Jackie Andrade and Jon May on imagination, lemons and Functional Imagery Training

Rob Hopkins

Welcome to our last blog of 2018. I'd like to thank you for joining me on this journey over the year and for your support and enthusiasm. Jackie Andrade is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth whose work focuses on imagination and how we can imagine different futures for ourselves and use that to help change our behaviour. Jon May is also a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth and his work also focuses on imagination and how it affects decision making, motivation and creativity. Over the last 20 years they have developed an approach called Functional Imagery Training which has many insights to offer to our exploration of imagination and its ability to change the real world around us. I took the train to Plymouth and we sat in Jackie's office and had a fascinating conversation that, as Jackie later put it after reviewing the transcript, is "almost a whole manifesto for behaviour change". I started by asking them to get us an outline of Functional Imagery Training. What is it, and what does their research tell us about how it works?