A neuroscientist’s sprawling survey of the creative mind takes in both William Blake and physicist Paul Dirac

“The Brain – is wider than the Sky – / For – put them side by side – / The one the other will contain / with ease – and You – beside –,” wrote Emily Dickinson. To all that the world presents to our senses, the mind effortlessly adds things that will not and cannot ever be. We can’t help it: imagination is humankind’s unbidden superpower, perhaps the capacity that most distinguishes us from other animals.

In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman attempts to explain how and why this is. It is a wide-ranging survey – too wide, offering a mass of fascinating information about creativity, mental imagery and child development bloated by superfluous discourses on the origins of life, the Covid pandemic and climate crisis. Even then it doesn’t quite resolve the mystery of why our imaginative capacity seems to far exceed what is adaptively useful. But in this Zeman simply reflects the state of play: brain science tells us a great deal about the imagination but can only ever take us so far.