In February 1953, a violent North Sea storm [4] crashed through the Dutch levee system, killing 1,835 people and leaving a hundred thousand others homeless. In the aftermath, the country responded by building the Delta Works [5], the world’s most sophisticated system of flood defenses. According to John McQuaid [6], a reporter for Mother Jones [7] on assignment in the Netherlands, the system is “engineered to a safety standard 100 times more stringent than the current goal (not yet achieved) for New Orleans’ most heavily populated areas. Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.” As one government engineer told McQuaid, conceiving and building the Delta Works “was like putting a man on the moon.”

That was half a century ago. Why the disparity between what the Dutch could accomplish then, and what the U.S. (the country that did put a man on the moon) has conceived to protect New Orleans, one of its most historic and treasured cities, and the surrounding region? You can call it foresight, or innovation, but beyond that, what the Dutch response required—and where we appear to be failing in our response to the aftermath of Katrina—was tremendous imagination.

Imagination is an intangible, unlimited, and free resource. It is not, at least for the purposes of this discussion, the same as fantasy, where universal laws cease to apply, where elephants might speak Latin or humans travel back in time. Nor is imagination reserved for artistic pursuits, though imagination is the core of creativity. Applying imagination to problem-solving requires the ability to come up with an idea, and to break that idea down into the steps that will bring it to fruition. It also requires an alchemical mix of will, vision, discipline, and action, not to mention stubborn perseverance in the face of frustration or opposition.

A prime example of this use of imagination would be George Hotz [10], the seventeen-year-old who spent all summer cracking Apple’s iPhone; he broke the lock that tied the phone to AT&T’s wireless network and freed it for use on other carriers’ networks, even overseas ones. Hotz spent five hundred hours with four online collaborators, and was motivated by the challenge and by “fun.”

Presently, imagination of this sort is very much in demand. One wake-up call to the erosion of imagination in American culture came in 2004, when “failure of imagination” was cited in the 9/11 commission report as the primary reason U.S. officials misjudged the threat of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Maybe government officials couldn’t imagine terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center, but plenty of others could and did—and not just those who actually carried out the long-planned and highly complex attack. The ability to prevent terrorist attacks depends on leaders who are as imaginative as those who would carry them out.

While imagination is one key to national security, it’s also crucial to economic security. In 2004, executives at leading technology companies like Dell, Cypress Semiconductor, and IBM spoke to Lee Todd, president of the University of Kentucky, about creating sustainable jobs for the U.S. in the years to come. All said the same thing, according to Todd: Imagination and creativity represent the future of the U.S. economy. On a broader level, the World Economic Forum chose “The Creative Imperative [11]” as the theme for its 2006 conference in Davos, Switzerland. Writers like Daniel Pink [12], author of A Whole New Mind, point to the new “imagination economy [13]” as a trend that’s just taking off. He sees it in quite simple terms: “People have to be able to do something that can’t be outsourced,” Pink told me. “Something that’s hard to automate and that delivers on the growing demand for nonmaterial things like stories and design. Typically these are things we associate with the right side of the brain, with artistic and empathetic and playful sorts of abilities.”

Government leaders in education are joining the chorus, too. “American education’s single-minded focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (‘STEM’ subjects) is admirable but misguided,” wrote two former assistant U.S. secretaries of education in the August 12 issue of The Wall Street Journal Online [14]. What makes America competitive in a shrinking global economy, they claimed, is “our people’s creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition, and problem-solving prowess.” As they summed it up, true success—economic, civic, cultural, domestic, military—depends on a broadly educated populace with “flowers and leaves as well as stems.”

If imagination is the answer to what ails us, what’s the big problem? We may be at a disadvantage with other countries in math and science, but imagination is practically built into the American character. For the immigrants instrumental in building this nation, from the Pilgrims to the most recent arrivals, leaving the homeland required not just guts, but the ability to envision—to imagine—a better life. So did figuring out how to survive once they arrived here. Combined with a hearty work ethic (another badge of U.S. pride), imagination is what propelled this country into world leadership, what got our man on the moon. The question, it seems, is whether America’s strong suit is inheritable.

“Adult life begins in a child’s imagination,” said Dana Gioia [15], speaking before the graduating class of Stanford University last June. “And we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.” By that, Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, meant that we’ve pawned off the task of imagination to commercial manufacturers of marketing and entertainment. They feed us an endless stream of stock imagery and flashy distractions—“content” that comes predigested and does little or nothing in the way of encouraging us to form our own mental images, ideas, or stories. With this type of passive consumption, a person’s imagination is no less an overfed and undernourished couch-potato than her body.

