I may forget what you said, but I will never forget how you made me feel with your imagination!

Though our 100 million sensory receptors enable us to see, hear, feel, taste and smell the real world, our 10,000 billion brain synapses allow us to relate new data to stored memories and ideas - to experience things that never happened.

A teenage prodigy named Ludwig van Beethoven was struggling with thoughts of suicide, our young musical icon had begun to lose his hearing. Beethoven choose to live, however, and to continue his work as a composer, though as he became increasingly deaf, his works became more difficult to understand. It was during his years of total deafness that he answered a critic by saying, "They are not for you, but for a later age."

Just like you and me and Ludwig, we have the amazing ability to see with our eyes closed and to hear when there is no sound. We can touch what isn't there and taste what we have not yet eaten. In the real world, imagination makes no sense but it makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and, perhaps most important, what might be.

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