Somehow: How to Imagine?
A few years ago, a question struck me: what is the mind’s eye and why was it I lacked one?
At the time, I used the question to recriminate myself, and it became an object of fixation: it occurred to me while others “saw” a face with their mind’s eye at the mention of a loved one, I beheld nothing.
The pain was all the greater, since I had a brother whose imagination was old as he was, nourishing the evening with fight scenes and dreamscapes that were unthinkable to me.
Only later did I understand this experience of mine had a name: aphantasia —image-free thinking.*
One may live a meaningful and satisfied life, no matter one’s tendency to think in images versus words — this is important to state, and whether you consider aphantasia or hyperphantasia a gift, every gift comes with its costs.
Nevertheless, imagination reaches far and two neighbours may live two lives that are similar on the outside, but different at their centre, as one thinks in words, whereas the other thinks with their body, their nose, their mind’s eye and musical ear: in short, they imagine.
Many articles exist on aphantasia, though fewer exist when it comes to how to imagine. Yet it was precisely how to imagine and grow in imagination that interested me most of all.
Ensuring there is a system of feedback for each exercise, as emphaized by Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and there is a mix of problems to boost learning, as advocated by David Epstein in Range, I have compiled every exercise, from Dual N’Back to recalling film clips, in this post — here they are!
- Dual N’Back — Dual N’Back is the foundation from which all imagination is built. Coloured cubes appear within a 3 x 3 grid, while letters sound. It is your task to remember this sequence, matching positions, colours and sounds to those which appeared N number of steps ago.
Fiendishly difficult, Dual N’Back trains you to hold shapes, sounds and colours in your mind’s eye for longer and with more clarity; it has also been debated whether this increases your fluid intelligence (your capacity to solve new problems).
I personally noticed that my ability to imagine visually greatly increased while playing Dual N’Back, and in turn, I enjoyed reading fiction more and got more out of conversations:
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(Thanks go to Federico Trotta for coding these, and Robert Chalean and Susan Jaeggi for the original idea)
2. Recalling film-clips —I take a film clip, watch thirty seconds, then pause it, trying to recall every detail I can remember — sounds, dialogue, visuals and movement — the lot.
By “inhabiting” the motion I see on the screen, I feel my imaginative experience intensifies. Mentally I try to walk the same way the protagonist does, move in contrary motion as do the tank and its turret, wear the protagonist’s costume, all while trying to envision the colours on screen and hear the sounds. Most recently, I have been doing this with the film Arrival.
This can be a very intense mental experience, associated with an intense state of joy and even physical discomfort.
3. Recalling and converting a film-clip to black-and-white or another colour filter mentally — The idea is to transform a colour film-clip to one that is black and white, before receiving feedback from the Turn Off the Lights Youtube extension.
3. 2D Ground-laying for 3D world-building — This works for visualising fictitious worlds. While reading Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, I did this to imagine the Hokkaido villa. You break down a house or site into a series of squares mentally. At the biggest level, you have two or three rectangles to represent the main buildings. Then, you populate each rectangle with smaller shapes that are its furnishings, repeating the process for each level of the building. From 2D, you can move to creating a 3D scene.
4. Drawing scenes in three-dimensions — A good place to start is this video from Liron Yanconsky.
5. Mentally rehearsing a musical instrument to a tempo, visualising the motions of your hands, their appearance and the sounds produced ahead of the sequence of notes you are going to play, all in time with a metronome. In the thirty minutes following this exercise at the piano, I noticed I was brought into a “sharper”, hyperactive/hypercurious state of consciousness where I process more visual information per unit of time.
As a running thread to these exercises, motion and imagination seem inseparable, which is perhaps why tempo and kinesthetic practices help to nurture an imaginative state. Following these exercises, I have noticed I have found it easier to engage in meaningful conversations with people and empathize with them more, at the cost of feeling more hyperactive and finding it harder to plan.
After these practices, I noted that I found programming and mathematical exercises easier too, in line with Sheryl Sorby’s observations on the function of imagination/spatial reasoning in STEM; I really do think that a greater emphasis on imagination and meta-cognition training in primary, secondary and higher education could have significant outcomes across both the Arts/Humanities and STEM.
- Some sibling rivalry too
The Somehow Blog is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
Somehow: How to Learn https://medium.com/@somehow_/somehow-how-to-learn-174214db307e
Somehow: How to Stylise your Work https://medium.com/@somehow_/somehow-how-to-absorb-the-styles-of-your-favourite-writers-artists-and-musicians-3fad74e1d56c
Range, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Arrival and A Wild Sheep Chase are Amazon Affiliate links.
