Visual Mental Imagery Training

SarahNibs

36 Visual Mental Imagery Training

19th Feb 2013

5 min read

36

Previously: Generalizing From One Example

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.

Summary: I do not have visual mental imagery. I want it. How do I get it? What exercises, if any, will help?

In further detail... Here's Francis Galton's Statistics of Mental Imagery paper. I'm not quite at the 3% level of completely unable to form mental images, but I'm close. In particular there are three times I have vivid, sharp mental imagery, and the existence of such times tells me I have the brain hardware to visualize. It's enough to let me know that I want it all the time. Unfortunately I don't know how to get it. And searching online has proven difficult and frustrating... for example this article is first of all about a different meaning of "visualize", it's talking about some kind of self-help motivational thingy, and second of all it starts by saying "How to Visualize: I want you to relax and close your eyes. Picture a hot, sunny day at the beach."

Full Stop. Halt, Catch Fire and Burn.

That's already too far. For those of us who don't visualize, practice definitely does not consist of pulling up mental images, playing with them in new ways, and expanding our imagination. I'm very good at imagination in some ways, but I lack that first ability to pull up a mental image. That's what I want to learn how to have!

Here is a description of what I can do, what I have tried, what I have learned, etc.

I see vivid visual mental imagery in 3 situations:

While dreaming. My recollection of dreams has that I see fairly vivid, sharp, whole-scene imagery.
Just before sleep. When I am in a certain almost-sleeping state, I can tell my mind to picture something - like an apple, or a horse - and I will often be able to see that thing vividly, briefly, and then it morphs into a scene. A beach with an ocean, or a pleasant clearing in a forest. If I try to alter the scene, like putting a beach towel and umbrella on the beach, the scene changes and morphs in some way but seemingly without regard to the changes I requested. Maybe my POV starts moving forward down a newly created path in the forest, for example.
During meditation. Sometimes I feel like I'm in exactly the same mental state during meditation as I am just before sleep, except without the tiredness. The imagery has the same characteristics in both situations.

I have tried 3 classes of practice:

Staying in visualization situations. When I find myself in the just before sleep or meditation state, I stay there for a while and play with imagery. This is fun but I have seen no increase in control over what I visualize and no increase in the range of states in which I can visualize.
Explicit imagery practice. I have found or drawn simple shapes, like a square or a ball, then stared at the shape, closed my eyes, seen the shape for as long as it stayed visualizable, opened my eyes to refresh, repeat. This straight up hasn't worked at all. I don't visualize it, only have the afterimage, and need to refresh within about a second.
Object drawing. I have had 3D constructions of blocks and tried drawing them from different angles on paper. This is an exercise I did while growing up during summers. Unfortunately there was no actual imagery or mental rotation involved, I just logic'd out where lines must surely go and drew like that.

Here is what my mental imagery looks like, per Francis Galton's questions.

Picturing breakfast. The image is extraordinarily dim, extraordinarily ill-defined (at most an edge or two changing the black-purple-brown background static texture), and not at all natural colors.
Vividness of Mental Imagery scale. This is a sequence of 100 descriptions of imagery, organized approximately in order from most vivid to least vivid. Of the given responses I identify most strongly with 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, and 99.

Here are my results on Marks' Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire: 4s on everything except 5s on 4, 6, 9, 11, 14. Results suspect since I had exactly one 5 on every section. Marks suspects, unofficially, that those without visual mental imagery may actually have it but be unable to consciously notice/report that they have it.

I read through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Mental Imagery, following links to places or ideas that looked promising. I have many forms of mental imagery: good aural, very good verbal, very good analytic, good motor, poor yet extant haptic. But not visual.

Eric Schwitzgebel questions our introspection about mental imagery in general based on the lack of correlation between scores on Marks' VVIQ and subjects' ability to perform certain tasks that "psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery". Such tasks include mental rotation and visual memory, both of which I can perform easily. I find it blindingly obvious that actual visual mental imagery is not required for these tasks. Here is my own introspection about mental imagery: what I call Imagination is sufficient for all the tasks that supposedly require visual imagery.

Does anyone know of (tested?) exercises for developing visual mental imagery from scratch?

Does anyone know that developing visual mental imagery from scratch is likely impossible?

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36 Visual Mental Imagery Training

by SarahNibs

19th Feb 2013

5 min read

36

Previously: Generalizing From One Example

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.

Summary: I do not have visual mental imagery. I want it. How do I get it? What exercises, if any, will help?

Full Stop. Halt, Catch Fire and Burn.

Here is a description of what I can do, what I have tried, what I have learned, etc.