Gioia’s speech lamented a “cultural impoverishment” that he said was evident in a widespread lack of interest in the arts and artists—a situation that he blamed on the media’s preoccupation with entertainers and athletes. Indeed, some of Stanford’s graduating class was rather unimpressed with the selection of Gioia as speaker: They didn’t think he was famous enough. Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t really show up on TV—or YouTube or MySpace or anywhere that might have given him some credibility or at least name recognition among the graduates. It’s hard for the work of poets—not to mention that of scientists, writers, painters, thinkers—to compete with the continual stream of spectacle produced by the likes of Britney Spears and Michael Vick, in a market where young people spend 44.5 hours each week in front of computer, TV, and video-game screens (and this figure, from 2005 research, is too dated to adequately consider the explosion in cell-phone texting as additional screen time).

Much has been discussed about whether all these hours spent in front of screens are contributing factors in the explosion of ADD, aggression, autism, and obesity in children and teenagers. What I’d like to consider—and there is some compelling research on this—is what kids are not doing during those 44.5 hours of screen time (besides not reading Gioia’s poetry), and how whatever it is they’re not doing might haunt them in adulthood.

“We’re engaged in a huge experiment where we’ve fundamentally changed the experience of childhood,” said Ed Miller. Currently a senior staff member for the Maryland-based Alliance for Childhood [18], Miller has a long history in education as a professor, policy analyst, and former editor of the Harvard Education Letter. “We don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We’re robbing kids of their birthright: the access to free, unstructured play of their own making.”

Note that Miller didn’t just say “Kids are not playing like they used to.” By “free and unstructured play,” he means activity that is unencumbered by adult direction, and does not depend on manufactured items or rules imposed by someone other than the kids themselves. He is referring to the kind of play that is not dependent on meddling or praise or validation from well-meaning parents on the sidelines. In fact, free and unstructured play is so encompassing for children that the entire adult world evaporates; children lose themselves in their own world completely. Most anyone who’s ever jolted a child out of this state with a call for lunch or bedtime would attest that the child’s reaction is akin to being awakened from a dream.

This type of play, both potent and transporting, has all but disappeared from contemporary childhood, Miller notes. Cognitive scientists, who investigate the basic logic that allows children to learn so much about the world so quickly, are worried. This “basic logic” also allows children “to envision possible future worlds, very different from the worlds we inhabit now, and to bring those worlds into being,” says Alison Gopnik [19]. An international leader in the field of children’s learning and author of The Scientist in the Crib, Gopnik explains that “this ability to imagine alternative possibilities and make them real—literally to change the world—is a deeply important part of our evolutionary inheritance.”

For many children, that inheritance has been jeopardized. Middle— and upper—income children are especially pinched. Certainly, these kids play. Playgrounds haven’t been abandoned; toys are not obsolete. But today’s kids cram a lot of activities each week in between those forty-plus screen hours, from music lessons to soccer games to science club to supervised “play dates.” And parents’ heightened fears, fueled by the media saturation coverage when certain children go missing, further conspires to keep kids indoors and under someone’s watchful eye.

Roger Hart’s [22] latest research on this topic has him rattled. Hart is a geographer, professor of environmental and developmental psychology at City University of New York, and the founder of the Children’s Environments Research Group. Thirty-three years ago, as a dissertation project, he studied eighty-six children in a rural Vermont village. “I realized nobody had really studied the natural history of kids,” he told me. “We know more about the ecology of baboons than the ecology of children.” Hart’s findings, published in 1978, revealed that children’s experience of “place” in the 1970s involved time they spent alone, or with peers, exploring their outdoor environment.

Recently, Hart initiated a new series of observations in the same rural village, and found stark differences from his original data.

“Thirty-three years ago, a nine-year-old boy could run anywhere he wanted. Now, that freedom is withheld until at least adolescence. And even then, the kid has to tell the parent where he’s going,” Hart said. “Today, most children in town don’t ever play outside alone.”

