Does it help to practice visualization?

[Shui]

Don't uncover the spoiler tags below until you've read everything else.

 

Some people say that it helps to practice visualization and suggest exercises like visualizing geometric shapes of various colors. Other people say that visualizing geometric shapes only helps you get better at visualizing geometric shapes. I'd like to put the question to rest.

 

This is a simple experiment. It should just take a few minutes. Please be honest.

 

What I want to see is if visualizing one thing will make it easier to visualize other things. For example, if you spend a lot of time visualizing ponies, will that make it easier for you to visualize a word search?

 

Again, please don't uncover the spoiler tags until you've finished reading the instructions.

 

Masked by spoiler tags below, you'll find five words. You are to visualize these in a five by five grid, as in this picture.

 

 

The words in the spoiler tags will be different, but they will all be real English words, and they will be the same read across as they are read down. Take as long as you want to look at the words and visualize them in your mind, but please don't write the words down, draw a grid of them, or impose them, and don't look at the words again until after you're done.

 

Once you have the grid firmly fixed in your mind, start your timer and uncover the next spoiler tags, which will ask you three questions about the word grid in your mind. These questions will ask you to mark letters as if they were a word search. For example:

 

1. What letters do you get when you start at the center letter of the bottom row, and end at the center letter of the center row?

 

In our FEAST grid example above, the correct answer would be ROM.

 

Write down the answers to the three questions, stop the timer when you're done, and record your time.

 

It's OK if you're unable to answer some or all of the questions. These are very easy questions when you're actually looking at the grid. I expect them to be difficult for most people who are visualizing the grid. That's what we're here to find out. So if you can't answer the questions, just follow the rest of the instructions so that we know.

 

You may look at the words now.

 

Words:

 

PANDA, APART, NASAL, DRAMA, ATLAS.

 

 

When you're done visualizing a grid of the words above, you may start your timer and look at the questions below.

 

Questions:

 

 

What letters do you get when you...

1. ...start at the center letter of the top row, and end at the last letter of the center row?

2. ...start at the center letter of the center row, and end at the first letter of the first row?

3. ...start at the fourth letter of the second row, and end at the second letter of the fourth row?

 

 

 

When you're done, post your answers and your time in spoiler tags so that nobody doing this experiment after you will see your answers until they're done.

 

If you couldn't answer the questions, just write inside the spoiler tags that you couldn't answer the questions.

 

(Just in case someone doesn't know how to do spoiler tags, I've put the code below.)

 

Also, please tell us what kind of visualization skills you have. How far along are you on your tulpa? Do you have any other visualization skills? Is there anything else that might make this experiment easier or harder for you, such as dyslexia, or a love of word searches?

 

[spoiler]Your content here.[/spoiler]

[waffles]

 

about two minutes I guess; I forgot to record my time. they were nrl, spp and rsr

 

But look, if your question was "Does visualizing one thing make it easier to visualize other things?" then everyone can tell you yes, it's a skill. Also, you answer these questions without visualising at all.

[Shui]

Well, yes and no. There are different kinds of visualization. Some people can see the characters of a play when they read a script, some can play a chess game ten moves ahead, some can hear a symphony by reading sheet music. My hypothesis is that these types of visualization use different parts of the brain.

 

I'm supposing here that visualization is somewhat like hallucination. With hallucination, imaging shows hyperactivity in the temporal lobes, and different kinds of hallucinations are connected with different parts of the brain. For example, the fusiform gyrus is associated with color information, word recognition, and facial recognition, and hyperactivity in one particular part is connected with hallucinations of distorted faces with large eyes and teeth. Hyperactivity in the collateral sulcus, connected to visual patterns, could cause hallucinations of fences or brickwork.

 

In retrospect, this experiment was poorly planned, because the fusiform gyrus is responsible for faces, which almost everyone here practices, and words, which I'm testing. Still, maybe we'll see something, and I couldn't think of another experiment as easy to perform over a forum.