Imaginology

What might religion have in common with make-believe play? How could those points of commonality help us to understand how the imagination works in general? Neil Van Leeuwen, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, explores these topics and outlines the features that make imagination different from belief.

Dr. Van Leeuwen’s book, Religion as Make-Believe, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Make-Believe-Theory-Imagination-Identity/dp/0674305027/

Follow Dr. Van Leeuwen on Instagram @neilyvanneily or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/neilyneil

New research on how people talk about belief (in collaboration with Dr. Tania Lombrozo) available here: https://philpapers.org/rec/VESEFM or here: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-18525-001.html

When is a game more than just a game? When it’s a tabletop scenario used by governments and other entities to learn about gaps in their preparedness or to analyze future risks. Erin Sikorsky, Director of the Center for Climate and Security, is an expert in designing and implementing these kinds of games, building on her experience as a senior analyst in the US intelligence community. She discusses how the game design process works, what ingredients make a game successful, and why it might sometimes be useful to make a game less realistic.

Learn more about Erin Sikorsky’s work at the website for the Council on Strategic Risks at https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/

Follow her on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-sikorsky/

Follow her on Substack at https://securityinaclimatechangedworld.substack.com/

Erin Sikorsky’s book, Climate Change on the Battlefield, is available here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/climate-change-on-the-battlefield-9781350407657/

The Driving Forces Cards developed by the Singapore government can be found here: https://www.csf.gov.sg/media-centre/publications/csf-df-cards/

What does it mean when imagination moves out of the mind and into the body? What kinds of crucial skills can we learn from studying theater, and how can those habits of mind shape children’s development? What explains our love/hate relationship with professional actors? Thalia Goldstein, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University, explores these questions and more.

Learn more about Dr. Goldstein and her book, Why Theatre Education Matters, here: https://www.thaliagoldstein.com 

Imagination is on full display in acting, as people pretend to be someone who they are not. How does this work? And how can the theater, broadly construed, help us to understand ourselves? John de Lancie, most well-known for his role as the trickster god Q on Star Trek (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Picard), answers these questions, and also talks about how music inspires his imagination, about how the characters he’s played have affected him, and about some surprising similarities between acting and sailing.

Learn more about John de Lancie’s musical projects at www.curtis.edu/person/john-de-lancie, or follow him on Bluesky at @johndelancie.bsky.social

Many people think that children are highly imaginative and creative, and that we lose those skills as we get older. Andrew Shtulman, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Occidental College, discusses why this belief is false and explains how creativity actually develops.

Learn more about Dr. Shtulman’s work on his website: www.oxy.edu/academics/thinking-lab

Dr. Shtulman’s latest book, Learning to Imagine, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Imagine-Science-Discovering-Possibilities/dp/0674248171

Why do we cry at movies that we know are fictional? What do children's pretend games have in common with novelists' characters, or with war games run by government analysts? And is imagination really the same thing as creativity? In this first episode of Imaginology, host Deena Weisberg, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Villanova University, explains what imagination is, what it isn't, and why the line between imagination and reality is blurrier than we might think. She also previews the season ahead: conversations with psychologists, philosophers, writers, actors, and therapists, including Andrew Shtulman, PhD, on why children aren't as creative as we assume, and Star Trek's Q (John de Lancie) on the power of theater.

Imaginology is a new podcast about the science of how imagination meets reality.