10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @[email protected] about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
This is what I have. basically not aphantasia (we can still manipulate visual imagery in our brains) but it’s also not prophantasia which is essentially just seeing, but with thoughts.
Thank you for teaching me the word prophantasia.
The way I’ve seen a lot of people try to describe normal mental visualization (phantasia I suppose?) can end up sounding like they’re sort of projecting a mental object into their actual vision, which seems to be more of a prophantasia thing.
I can mentally design an object, have a very clear mental picture of what that object looks like, and I can look around me and I can know what that object would look like if it existed in the same space I’m in, but I cannot actually see that object in the room with me. I can also mentally build a copy of the space I’m in and visualize that, I could put that mental object in that space and mentally look at it, manipulate it etc. but that’s still a different experience than actually seeing it with my eyes.
Right. “prophantasia” is a word used to refer to that “it’s like you’re actually seeing it”, whereas visualization for me isn’t like that and it’s more like what you described, a sort of mental idea, like I can think of and mentally understand imagery, but it’s not like I’m actually looking at it with my eyes (like when I see things or am in a lucid dream).
It seems some people with visualization do this “minds eye” kinda thing, and the some have that “it’s like you’re seeing” type.