The mystical transubstantiation takes place in the venues of everyday life — the magazine stand or on the train or in the doctor's office. Paging through ads is not a lofty or highly charged experience. Yet in these ordinary moments of life, the imagination is going about its business: measuring different futures, cooking up semiconscious fantasies, stoking the fires of anticipation, longing for different goods, homes, and lives, savoring the pleasures of fantasy.
The key aspect to understand is that the imagination never rests. As cognitive scientists are discovering, the imagination is not some rarified gift that artists use to paint pictures. It's the brain at work every second of every day, blending one set of perceptions with others.
When we pick up a cup of coffee, we experience many sensations: the smell, the color, the feel of the cup in our hand, and the weight. These perceptions register in different parts of the brain. Somehow the brain blends them together. We have no idea how. This is imagination in its most rudimentary form: blending disparate sensations. At higher levels, the imagination blends what is with what could be. Without our permission, and without our ability to control it, our imagination takes physical sensations — me looking at a perfect kitchen in a glossy magazine — and it blends a fantasy landscape, me with my perfect family in the perfect kitchen and the dishes are clean and the meal is relaxed but perfect.
— David Brooks, On Paradise Drive