Question: Why is our intellect/comprehension limited? Is it all to do with imagination? Do we need to picture it in order to understand it? Although there are certain concepts that we comprehend but can't imagine, e. g. Infinity, why?

Jen Todd Jones answered on 14 Mar 2013:

Our intellect or comprehension is not limited by the size of our brain necessarily, actually our brain may well be capable of more than we use it for at the moment. But what does limit us is our memory capacity, we cannot easily remember every single thing we’ve ever seen, done and thought – without our intellect can only be good to a level.

I wouldn’t say it’s ‘all’ to do with imagination but it certainly is important, Einstein the famous scientist had a great quote about imagination: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” (). Imagination is important for thinking about ideas and concepts that noone else may ever have thought of!

It’s an interesting question about whether we need to see something to understand it, we can’t ‘see’ infinity, or gravity, or really electricity! But we know they’re there and we know how they function, imagination is an important part of this. We remember rules about these things like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, it is different depending on your altitude in the world and it changes on other planets because of the change in mass of the planet – by remembering these rules we can know the idea, even though we never need to see a picture of it drawn.