Cassandra Vieten

Every map has an edge: a place where the known world ends, and, as cartographers once wrote, here there be dragons. For centuries, Western epistemology has treated those edges as warnings. This talk argues they are invitations, and proposes a conceptual map for exploring them. A conceptual review spanning psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy proposes a provisional three-domain model of imagination, cognitive-narrative, sensory-motor, and social-emotional, as a framework for understanding how knowing arrives through channels other than analysis, such as image, symbol, intuition, dream, psychedelic dissolution, and the “truths that can only be found in fiction.” It frames imagination as a distinct epistemological territory, with its own language and conditions for access. In this model, imaginative content is organized along two intersecting axes: a conscious–nonconscious spectrum, in which content enters awareness only when it falls within a shifting "flashlight" of attention, and a volitional–spontaneous spectrum, in which content may be deliberately generated or may arise unbidden. The influence of imagination on physiology, mental health, and behavior will be reviewed, along with the neurodiversity of imagination, and the biases, hallucinations, and collective delusions that arise when subjective experience is mistaken for fact. What emerges is a vision of imagination as a bridge: the connective tissue between what some contemplative and philosophical traditions call big "C" Consciousness, a field of undifferentiated, infinite potential, and the conditioned, constraint-bound cognition through which we actually navigate the physical world. Imagination is the faculty that reaches toward that wider field without abandoning the shore, and leads to creativity, or how the possible finds its way into form.

Cassandra Vieten, PhD is Clinical Professor and Director of the Center for Mindfulness at the Centers for Integrative Health in the Department of Family Medicine at UC San Diego. She is also Director of Research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and Clinical Psychology Director at the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative at UCSD. She is Senior Advisor of the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation where she served as Executive Director from 2019-2023, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where she served as President from 2013-2019. Her research has focused on spirituality and health, transformative experiences and practices, the development of mindfulness-based interventions for emotional well-being, and development of media technologies to inspire awe. She is author of the forthcoming book Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination (Simon and Schuster, August 2026).