Visual Mental Imagery Training

Oxiracetam might improve it.

I've tried a several nootropics (piracetam, modafinil, pramiracetam, aniracetam, choline, sulbutiamine, others) and had varying results.

I took 800mg oxiracetam 3 days in a row, and found that I could visualise maths equations that I had seen on paper but did not yet understand. It was similar to having photographic memory. My head felt like an empty cave with caverns I could explore.

I stopped taking it after the 3rd night, when I heard an imaginary voice say "Good night!" as I was in that fuzzy area between asleep and awake. It spooked me out ("what if i permanently hear voices now?!") and kept me awake a couple hours from fear. In those couple hours I had mild HPPD (tried revising more and the words were wobbling on the paper).

The next day there were no side effects, and have been none since (never taken it again). I have read extensively on all major nootropics communities and posted on several - nobody else seems to have had the negative side effects that I mentioned. I also get the impression that the near-photographic-memory I received was rare too, although I have read one of two posts where people have mentioned it over the last 3 years.

I think both oxiracetam and aniracetam lowered the quality of my sleep too, but have not quantified this.

I no longer take nootropics, except piracetam, which I use as a replacement to alcohol for parties - it makes me extremely social, creative at talking (as if on a lesser form of mdma), able to process three people speaking at once (I cant do two normally (very few people can)), confidence boost. And there is no hangover.

Oxiracetam has not been around long enough for there to be long-term results from human use. Piracetam has, and there are no long term side effects that have been observed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxiracetam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam

1. Pick a video game. Preferably something with a lot of consistent imagery/gameplay. A racing game running the same map would be a great example.

2. Play this video game from when you wake up to when you go to bed, with minimal time for breaks or distractions.

3. After hours of having these images burned into your retinas, randomly try closing your eyes for just a moment or two and rest your brain every once in a while.. When I'm playing video games intensely and then I shut my eyes, sometimes it's like I never even shut them in the first place - all the images are still mostly there and still mostly behaving as I've been watching them behave (e.g. I'm involuntarily visualizing the walls rushing by as I make turns in the race, etc. My eyes feel funny and then I realize they are actually closed! holy crap! etc...).

I've found first-person games like FPS or racing games to be the most intense and reliable in producing this effect. You might also get better results at different times of the day (e.g. alone in a quiet room in the middle of the night). But it works with any game, or really just in general I can close my eyes and have the scene flashing in my mind.

Here's another thing to try:

Walk casually around your house or another familiar area. With your eyes closed. Only once every few seconds (or when you think you really need to) - as quickly as you can, blink your eyes open and instantly shut again. Try to retain as much information as possible for the next few seconds of your blind walk so you don't run into things or step on things. You will be amazed at how normally you can perform with scant visual information.

er, also note that trying to visualize something from nothing can be extremely hard. For example I cannot look at someone's face and then imagine them in all kinds of new facial expressions that I've never actually seen on them before. If you try to change something you're not really equipped to visualize, it will just seem like an amorphous blob or an abstract symbolic designation rather than striking visual imagery. If this happens with something like geometry, that probably means you just need to spend more time trying until you get it, but don't be too surprised if you're trying to visualize this massively detailed scene of real-life visualizations, and things just aren't as vivid as you like. Visualizing geometry and relatively abstract scenes is way, way less demanding than trying to manipulate the full visual resolution of real-life images in your mind.

Lo these many years later: the term "aphantasia" has been coined (2015) for the absence of visual imagination, and there's starting to be more research on the topic. The University of Exeter seems to be the main home for such research: https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/research/healthresearch/cognitive-neurology/theeyesmind/ .

Can you solve problems in geometry in your head? For example: How many edges does a dodecahedron have? Prove that the medians of a triangle are concurrent. How long is the altitude of a regular tetrahedron? How many Platonic solids are there in 4 dimensions?

I stumbled across this thread randomly trying to look up this very information.

I have pretty much no visual imagination at all, with my eyes closed I see no shapes, no movement, not even colour. On Mark's Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire I am 5s all the way down. Close to sleep or in meditation at best I get faint movement, like very dim "white" light. I can however weigh in on some things.

1. I draw quite well, to the extent that I can draw portraits that look very much like the person, despite the fact that I can't see their face at all in my mind's eye. For a long time I had an irrational fear that I wouldn't recognize someone I knew well when I was going to meet them cause I couldn't picture their face, of course I always did. And I don't confuse people at all, but I do have a terrible memory for faces and sometimes need to meet a person more than once to be able to recognize them readily.

2. I can recall and even have lucid dreams. I'm not good at lucid dreaming. I've been trying off and on for years, and fairly intensely for the past year, but have only had a handful, 4 to be precise. My dream recall however is quite good, but I remember the narrative more than the visuals. Interestingly though, remembering dreams is the closest I get to seeing with my mind's eye, but it is fleeting and comes in flashes, and then nothing.

