my body." He suggests that the problem is not too little creativity but too much: that some people retreat from the overwhelm. This is an echo of the fear of AI: this thing is so incredibly powerful, maybe I'd better not mess with it!

But if you are one of those people, or hovering toward that end of the spectrum, what about accepting that your body contains this stunningly powerful imaginative processor, and starting to train it? All intelligence has to be trained. That's (in theory) why we send kids to school. Training is what makes AI so expensive in terms of programming time and electricity. But you don't have to train yourself to the level of ChatGPT or Leonardo da Vinci right off the bat. We train ourselves to move bipedally, too, and most of us never expect to run a 4-minute mile.

The GPT in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. If you wish, you can be a Generative Personally-Trained Transformer. Your unique coding guarantees that you are capable of writing with startling originality, once you get those synapses—or whatever the AI equivalent of synapses is—up and firing. Navé has trained ChatGPT to give him what he wants (organization and pithy quotes without changing his words), by using it—a lot. We’ve realized recently that we’ve both trained our imaginative intelligence to surprise us by writing in the Imaginative Storm, randomly and without judgment, for 10 minutes a week, and then reading what we wrote aloud and allowing our hormonal coding, in the form of that dopamine release, to hone it to our desires.

So, the more you use your imaginative intelligence, which means intentionally asking your rational mind to give up control—as, for example, you can also do by meditating—the more exciting and personal and satisfying the outputs of your imaginative intelligence will be.