I don’t have complete aphantasia (lack of imagination), but my visualizing skills pretty much suck, I can kind of imagine a face of a person I know, but it’s very vague and gets lost in a second or two. I can also not really imagine my car, but instead only parts of my car and the image also fades almost right away.
I tried googling and all I could find are some spiritual and inspirational things like “how to manifest a positive life”,etc, but that’s not what I’m asking, I want to simply improve my imagination so that I get a clearer image of things I try to imagine, instead of really vague images I get at the moment. I am a 3d model artist, so improving my imagination skills is really important for me.
Does anyone have any ideas of exercises I could try?
This seems like a IMHO question, and I don’t have an answer, but I’ll toss in a comment.
I’m a long-time professional graphic designer/photographer/illustrator and my visualization skills are (probably) below average. I’m also a bad chess player, and am amazed at people who can play “blindfolded.” So, I’m interested in improving my mental visualization, but not so interested that I’ve pursued a systemic regimen.
What I find intriguing is that in a half-awake state, my visualization limitations vanish. I remember lying in bed and “looking at” an object lying in a shallow stream; the water sparkled, the transparency effects and visual distortion created by the moving water were perfect. The episode lasted 10 or 20 seconds, and vanished as I became more alert. I’ve had similar half-awake experiences a couple dozen times in my life, They are rare, but they make me think there are ways to improve visualization abilities.
There are researchers who contend that people can be taught to have lucid dreams (dreams in which you realize you’re awake, and in which you may exercise some control over the dream). Working on your lucid dreaming could be an avenue to enhanced visualization. But after 30 years of working in the visual arts, it seems to me that just routinely trying to imagine what things will look like before you put them on paper (or a computer screen) does not improve visualization skill.
I have experienced lucid dreams, though only one that was longer than a few seconds, I also dream vividly often, so yeah, that’s a weird thing, visualization working perfectly during the sleep state and poorly when you’re awake.
Some things I found that could help, though I didn’t test them out enough to judge yet are:
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meditation (not sure if any meditation or a specific kind, but visualization depends on neuron paths and meditation I think strengthens those paths, but whether it helps with visualization…I don’t know)
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image streaming (you close your eyes, take a recorder app on a phone and say whatever image comes to your mind and describe it fast without analysing it, so “I see…a car, it’s yellow and has a gray bumper, now I see a black bird with orange feet” and so on, the thing with image streaming is that I’ve seen people claim it helped others see visualizations for the first time, but I’m not sure if it actually helps improve already existing visualization)
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LSRT, a newer technique, not entirely sure how it works, but I think you imagine a scene with a motion, like a golf player hitting the ball, then you open your eyes and say whatever you remember, then you do it again and this time you try to add more detail, so for example a golf player that is wearing blue shorts and a yellow shirt and so on.
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not sure if this does anything, but perhaps blindfolding yourself for a longer period of time and doing various thing, moving your hands, walking around the room, feeling random objects,etc.
out of all these, image streaming hasn’t helped me much, I can’t manage to do LSRT and I’ve done meditation for only a week, so it’s too early to say anything and I came up with the blindfold thing today.