A poll on mental imaging - are you an imager or nonimager?

[Robb58]

OK... call me obsessed, but since I discovered that the majority of people can see images of what they think about... and I can't , I'm curious about what level of clarity people experience and whether or not you experience it with eyes open or closed.

To discover what the majority of people experience, I've added this poll on the subject so please cast your vote for the most appropriate category.


n.b.. I'm assuming that people who can see images with their eyes open can also see them with eyes closed

[lucky]

Hi Robb,

great poll! this subject is fascinating and i am going to coment on it in more depth soon..

briefly though my ability to visualise images has improved vastly over the years since practicing visualisation.. I remember when I first started I struggled quite a bit with holding images in my mind.. it always helped if the visualisation was based on an image I could use from memory and not an entirely new image..

x
Pen

[hubblebubble]

Hi Robb,

I find it really easy to visualise things with my eyes open, I only have to think about something and I can see it immediately. However, if I'm trying to visualise something I want to 'happen', I find that my mind drifts off onto other things, hence I find it hard to remain focussed for longer than a few minutes!


... x

[Robb58]

hi bubble,

It would seem that your experience is the norm, I've talked to a lot of people about this subject (... I told you I was obsessesd!! ) and most people seem to be able to image familiar things in a great deal of clarity. From what you describe, it sounds like your images are retrieved from a sort of stored memory archive. This could possibly explain why trying to visualise a new scenario is a bit more difficult as your mind doesn't have a source of pictorial reference to work from - I suppose that your mind is having to work overtime creating a mental collage from your existing memory base

[Yvonne Green]

Robb,

Just a thought, but how would you manage if you were doing a guided meditation and I said you were "now entering a beautiful, magical forest bathed in dappled sunlight with little pinpoints of light darting here and there amongst the tall trees."

I, and most of my group members just get a vague feeling of being there and don't actually see any pictures. Yet we can bring back the most amazing reports of what we've 'seen' there and what we did.

How would you do it?

[Robb58]

Not sure on that one Yvonne, although on the discussion thread about it that I've joined, one of the contributers reports that nonimagers are far more successful at meditating because there are far fewer things to crowd the mind.

[hubblebubble]

Hi Yvonne,

I'd be just fine if somebody was talking me through it for however long it takes,.... but having to do it myself lasts about five minutes (including conversations that may crop up in the visualisation), then I drift into thinking about other things!



and Robb, you're not obsessed, just have a heightened interest in something you never realised others do all day, everyday

[lucky]

I have a feeling that the answer to Yvonne imagine a magical forest senario is that through reading books as children and watching movies that we would actually have quite a forest image base and that we could pull visual images from this base and put them together to form the image of a 'magical forest'.

I believe that this is why picture boards work so very well.. because if you want something that you do not currently have then by viewing a picture of it this will really aid your imagary of it.

Try imagining a grutomes coloured humdolong.. and you will get the picture... er... or not!

Pen