Your imagination doesn’t get worse as you age – but it does change
It’s natural to associate wild flights of fantasy with children and a more mundane internal world with adult life. The latest research, though, shows that isn't the whole picture
As children grow into adulthood and then continue ageing, what happens to their imagination? Do all of us gradually lose our innate capacity to conjure up novelty to the drudgery of life, or does experience teach us to fine-tune it? Paul Harris, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University, has argued that imagination gets better with age, stating in a that young children’s pretend play generally sticks to “everyday regularities”; only later do they start imagining dramatic counterfactuals. In particular, Harris points to an apparent shift around the age of 4, when children start to be able to…
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