The Reach of the Imagination. The Reach of Imagination by Jacob Bronowski, deals with the manipulation of images in ones head. Images play out events for us that are not present to our senses. They protect the past and form the future, a future that does not exist yet, and may never in that form. In contrast, the lack of symbolic ideas in animals cuts them off from the past and the future, and traps them in the present.
Words are the most important images for human beings.
Animals do not have words, in our sense, and in the brain there is no specific center for language compared to the human brain. The basis of memory is experience. We can react to stimuli, which have never yet happened. We can draw from the past, but also manipulate the future. The test of imagination is experience.