Much has been written about the effects of such limitations: We’re over-protecting our children, putting them at risk for obesity, and so on. But Hart is interested in speculating beyond those issues. “For example,” he mused, “it’s interesting to ask what it means when children spend less time with other children, or when they no longer direct their own play. They rely on adult direction or the implicit direction in manufactured activity. You tell the kid to go out and play, and the kid says, ‘Play what?’ ”

“A willingness to explore, a love of adventure, of finding a new path—all that was part of the experience of children’s play for all of history right up ‘til the last fifteen years or so,” said Ed Miller of the Alliance for Childhood. Adults who emerge from modern childhoods lacking those qualities may also lack the skills most essential to flourish in the “imagination economy” of the future. But there are other, even greater risks, Miller says. “I think there will be serious implications for the future of the environment and of democracy,” he said. He points to problem-solving around global climate change as an example. “We need to take strong collective action, but there isn’t enough collective imagination for people to truly picture the consequences in a vivid enough way to do something about it.”

Part of the lack of action around climate change might stem from the difficulties, in a culture largely shielded from most violent effects of weather, in imagining such far-reaching consequences. However, that general sort of inertia around a pressing issue—the inertia that Miller believes stems from an atrophied imagination—plays out in other arenas as well.

“If free play is essential for kids to become free agents with autonomy, who know they deserve a voice in public decision making, then we may be in serious trouble,” he said, pointing to “a new kind of tyranny where people are more and more willing to let authorities make decisions for them.” The public reaction—or lack thereof—to government wire-tapping and surveillance are, he believes, early warning signs of this increasing apathy and compliance. “People are willing to let the government spy on them and monitor their calls and emails because they can’t think of any other way to stay safe. Fundamental issues of privacy and individual rights are really changing. Maybe that’s inevitable. But I hope not.”

Human nature seems almost to require that every generation bemoan the attitudes and prospects of younger generations. Even so, to think that the relentless pace of change in the last century will not have serious effects is naïve.

It’s not news that the United States is losing ground as a leader in the global economy. How is that linked to the imaginative powers of its citizens? One way to look at it is through patents: A decade ago, American companies and engineers were granted ten thousand more U.S. patents than foreign entities, but that lead has now dwindled to four thousand. In 2004, only four American companies ranked among the top ten recipients of patents granted by the patent office. And despite the aforementioned “single-minded focus on science, technology, engineering, and math” in American education, less than a year ago a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine [25] stated that “scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gaining strength.” Intel cofounder Andy Grove [26] quoted in Newsweek, was more blunt, saying that America is going “down the tubes, and the worst part is nobody knows it.”

Civic participation is another barometer of the health of the American imagination. Four years on, the Iraq war has become as unpopular with the public as the Vietnam war was in 1968, yet where are the protestors? Analysts say Americans aren’t marching because the alternative to war is not clear—and because, with no military draft, people are largely unaffected by the conflict they oppose. “The Iraq war, as bad as it is, touches a far smaller percentage of the population than Vietnam did,” said Charles Franklin [27], a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, quoted in the Agence France-Presse. “That does dramatically reduce the self-interest that people have in opposing the war,” he observed.

Factor in as well an attention-getting new study that reveals a generation of highly narcissistic college students, a trait that does not tend to foster that alchemical mix of vision, will, discipline, and action necessary to solve pressing societal problems. In 2006, two-thirds of students had above-average scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a thirty-percent increase over 1982. One of the researchers pointed to online phenomena like MySpace and YouTube, saying that both encourage attention-seeking and navel-gazing. This kind of self-involvement may also help explain why adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four are now the least likely to turn up at the ballot box.

America, said Dana Gioia, is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups: one that passively consumes electronic entertainment, and one that uses technology but also participates in the arts, sports, exercise—and volunteers at three times the rate of the other group. The factor that differentiates these groups is not based on income, geography, or education, but simply on whether people read for pleasure and participate in the arts. In his Stanford speech, Gioia said, “A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed in the way that child would be by spending time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.” Or by reading a book. A 2004 NEA study correlated a decline in literary reading with increased participation in a variety of electronic media, and noted that it “foreshadows an erosion in cultural and civic participation” because literary readers volunteer, do charity work, and attend arts and sports events more frequently than their non-reading peers. The report predicted that “at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.”

Just as adults are turning away from reading, professors across the country are bemoaning the lack of writing skills among college freshmen—another task requiring imagination. Educators say that because of the No Child Left Behind Act’s [30] emphasis on basic skills and multiple-choice testing, they no longer have time to teach a complex, creative skill like writing. Composition is a skill that has been used to change the world time and again; for example, support for American independence and for the Revolutionary War hinged heavily on the well-articulated argument put forth in Thomas Paine’s [31] pamphlet Common Sense, which was reproduced a staggering half-million times. In failing to write effectively, we further risk failing to articulate our ideas through speech, at least with enough clarity and persuasion to make a difference.