3. I have an excellent sense of direction and never get lost. Going somewhere once is enough for me to remember how to get there, but I don't have a visual mental map, it's more like sensing movement in different directions. It's more kinesthetic than visual. I sense a direction, then sense which way to turn ect... I'm also quite good at those shape orientation tests, where you are given an usual shape and have to match it with it in a different position in a line up of similar looking shapes.

I often feel as though it's not that I'm incapable of holding a mental image, it's just that I think it is a subconscious process for me, so that even though I can't actively imagine a friend's face, a visual map, or a rotated shape, somewhere below my awareness I in fact do "see" it and the information bubbles up when needed. I really want to see if I can learn to consciously create and experience a mental image, and I discovered one trick that gets me closer than anything else I've tried.

I can't visualize an apple on command, but if i'm looking at the colour red, sometimes I can picture an apple, or if I look at the colour green, sometimes I can visualize grass. The act of looking at the colour seems to be like a scaffold on which I can build a mental image. I'm hoping with practice this could lead to seeing it without the colour stimulus.

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton

I believe that this is historically false and the debate continued for many more decades. I bring this up because I think it is important to keep track of what kinds of evidence are historically convincing.

When reading a fiction novel, do you imagine a scene in which the characters are interacting, or do you just see words on a page?

Just wondering, what happens when you try to recall a movie you saw, or someone's face, or a drawing?

Do we actually have an objective test for the quality of visual imagery? (as compared to subjective quality of it.) What I'm thinking of is something like the mental rotation experiments, proving that in fact there is a representation of images in our heads... but with somewhat more complicated images. Or scenes.

Otherwise... I think I have good imagination abilities (I was also once told so while solving math problems involving rotating cubes), but my subjective quality levels are similar: pictures are somewhat vague, especially compared the ones I can get on 20 hour long bus trips in the middle of the night, half asleep. But isn't it just about the fact that in half-asleep states, we accept anything as real, even it's not really representing anything Euclidean?

For me at least, mental imagery is different from dreaming in that the images feel like they are above and/or behind my eyes (outside of the normal visual field), whereas dream images appear in the normal visual field.

Mainly, I think you practice like you would any skill, controlling motivation, repetition, difficulty, etc. I would be very surprised if sustained training yielded no improvement.

I know I've read books on it before. Never applied myself for any length of time, so can't give a fair assessment.

And for your own training, I don't think 2 was the right thing. That might help you to hold an image, but I don't see it helping you generate the image to hold. 3 doesn't look helpful either - I don't think logicking it out would help.

And even 1 is questionable, as you're trying to maintain pieces of a sleep state. That might allow you to visualize if you can pull it off generating enough of a sleep state.

Try to do colors. Then basic shapes. Try eyes open, eyes closed. I find it easier to in the basic Matrix white space. Try to get a 3d image, instead of 2d. Maybe simple isn't the right way. Maybe a natural scene with detail is easier. And also, see about adding other sensory modalities. I'm probably best at "visualizing" sound.

A lot of dance and movement theorists recommend "visualizing" body movement as well.

Basically, you're just learning how to control and train your nervous system, so I think a lot of movement theory would transfer. I wonder if Feldenkrais ever had anything to say on visual visualization. He's very good on movement and learning theories.

From some light introspection, it seems like my mental imagery is comparable to yours, but probably somewhat better. (E.g. I would mostly answer 4s to Marks' Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, with a few 3s and maybe one or two 2s in there, however all images I see are very fleeting/morph rapidly.)

So, with that said, the "full" (as opposed to momentary, fleeting) visualisation I find easiest while (mostly) awake is that of locations I'm familiar with. I can imagine myself in a room in my house (or previous houses I've lived in), and "look" around, taking notice of objects that should be in various locations. By mentally examining each area in a room in detail, I can bring to mind what should be where and add it to the "image". Eventually, I'll have built up a decent moderately visual image of the room (if I'm fully awake, it's not completely vivid, but I can move as I please and be able to tell what sort of vague picture I should see when looking in any particular direction). You could perhaps try doing that sort of thing and see if it helps and maybe it'll help in more general cases too (possibly).

The other thing you could try is self-hypnosis. There are a lot of files floating around the internet that allege to help you visualise some scene, and some of them purport to be things like "imagination training" and whatnot. Mind you, from my brief attempts, they completely failed to work for me (in the sense that I failed to get hypnotised), but since you have experience with meditation, maybe you'll have an easier time with it. Admittedly, I suspect this won't help, but if you're running low on ideas, it might be something to try.

I was able to fantasize very vividly after doing the following the other night, though am not sure if these caused it:

(1) I did a tarot card spread.

(2) I focused on a tarot card, then drew randomly in ink over a blank canvas, while also focusing on and being inspired by sensations in my body.

(3) I improvised some dance movements while looking at what I drew.

(4) I looked through some (paper) photo collages I made.

Is it a wise idea to take any chemicals to acquire a skill?

You can not visualize if you've never actively exercised your mental muscle. As you all know, it's the same with everything else: there's no shortcut when learning anything - you have to invest serious time in learning.

