The Importance of Imagination in Nonfiction

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People have vivid imaginations, even when they're just consciously making stuff up. So why wouldn't it be possible that people misinterpret things and think they're writing nonfiction, but it's really just coming from their imagination? The audience for that sort of thing has been going longer than the written word itself, longer than the book. And one particular thing before we move on, some people would tell us about, you know, after a book they particularly enjoyed,after they put it down, some characters would keep talking. They would start commentating on what's going on in their lives. Or the reader themselves would start thinking like a particular character,. Like in the style of the way a

Shermer and Alderson-Day discuss the psychologist’s journey to understand the phenomenon of sensed-presence: the disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. Using contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy, Alderson-Day attempts to understand how this experience is possible. Is it a hallucination, a change in the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His new book is Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.