Paul Ricœur in dialogue with contemporary neuroscience
We can imagine a place we have never visited, a conversation that never took place, a life different from the one we lead. Looking at a painting, we can also discover relationships we had never perceived before. These experiences draw on different capacities, yet all allow us to gain a certain distance from what is immediately given. For a time, present experience ceases to define the limits of what we can conceive.
What happens within this distance? Are earlier impressions simply displaced and recombined, or can imagination transform the very frameworks of our understanding?
This question runs through the lectures Paul Ricœur devoted to imagination at the University of Chicago in 1975. His inquiry gradually distinguishes the representation of what is absent from the creation of new meanings. Fiction, metaphor, painting and scientific models occupy a decisive place in this investigation: each offers a way to examine how an imaginative construction can renew our relationship with reality.
Contemporary neuroscience approaches some of these questions through the operations that make imagination possible. It studies the construction of absent scenes, the use of memories in anticipation, the distinction between perception and mental imagery, and the formation of original associations. A dialogue with Ricœur requires us to hold two questions together: how does a possibility take shape, and what does it enable us to understand?
The image and what it enables us to think
Closing our eyes and recalling a face, a house or a landscape is a familiar experience of imagination. It encourages a conception of the mental image as a weakened perception: something appears inwardly while its object remains absent.
This account explains part of our experience. It becomes insufficient, however, when we seek to understand how an image can give rise to a new thought. Representing something and understanding something through that representation are two operations whose difference matters.
A house can be imagined through its windows, walls and garden. It can also appear as a refuge, as a place that has become unfamiliar, or as a space marked by the absence of the person who lived there. The visible elements remain similar, while their organisation and meaning change.
The distinction between reproductive and productive imagination acquires its full significance here. The former concerns the representation of what is not present; the latter involves the formation of configurations through which experience becomes intelligible in another way. The visual precision of an image therefore does not, by itself, determine its interpretive power. A meticulously reconstructed scene may confirm a familiar understanding; a few uncertain forms may open a question we did not yet know how to ask.
Memory as the material of possibility
Imagining a new situation often involves drawing on elements already encountered: places, people, gestures and sensations. Acquired experience supplies materials whose organisation can vary until they compose a scene that has never been lived.
The work of Demis Hassabis and his colleagues has illuminated this relationship between memory and imagination. In a study published in 2007, several patients with amnesia associated with hippocampal damage had difficulty imagining spatially coherent experiences. Their descriptions contained isolated elements that failed to come together in a unified setting. These observations suggest that the hippocampus contributes to constructing the spatial context in which the elements of an imagined experience can be connected.
Memory thus emerges as a resource for constructing possible situations. The capacities that enable us to recall the past also participate in developing what we have not experienced.
One question nevertheless remains: what gives a new combination its significance? Imagining a table in another room produces a variation. Discovering, within a fictional scene, a way of understanding solitude or hospitality involves a deeper transformation. In both cases, familiar elements are reorganised; in the second, their relationship changes the meaning we can attribute to them.
Ricœur’s reflection draws our attention to this passage from construction to meaning. The organisation of a scene allows an imaginative experience to take shape. Its value also depends on what it brings into our understanding.
Experiencing an image, recognising its status
An anticipated conversation can cause anxiety; a remembered scene can revive joy; a fictional character can inspire lasting attachment. An experience whose imaginary character we recognise can therefore have real effects.
This coexistence raises a difficulty: how do we distinguish what we experience from what we regard as an external event?
In a study published in 2023, Nadine Dijkstra and Stephen Fleming examined the distinction between visual imagination and perception. Their findings suggest that the subjective strength of the sensory signal contributes to judgements through which an experience is recognised as imagined or perceived. Under the experimental conditions studied, signals from these two sources can combine and influence that distinction.
These observations concern a mechanism of perceptual discrimination. Our relationship with a work of art involves further dimensions, including knowledge of its status, the conventions of its reception and the meanings we attribute to it. The comparison nevertheless opens a shared question: how can an experience affect us while being recognised as a construction?
We know that a novel consists of sentences and that a painting is a painted surface. This knowledge accompanies our experience without exhausting what happens within it. We can follow a fictional life, experience its tensions and examine its consequences while remaining aware of the distance that separates us from it.