I see vivid visual mental imagery in 3 situations:

While dreaming. My recollection of dreams has that I see fairly vivid, sharp, whole-scene imagery.
Just before sleep. When I am in a certain almost-sleeping state, I can tell my mind to picture something - like an apple, or a horse - and I will often be able to see that thing vividly, briefly, and then it morphs into a scene. A beach with an ocean, or a pleasant clearing in a forest. If I try to alter the scene, like putting a beach towel and umbrella on the beach, the scene changes and morphs in some way but seemingly without regard to the changes I requested. Maybe my POV starts moving forward down a newly created path in the forest, for example.
During meditation. Sometimes I feel like I'm in exactly the same mental state during meditation as I am just before sleep, except without the tiredness. The imagery has the same characteristics in both situations.

I have tried 3 classes of practice:

Staying in visualization situations. When I find myself in the just before sleep or meditation state, I stay there for a while and play with imagery. This is fun but I have seen no increase in control over what I visualize and no increase in the range of states in which I can visualize.
Explicit imagery practice. I have found or drawn simple shapes, like a square or a ball, then stared at the shape, closed my eyes, seen the shape for as long as it stayed visualizable, opened my eyes to refresh, repeat. This straight up hasn't worked at all. I don't visualize it, only have the afterimage, and need to refresh within about a second.
Object drawing. I have had 3D constructions of blocks and tried drawing them from different angles on paper. This is an exercise I did while growing up during summers. Unfortunately there was no actual imagery or mental rotation involved, I just logic'd out where lines must surely go and drew like that.

Here is what my mental imagery looks like, per Francis Galton's questions.

Picturing breakfast. The image is extraordinarily dim, extraordinarily ill-defined (at most an edge or two changing the black-purple-brown background static texture), and not at all natural colors.
Vividness of Mental Imagery scale. This is a sequence of 100 descriptions of imagery, organized approximately in order from most vivid to least vivid. Of the given responses I identify most strongly with 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, and 99.

Does anyone know of (tested?) exercises for developing visual mental imagery from scratch?

Does anyone know that developing visual mental imagery from scratch is likely impossible?

TechniquesPractical

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SarahNibs13y70

I was given an excellent geometry problem by Dr. Nigel Thomas.

It might be worth attempting to see how you perform on certain types of spatial thinking problems that most people claim to use imagery to solve (although no correlation seems to exist between spatial thinking ability and the vividness that people report their imagery to have). Try to solve the problem below, in your head, without drawing diagrams or making calculations on paper or anything like that. The four narrow sides of a 1 cm by 4 cm by 4 cm block are painted red. The top and bottom are painted blue. The block is then cut into sixteen 1 cm cubes.

How many cubes have both red and blue faces?

How many cubes have one red and two blue faces?

How many cubes have no painted faces? Most people say they use imagery to do this, and count the relevant cubes in their image. Were you able to solve all or any part of the problem at all? Did it seem very difficult? How, in fact, did you solve it (if you did)? Did you have to consciously employ any formal knowledge of geometry or other mathematics (beyond counting)?

When I solved this, I had the interesting experience of Imagining the 4x4 block of 16 blocks, noting that the outside ones (all but 4) had red paint on them, and all of them had blue paint... but I only "put" blue paint on the top. My diagram was flat, oriented like a pancake. None of this was Mental Imagery. Then when I was asked how many cubes had red and blue faces, I felt around the edges of the block. Motor/haptic mental imagery. Then when I was asked how many cubes had 1 red and 2 blue faces, I immediately thought the question was 1 red and 1 blue since I didn't have blue paint on the bottom in my model (I'm not sure if I had a bottom in my model). I thought "when would they have more than 1 red? ah the corners", and then had the distinct vivid motor mental imagery of moving my hand and touching two non-corner side blocks on the left of my model, then two at the far side, then two on the right, then two on the near side, counting "2, 4, 6, 8". This was a different experience than my usual Imagining... but I'm not sure if it was qualitatively different or just more "vivid" motor mental imagery.

JuJuMagumbo12y10

Did anyone else have trouble recalling the red vs blue sides? (based on my experience with this (below), it seems as though my mental association was essentially "top and bottom are same" and "narrows are same" but neither really had a color. When I close my eyes, I don't see "red" or "blue")

At first I was imagining a 1cm by 1cm by 4cm block. I then realized that getting the 16 cubes of 1cm each out of this wasn't possible and then went to the accurate idea of a 4 by 4 by 1. I realize I am having a great deal of tro... (read more)

1ESRogs13y

This is very interesting. I am having trouble understanding the experience of imagining the 4x4 block of 16 blocks well enough to note that there are four interior blocks w/o red paint on them without picturing them. I could imagine that this could be done with just logic (reasoning about how many blocks there must be in different categories, which is maybe how I would do it if the problem were more complex, or took place in four dimensions for example), but you said you had a diagram... So it sounds like you did have mental imagery, it was just 2-d instead of 3-d. But apparently that wasn't very vivid, because you still had to do the haptic imagery thing. How vivid is the experience of this motor mental imagery for you? I'm wondering if I'm missing out on that in the way that you're missing out on more vivid visual mental imagery.

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