innovatED Magazine - Issue 4 - Spring 2020

Reasoning in contrast is a much broader psychological
activity which also involves selecting and assessing
evidence, creating and testing hypotheses, weighing
competing arguments, evaluating means and ends,
developing and applying heuristics (mental shortcuts),
and so on.
All this requires the use of judgement, which is why
reason, unlike logic, cannot be delegated to a computer,
and also why it so often fails to persuade. Logic is but a
tool of reason, and, occasionally, it can be reasonable to
accept something that is or appears illogical.
With the decline of religion and traditional social
structures, our emotions have come to assume an
increasingly dominant role in our lives. It has forever
been said that we are ruled by our emotions, but this
today is truer than ever. Much more than reason or
tradition, it is our emotions that determine our choice of
profession, partner, and politics, and our relation
to money, sex, and God.
Yet, remarkably, the emotions are utterly neglected by
our system of education, leading to millions of mis-lived
lives. Nothing can make us feel more alive, or more
human, than our emotions, or hurt us more. To control
our emotions is to control ourselves, and to control
ourselves is to control our destiny.
What about imagination? Imagination is the highest form
of thought, almost divine in its reach. With enough
imagination, we could identify and solve all our
problems. With enough imagination, we would never
have to work again—or, at least, not for money. With
enough imagination, we could win over, or defeat,
anyone we wanted to.
But our imagination is so poor that we haven’t even
imagined what it would be like to have this kind
of imagination.
I’m lucky to have received a solid education, but one
thing it certainly didn’t do for me is cultivate my
imagination. In fact, medical school in particular did
everything it could to destroy it. In recent years, I’ve
been trying to recover the bright and vivid imagination
that I left behind in primary school. For that, I’ve been
doing just three things, all of them very
simple—or, at least, very simple to explain:
• Being more aware of the importance of imagination.
• Making time for sleep and idleness.
• Taking inspiration from the natural world.
Which brings me onto inspiration. Think back to your
favourite teacher at school: for me, a French teacher
who wept silently as he read to the class from a novel by
Marguerite Duras. The teachers whom we hold dear in
our hearts, who changed the course of our lives, are not
those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or
fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the
syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up
to ourselves and to the world. Despite its importance to
the individual and society, our system of education
leaves very little place for inspiration—perhaps
because, like wisdom and virtue, it cannot easily be
taught but only ever… inspired. Unfortunately, a person
who has never been inspired is unlikely to inspire
others. That is a great shame. The best education
consists not in being taught but in being inspired; and if
I could, I would rather inspire a single person than teach
a thousand.
Our schools and universities and wider society
privilege knowing over thinking and equate thinking
with reasoning, and reasoning with logic. This has done,
and continues to do, untold harm. Instead of digging
ourselves in deeper, we need to make more time and
space for thinking. And we need to rehabilitate
alternative forms of cognition such as
emotion and imagination that can support,supplement,
or supplant reason and return us to wholeness •
About the author
Dr Neel Burton is a
psychiatrist,
philosopher, writer,
and wine-lover who
lives and teaches in
Oxford, England. He
is a Fellow of Green-
Templeton College,
Oxford, and the recipient of the Society of
Authors' Richard Asher Prize, the British Medical
Association's Young Authors' Award, the
Medical Journalists' Association Open Book
Award, and a Best in the World Gourmand
Award.He has written over two hundred articles
for Psychology Today and is the author of
several books. These include Psychiatry (2006),
Living with Schizophrenia (2007), The Meaning
of Madness (2008), Master your Mind (2009),
and Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the
Emotions (2015). His work has been translated
into several languages.
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