Sure, you can name the play-by-play announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates back in the 1950’s. You might tell the following facts to anyone willing to listen: the name of the first man to conquer Mount Everest, know who played the movie role of Lawrence of Arabia, rattle off the capitols of each of the fifty states, can recall the man who, with just a smile and a fountain pen, pulled off the biggest billion dollar scam ever. You know lots of stuff, don’t you?

Facts, my friend, facts, facts, facts. Mind-knowlege used to put down your friends and nonfriends. Hey, maybe you can qualify for contestant tickets to participate on Jeopardy. These skills — all learned by habit and rote — are to “outwit” competitors or computers in all styles of games. It’s quite a skill once learned. Such skills are all habitual responses based upon the theory of Pavlov’s dog-to-bell responses.

Why, there’s money to be made from computer programs that provide maintenance for the brain. “Why, you too can delay the onset of Alhemizer’s disease with mindless facts and higher math exercises,” says today’s headline. Hah!

Okay, where’s the above going? This posting is an appeal to each of us to develop what’s been neglected, what’s been bypassed. Our imagination; our creativity. Right side/left side of the brain? Doesn’t matter, for imagination resides in each of us but is dormant, asleep, in a coma.

What if you want to escape? Can you really escape by reciting the names of all the past Presidents of the United States? Hell, no! But a functioning imagination can let anyone escape the worst. It can be a gateway, a portal. It can work especially for those people caged. There was a book/movie about a POW who built his dream house in his mind via imagination. Daydreaming. It was this endless construction that kept him sane and got him thru his ordeal. Just imagine!

Sorry, but you cannot throw a switch and turn on your imagination. It’s there in your brain but unable to function from disuse.

For example: Just like the need to prime a well with a little water to then pump out the well’s water, so too there are ways to prime your well of imagination.

The slant of this posting focuses on people who claim they have no imagination, and how their “nonexistent” imagination can be revived. It is possible to escape life when reality is too harsh to bear. Let’s face it, this is daydreaming. Just one aspect of using the imagination. It’s a minor aspect that has been wrongly frowned upon, always by your school teachers when you were a child.

What can a person do to bring forth their imagination? Do the following: 1) Daydream. 2) Involve your latent imagination by catching onto the coattails of a fiction writer, and brother, hold on! Read fiction, novels and fiction stories. 3) Listen to old-time radio shows from Internet radio. And listen to the “Prairie Home Companion” on National Public Radio (NPR) on the weekend.

Why do these things? Because without the visual and only hearing the audio, your mind’s imagination will scope out and fill in the rest to make it whole in your mind. As for reading, your imagination will place you right in the story you’re reading, in the midst of things. Television is passive, reading is interactive. The payback will be your imagination as it begins its work without effort while you read. The result? It won’t be long before you can imagine on your own without these props.

And just maybe, with hope, some day, researchers will be challenged to examine the imagination’s usage to create another “tool” to postpone the onset of Alhemizer’s disease.

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