We're just among the people who somehow "unlearned" using this wonderful ability (I'm convinced that all of us were able to visualize easily in our childhood).

I'm now 37 and I had to relearn it myself - by practicing everyday for at least 30 minutes staring at candles, geometric shapes, flickr-images, etc. - now after a couple of months I proved to myself: "This is something you CAN learn!"

And, it's worth every minute of time invested.

So, please guys, don't take any chemicals that in the end might just harm you. At least go through a month of disciplined mind-workout to prove to yourself that you have a weakened visualization-muscle that urgently needs your dedicated attention.

Practice at least for 10-15 minutes a day. You can find a selection of exercises on the Learn How To Visualize post.

I'd like the satisfaction of getting some of you to prove this to yourself, too. Just too many people believe that something is wrong with them.

Have you tried your hand at drawing?

It is not quite the same skill, but being able to notice/See things as they are (closer to raw visual input) rather than letting your brain auto-label stuff may help you retain images better, and I think it'd also be interesting if you were to take a written scene from a book and try do draw it.

By the way, there is supposedly a fast way (~20h) to go from kindergarten to recognizably realistic in drawing skills using some neat tricks, there was even a series of articles about it here on lw. (the other 10k hours go into those final touches of skill, but to the untrained eyes the difference isn't as jarring as the no-training - some-training gap, at least in simple scenes)

Hey Guys, I'm in a similar position. I'd love to know if anyone has made any tangible progress on this matter? is it a lost cause? thanks! I'll probably try anyway, but just to have reasonable expectations.

Has anyone else with a similar level of mental imagery to Guy's had any experience with Lucid Dreaming/dream recall? Based on what I've read, it seems as though mental imagery is significant in the ability to lucid dream/recall dreams, but I haven't found much written on lucidity with little mental imagery.

So how did this pan out? Were you able to improve your mental imagery? What methods did you use? :)

When I was a kid I tried the Relaxation Response for a month and it improved my very weak ability for a time. But then I stopped doing it! Perhaps the act of taking 10-15 minutes a day to focus on my 'mantra', which was just a picture of "one" written out, helped. It was great because after the month I was able to, for the first time ever, recall pages from my textbook, almost like I had the beginnings of a photographic memory. I'm thinking of trying this again.

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.

...

Such tasks include mental rotation and visual memory, both of which I can perform easily.

I'm confused by these two statements. If you can perform mental rotation easily, why was it not useful in drawing blocks?

My visualization ability improves the closer I am to sleep, being near perfect during a lucid dream.

I'm in the same boat as you; would be interested in your results, such as they may be.

One hypothesis I entertained for a while was that training at the game of Go would improve my visualization, since one of the basic skills ("reading") appears to involve actually hallucinating stones that aren't really on the board.

In practice, I found that I was able to reason about what stones would appear where, while still dismally failing to see them in any meaningful sense of the word. If anything, the primary modality was kinesthetic - I was representing internally the feeling of "clicking here then there".

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

Warning: Anecdote, personal experience!

I used to have occasional super-vivid "waking dreams", as well as regular dreams, but it was otherwise almost impossible for me to think in terms of images instead of words. Then I had a friend adopt me as his art student. I never learned to draw, but I learned to take his line drawings and add color, then shading.

The process of learning to shade required me to learn to do more visualization than I used to, since I simply couldn't model the correct lighting without having an internal model advanced enough to contain that nuance. It's still weak visualization, since I can't visualize line structures at all (I strongly suspect properly learning to draw would fix this, specifically focusing on taking a scene in front of me and capturing it), but I can visualize colors and shading just fine.

This suggests to me that practice works just fine, and that learning to draw / color / shade will specifically push you to do exactly this, depending on what sort of visualizations you want.

I also found that if I spent 4+ hours continuously practicing, I'd spend at least a few minutes looking at the world and automatically analyzing it in terms of shadow and light and color, which was very helpful for mapping this skill on to reality. So, the occasional obsessive day once you've got the basic knack might help :)

A meditation discipline called kasina is specifically about visualizing objects. I understand the idea is something like staring at a specific fixed object for a long time and trying to use that to develop a more vivid mental image of the object. I have no idea if it will help to build up visual mental imagery from scratch, but there should be detailed instructions to be found for the practice.

No better way to get sharp & clear images from your own brain than to expose it to constant trial and error.

In other words, practice, practice, practice. Treat your mind's eye like a real muscle.

Begin with a simple shape in mind. Attempt drawing in your mind. It'll be crap. Try again. This one will suck again. Retry. This will suck also. Again. Slowly, you're getting there. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Somwhat better. Again. Persist. Much better. Again. And so on.

Next time, try another shape. A more difficult one. Keep creating. Over and over.

Persist until you succeed. Because you will. This is simply how our brain works. This is its secret.

Nothing else but resolute practice :D

You're still stuck, UnchainMyBrain got a couple of visualization exercises postet:

• Learn to visualize from scratch
• Learn to create clear mental images