Then there’s the decline in so-called “soft” skills among young people. In Where Do the Children Play? [32], a public television documentary to be broadcast next month, pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg says that through free, child-driven play, kids determine their own strengths and weaknesses; they also learn peer negotiation and become familiar with taking chances and forging ahead in the face of mistakes and failures—all traits that employers fear are waning in young new workers.

In a September 2007 report, “Under-Equipped and Unprepared: America’s Emerging Workforce and the Soft Skills Gap [33],” America’s Promise Alliance declared that “a large percentage of the children and youth who will enter the workforce … are lacking enough of the ‘soft’ or applied skills—such as teamwork, decision making, and communication—that will help them become effective employees and managers.”

Given what’s coming out of all these studies, it’s questionable whether tomorrow’s adults are learning to use the tools they’ll need to succeed. David Walsh [34], founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family [35] in Minneapolis, agrees that the changes raining down on our youngest generation are more enormous than those faced by any other. “Whenever revolutionary things happen in the world of technology, they have a big impact on society,” he said. “The printing press—that took us out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance. It would be naïve to think this latest profusion of technology wouldn’t have a dramatic impact on the way kids are being raised.”

His response to the impact of technology is articulated in his ninth and most recent book, No: Why Kids—of All Ages—Need to Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It. Encouraging more limits for kids, Walsh says, provides a counterbalance to the media’s onslaught of what he calls “more, easy, fast, and fun.” More than a third of kids under six have a TV in their bedrooms, he notes. “They’re more wired than they were yesterday, and tomorrow they’ll be more so again. So we have to figure out how to maximize the benefits and minimize the harm.”

Jane McGonigal [36] is an award-winning designer of computer games and a passionate believer in figuring out ways to maximize the benefits of technology for a wired generation. On her blog, she writes: “I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I’m trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032.”

Maybe she will. Last year she completed her PhD at the age of twenty-nine and was named one of the world’s top innovators under the age of thirty-five by MIT’s Technology Review. Now she teaches at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. McGonigal wonders how people and computers could become so connected that collectively they would act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers. She’s deeply interested in French philosopher Pierre L´evy’s [37] theories in “collective intelligence,” and the impact of internet technologies on the cultural production and consumption of knowledge. L´evy has argued that the internet should “mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity” in new and unexpected ways. He also predicted that we are passing from the “Cartesian cogito”—I think, therefore I am—to “cogitamus”—we think, therefore we are.

McGonigal herself believes there’s nothing inherently more imaginative about staring at a tree or drawing with chalk on the sidewalk than there is in confronting a virtual-world monster or creating digital graffiti. “I can give you one or two research findings that say otherwise,” says Stuart Brown [40]. The founder of the National Institute for Play [41], Brown’s recent efforts have focused on the relationship between play and brain development in humans. “You put a subject into a CAT scan or MRI machine—which measure real-time blood flow into the brain—and you have that person looking at a virtual image, say a hand holding a ball, and then compare that to the person looking at an actual hand holding an actual ball.” What goes on in the brain, he says, is entirely different with each process. “The second one activates the frontal cortex and many other areas of the brain in a much more integrated way.” Virtual images stimulate the brain and stimulate imagination, he allows—but “it’s probably arousal without much integration with the whole of the brain.”

Brown’s point touches on a crucial area: The differences between an adult’s nervous system and a child’s. Children’s rapidly forming brains are unalterably influenced by the nature of their experiences. These differences are at the heart of the recent ban on cold medicines for very young children proposed by safety experts at the Food and Drug Administration, which has recently gone back on its assumption that children’s bodies are simply smaller versions of adult ones. The same goes for the assumption that TV and computer screens affect a child’s brain in the same way as an adult’s. Which is, in part, why the American Academy of Pediatrics urges keeping kids under two away from the TV.

Unlike adults, children do not choose their environments or experiences, or the cultural norms that literally determine the way their brains will develop. And so the developing imagination is at its most vulnerable in babies and toddlers, in grade-school children, in unfolding adolescents whose minds are malleable and open and at the mercy of whatever environment, whatever experiences we adults either provide or deny.

British historian Arnold J. Toynbee [42] said that apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: “First, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.” That kind of imagination is the cognitive fuel that put a man on the moon, and that could help forestall the wreckage of another Katrina. But the fate of the American imagination seems also to be governed by an old adage—one that is tricky for cognitive scientists and brain researchers to prove in context, even though it’s simple enough for any first-grader to grasp: If we don’t use it, we may lose it.