Can you imagine? How our creative minds play a part in understanding and predicting others

Imagination is not only for coming up with new ideas, it is a tool for simulation. With it, we can simulate entire other human minds within our own minds. For example, at work we constantly create simulations of how our colleagues might behave or react to our suggestions, or what our customers value, how they may respond. For high-quality interaction, it is best to treat these simulations as hypotheses, gather as much data on others as possible, and make sure your assumptions are correct.

A colleague you don’t know well posts a message in your team channel:

“Hi everyone! Please realize that when you post here, each time, everyone is pinged. The more messages you send, the more pings there are. Try to remember that this is not like a f2f conversation (duh). Please put all you have to say in fewer messages. To me this is remote work 101 stuff and I thought we were farther in these things as a team.”

Instantly, while reading the message, your imagination is engaged. You read the text in a certain voice in your head (aka the Morgan Freeman -effect). You

picture the person who wrote the message. You imagine their mind - the values they hold, their personality, their social skills, their intentions while they wrote the message.

Our imagination is not there for only coming up with new ideas. It is a tool for simulation. We play out scenarios in our minds to be able to make good choices in real life. This applies to other people, too. We can simulate entire other human minds within our own minds. With this, we can in advance test social scenarios (“I wonder how my spouse will react if I say that thing like this”), and decipher intent (“I wonder what made them react so strongly”). We create simulations of how our colleagues might behave or react to our suggestions and what our customers are like, with the help of our imagination, and previous knowledge we have accumulated in our minds.

We also simulate the past. In the example of reading the message from your colleague, you may play out a simulation of what their expressions like when writing the message, what transpired before writing the message, and imagine occurrences that led them to write the message in the first place.

The brain mechanism that is important for imagining and simulating is a set of connected brain regions called the default mode network. This network is active when we are idle and not focused on anything in particular (not even your phone!). It is also active in even short instances of letting our minds wander. It seems that if the DMN is active, new ideas have a greater chance of popping into mind. You might have noticed this. For example, you try to think of a solution to a problem for hours. Then you go for a walk and think about completely different things. Suddenly, the idea or solution you were looking for pops to mind!

When trying to understand others and work together in the best possible way, it is helpful to remember that our brains like making complete models of things in the world. If we lack information about the things, our brains will guess the rest with the help of our imagination. Also, the less information you have about another person, the more your brain will guess stuff to fill in the picture.

It pays to take your simulations and models of other people as hypotheses. Especially with very little information about another, be sure to gather more data and test whether your assumptions are correct, else interaction can go pretty badly wrong. As we so often see on social media.

For example, the quick hypothesis your brain makes about the colleague complaining about messaging habits might be very negative: a control freak, cocky, thinks they are above others, wants to boss people around. But what other intentions and characteristics might be at play here? How much do you actually know of the person and their values? Are they right, but just expressing themselves poorly in a hurry, which makes you resist the main point?

The example from the beginning of this text is in part based on true events. One founder kept sending individual messages on Discord which drove the other crazy :D Discussing how we use interaction tools can make remote work a lot easier. Reaching these agreements requires trust, the ability to give and receive negative feedback in constructive ways, and patience with the conclusions our brains sometimes jump to.