I reviewed Albert Read’s The Imagination Muscle for the TLS:

This book about the imagination begins, aptly enough, with a story about telling stories, inspired by a serendipitous find. Just out of university and doing a job he hated selling advertising space from a Soho office, Albert Read was browsing at lunchtime in the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He saw a book, The Secret Language of Film, by the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and bought it on a whim. In it, he discovered that Carrière and his long-time collaborator, Luis Buñuel, would set each other a challenge at the end of a day on set, by spending half an hour inventing a story to tell to the other. This was their way, Carrière wrote, of “training the imagination, the muscle which makes the essential breakthroughs”. Ever since, Read has clung to this idea of the imagination as a muscle – something that can be stretched and developed “through the regular pulse of movement and exertion”. Engaging it fully might feel weird at first, as with “an unencountered glute muscle”, but it will become stronger and suppler when “prodded into the rhythm of action”.

Most of this book’s chapters are themed around some way of training this “imagination muscle”. The training tips seem fairly obvious: free yourself from unthinking habit by taking a different route to the train station on your way to work; adopt a “beginner’s mindset”; be at ease with risk; keep a commonplace book; seek out collaborations and have better conversations; make leaps across disciplines; embrace the “joyful absorption” of observation, by taking out a magnifying glass to study a yellow meadow ant. All sound ideas, but none of them very imaginative.

Gradually, though, a more original take emerges. The imagination works best, Read finds, when it meets the constraint of structure or has to otherwise rub up against the real world. Its sweet spot is the “meeting point of intelligence, acquired knowledge and observational wonder”. The trick is to stay within touching distance of the unconscious and respond to its “quiet intimations”, while giving them shape “under the limpid gaze of judgement”. The biggest creative leaps are made by refining and recombining established ideas, or running with the grain of what already exists. Palaeolithic cave painters worked with the contours and fissures of the rock – a bulge in the rock incorporating a bison’s hump, say, or the swell of a muscle – to bring three-dimensional dynamism to their art. Read offers the analogy of a child making a mask by coating one side of a blown-up balloon with papier mâché. Sometimes, he writes, “the imagination requires a balloon around which it can drape its first tender ideas – initially too fragile to find solid form of their own”.

Read is the managing director of Condé Nast Britain, overseeing titles like GQ, Vanity Fair and Vogue. Imagination is a more unusual topic for someone of this background to fasten on than its more dynamic-sounding partner, creativity. Creativity, ubiquitous in the business lexicon, suggests agency and action; imagination carries suggestions of reality avoidance and unproductive daydreaming. From the evidence of this book, Read seems like the kind of line manager who would tolerate a bit of daydreaming in meetings. I like the sound of a boss who says that “ideas come where there is confidence and laughter” and who thinks that business is normally too focused on “the ratcheting up of expectation, the smoothing out of experience … and the unthinking quest for efficiency”.

I am not sure, though, that this book quite gets to the bottom of what the imagination is and how it works. Read dismisses evolutionary biologists who see the imagination as “merely a highly evolved survival mechanism” and who thus wish to “diminish or ignore its mystery”. I don’t see why this should be so: you can still be captivated by the mysteries of the human mind even if you know that they are all held within that three-pound lump of jellified fat and protein inside our skulls.

Read would presumably agree with Keats, who accused Newton of draining the rainbow of poetry by explaining it as a product of the refraction of white light. There are plenty of scientists discussed in this book, but they tend to be ones with side interests in the arts such as Albert Einstein (violin-playing), Richard Feynman (drawing) and Alexander Fleming (painting with bacteria). Read’s idea of the imagination is essentially a romantic-artistic one. The Romantics saw the imagination as a transforming force, able to both tap into the hidden energies of this world and conjure up alternative worlds – in Shelley’s words, “Forms more real than living man, / Nurslings of immortality.” For Read, too, the imagination is a tool that can unravel “the mystery, the harmony and the immensity of existence” while also serving as “the valve easing the crush of reality”. In service of this argument, Read falls back on the usual prodigiously gifted suspects: Newton watching the falling apple, Turner strapping himself to the mast of a ship, Einstein grasping the relativity of time just after waking up one morning, Leonardo conceiving the helicopter by observing the rotating descent of a maple tree seed.

Undercutting this – and source of the book’s more interesting insights – is an idea of the imagination as something more ordinary and workaday. To imagine, in the mundane sense of being able to generate images not felt or experienced by the senses, is a basic human activity. Imagining, as Read writes in the opening chapter, is at the centre of all social life. He is tied to his family “not only by love, but by the imagined structure of marriage”, and he deposits his money in a bank because “I imagine that one day they will give it back”.

This notion of the imagination as something that knits our collective lives together could have been explored more. The novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh observed in his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and thus of the imagination”. Our stunted ecological imaginations make it hard for us to connect our everyday habits with rising sea levels and record temperatures. We demonize refugees and benefit claimants because of a failure to imagine the fullness of their humanity or the complex networks that connect us to them. Hate, as Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory, is a failure of the imagination. Imagining other perspectives and realities is the basis of all democratic compromise, all care and concern, all attempts to conceive better ways to work and live.

Read mostly ignores these broader questions, focusing instead on life hacks, ways of training the imagination to make our individual lives more productive and fulfilling. I can see why his publisher liked the idea of the imagination as a muscle. It makes intuitive sense, and is readily explainable in a three-minute radio interview. But is the imagination really like a muscle? Most muscles, when exercised regularly, become stronger and more efficient at converting energy derived from chemical reactions into mechanical energy. I saw no firm proof in this book that exercising the imagination regularly makes you more imaginative. Rather, the evidence collected here suggests that the imagination works best when it is caught unawares, while the mind is semi-occupied, energized by a change in physical circumstances or enjoying a brief moment of stillness. Ideas come most freely to us in the grogginess of waking up, while having a shower, or when leaving a party alone and stepping out into a cold street.

My favourite story here is of Arthur Fry, who invented the Post-it Note while daydreaming during a dull sermon in a Minnesotan Presbyterian church in 1973, “his disengaged mind roaming the unconscious for connections, but still possessed of a sufficient self-awareness to pull a good idea up from the depths”. (I can confirm from first-hand experience that church services are a good space for creative reverie; more recently, dull university research seminars have served the same function.) Perhaps the answer, then, is to engineer more of these liminal, unguarded occasions, rather than to push the imagination like a muscle and feel the burn. Maybe that is what Read is really arguing, because the muscle metaphor doesn’t appear much beyond his opening chapter. By the end of the book, this metaphor feels less like an argument than a peg on which to hang a mixed bag of insights – most of them stimulating, some of them useful, not all of them imaginative.