Shall we talk about visualization? Are you all familiar with it already?

Well, I’ll start with a question. How do we cause things to happen? I mean anything. Is it just physical activity?

We think about it. And the biggest part of your brain is the part responsible for visual processing.

Planning helps. Even the most rudimentary planning involves some measure of being able to reproduce what something might be like in a sensory way. Can we think without involving sensory information?

I’m a big planner myself, and I’ve found it kind of irritating that I can spend hours planning something and then someone else comes along and just does it with virtually no prior thought. I’m kind of jealous. They actually had prior thought, and theirs differs from yours really only in structure and work involved.

Perhaps some higher math involves no sensory information, but I can’t think of anything else. Even to conceptualize higher math our brains use a sense of space and object modeling.

There is even a very high functioning savant who published Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind. He is what they call prodigious because he has enough gifts to make up for otherwise complicated function. He describes how he accomplishes his amazing feats of mathematical skill. His mind is voraciously associational so he makes a sensory metaphor for the values he is processing in his head, and then watches how they interact together when he’s doing a computation. Part of why this works for him is he is synesthetic so even individual numbers register as having colors and shapes.

If it’s the same person I heard about, he sees objects as numbers like skyscrapers are 1s to him. That is a radical case of visualization, but we all do it. But how does it usually go? What have your experiences been like with it?

I can visualize in 3d quite well, but I’m not synesthetic.

I tend to strain to do it, trying too hard to see detail vs. just get the feel of it.

It’s a valuable skill, and in fact everyone is a synesthete to some degree. They used to think it abnormal, but research has shown it really isn’t. It just doesn’t get much use in most people.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~