Imagination thus makes possible an exploration in which engagement and distance are equally necessary. We encounter situations, relationships and decisions that may subsequently find a place in our understanding of reality.
The novelty of a relationship
In metaphor, a new meaning can arise from entirely familiar words. Bringing them together introduces a tension that calls for a reconsideration of what they designate.
To say that a city is a wound invites us to consider its ruptures, its traces, its exposed parts or the difficulties of its reconstruction. The expression reorganises attention. Aspects already present become perceptible through a relationship that gives them a different coherence.
Imagination participates in this formation of meaning: it allows us to grasp an affinity that ordinary usage did not make immediately accessible. Understanding develops through the effort to find relevance in a relationship that initially unsettles us.
Some neuroscientific research examines the conditions under which original associations form. In a study published in Brain in 2024, Eleonora Bartoli and her colleagues combined intracranial recordings with direct stimulation of regions of the default mode network. In a task requiring participants to invent unusual uses for ordinary objects, stimulation reduced the originality of responses without reducing their number. This finding supports a causal contribution of the network to divergent thinking under the conditions studied.
Understanding a metaphor and inventing an unusual use remain distinct activities. Both, however, involve the capacity to discover relationships to which habit gives little room.
The originality of an association does not guarantee its aptness. A metaphor becomes fruitful when it allows us to grasp more clearly the experience to which it refers. Its value lies in the relationship it makes intelligible, in what it reveals and in what remains of the discovery after the initial surprise.
Painting as an experience of reconfiguration
In front of a painting, understanding develops over time. A colour changes its value beside another; a form attracts the eye, then gives way; a detail initially considered secondary comes to organise the whole. Our first interpretations are reconsidered as attention discovers new relationships.
Ricœur’s notion of iconic augmentation offers a way of thinking about this capacity of the image to enrich our relationship with reality. A work provides a sensible organisation through which certain aspects of experience become accessible in a different way.
An empty space may be experienced as waiting. The proximity of two forms may suggest attraction, threat or hesitation. These meanings become clearer in the encounter between pictorial relationships and the viewer’s activity. They depend both on what the work presents and on the way its organisation engages the eye.
The viewer brings memories, expectations and knowledge. The painting introduces elements that confirm, displace or resist them. Thought initially directs perception; what is perceived can then alter the thought that guided the approach.
Experiments on scene construction or original associations illuminate certain capacities that may participate in this encounter. The significance of a work nevertheless requires an inquiry of its own: how does an interpretation form, which details support it, and what resistance leads it to change?
A painting can thus leave a trace that extends beyond the memory of its appearance. It may alter our attention to a relationship, a quality of presence or a tension we later encounter elsewhere. What was discovered in the work becomes a possibility for recognition and understanding.
Knowing through the possible
Scientific models give imagination a place in the development of knowledge. By selecting certain elements and organising their relationships, a model makes a phenomenon accessible to examination. Its value depends on what it enables us to explain, predict and test.
An imaginative construction acquires value here through the questions it makes possible to formulate and the constraints to which it submits. Conceiving a possibility opens an inquiry; examining it allows us to establish its significance more precisely.
This relationship also appears in everyday experience. Before making a decision, we imagine several situations, their consequences and the place we might occupy within them. Sometimes this exercise transforms the initial question: what seemed to constitute the problem proves to be only part of it, while a previously neglected possibility becomes important.
Imagination then helps us revise the frameworks through which we judged. Its power lies as much in this revision as in the richness of the scenes it produces.
The dialogue between Ricœur and neuroscience is particularly valuable at this point. Experimental research illuminates operations of construction, discrimination and association. Philosophical inquiry considers their participation in the formation of meaning and the changes that a possibility can introduce into our experience.
An invented scene, a metaphor or a painting may remain a passing experience. It can also bring a lasting change to the way we recognise a situation. The same things remain present, but their relationships become intelligible in another way; some certainties weaken, and some alternatives become conceivable.
The possible thus participates in our knowledge of reality. We understand what is by considering what might have been, what could come to pass and the relationships a work teaches us to recognise. Acquired experience remains the material of this exploration. Imagination gives it continuations whose form was not already determined by what we had lived.
