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Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

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Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#11

Post by ztratar »

kepano wrote: post #9
ztratar wrote: post #3

OP here. Strange with upvotes but no discussion. I'm curious if anyone has tried anything like this before? I'd love some guidance or thoughts.

I spent about two years dedicating my free time to experiments of this type. The most profoundly affecting exercise was training the left side of my body (I'm right-handed). I learned to write in left-handed mirrored script (Da Vinci style) and performed all sorts of everyday actions with my left hand. Amazingly, the more I trained my left hand the more my right-handed writing and drawing skills improved. Within a fe…

That is extremely interesting. I'm also wondering if it was maybe some type of placebo effect. Maybe the modes were a mental manifestation...

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#12

Post by realitygrill »

wilder wrote: post #7

I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on). There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psy…

I have a well developed spatial sense, but am very weak visually. When I try to visualize, the best I get is impressions of abstract glow-y lines that fade away quickly. I also tried to develop mental visualization but to little effect (I did have a vivid dream once. Only once, though.)

obligatory LW link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#13

Post by wilder »

ztratar wrote: post #10
wilder wrote: post #7

I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on). There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psy…

Wow. My experience is drastically different than yours. I've almost always thought of things through mental imagery. It comes naturally to me (which really helped in calculus 3, haha). I can say that with confidence. Thanks for the link. I wonder how many non-visualizers are out there, too.

Sounds wonderful. The odd thing is that I can imagine what it would be like to have the sort of visual imagination that would be helpful in calculus.

Unfortunately it turns out that imagined imagination is worthless for calculus.

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#14

Post by jimmaswell »

ztratar wrote: post #10
wilder wrote: post #7

I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on). There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psy…

Wow. My experience is drastically different than yours. I've almost always thought of things through mental imagery. It comes naturally to me (which really helped in calculus 3, haha). I can say that with confidence. Thanks for the link. I wonder how many non-visualizers are out there, too.

Reminds me how there's apparently a decently-sized part of the population that doesn't intuitively know left and right. I wouldn't have believed it much if I didn't meet someone with the issue and someone else who claims their wife has it.

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#15

Post by Gravityloss »

wilder wrote: post #7

I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on). There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psy…

Think how hard it is for visual thinkers to produce one-dimensional text of their two or multidimensional ideas. They see all the relations between things directly but it is hard to express in text. It's not always a blessing.

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#16

Post by jimmaswell »

shib71 wrote: post #8
ztratar wrote: post #3

OP here. Strange with upvotes but no discussion. I'm curious if anyone has tried anything like this before? I'd love some guidance or thoughts.

I've had the same experience as Tesla, though not so extreme as to cause problems. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed extremely detailed "daydreams" where I explore worlds and meet people inspired by the books I read. I suspect this is fairly common in children, but I did it right through high school, university, and several years in the workplace. The real question is: how much benefit does having a strong…

I'd imagine a strong imagination is great for the concept and design parts of engineering, but not entirely necessary if you're just building to a spec.

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#17

Post by wilder »

Gravityloss wrote: post #15
wilder wrote: post #7

I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on). There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psy…

Think how hard it is for visual thinkers to produce one-dimensional text of their two or multidimensional ideas. They see all the relations between things directly but it is hard to express in text. It's not always a blessing.

It has been intermittently amazing to me that I not only get by but am even considered intelligent without what seems (to me) an absolute gift and superpower that most people possess.

The rest of the time it's just obvious that there are tradeoffs, or that it's behaviorally insignificant unless one is off the chart positive on some modality. Would still give anything to picture though.

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#19

Post by incision »

ztratar wrote: post #3

OP here. Strange with upvotes but no discussion. I'm curious if anyone has tried anything like this before? I'd love some guidance or thoughts.

>I'm curious if anyone has tried anything like this before? I'd love some guidance or thoughts.

This is proving quite hard to articulate as I try to find a way to visualize it.

To me...

Thoughts are like threads to follow and your wall is faceted shell. Each of these facets carries a kind of gravity which pulls on your thread.

Facets you have accepted without understanding appear solid, a barrier. When you run into one you have hit the wall.

Facets where you have no concept are wide open and you're free to follow your thread, but you risk finding yourself adrift with no reference asking for your thread to become tangled.

Facets where you have greater understanding are revealed to be a lattice, full of gaps to thread through and continue exploring.

You don't "leave" the shell, there's always another layer that might be completely new or something you've passed through many times before.

Imagination/discovery is the act of continually finding the gaps.

---

Personally, I've always done a lot of visualizing. As an adult I've come to recognize close similarities to what I do in the visualization techniques of Stoicism and general thought experiments.

One exercise I find quite useful is to avoid resorting to references for things I don't understand, to turn first toward visualizing how to create whatever it is that's puzzling me - to "search for the gaps" and see where I end up.

Re: Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

#20

Post by zwegner »

Pretty cool--I've been interested in finding new ways to exercise my mind recently. I have pretty bad ADHD/laziness, so it's hard to commit to doing such things regularly, but I'm hoping that meditation as well as these sorts of exercises will help with that.

Another fascinating set of exercises (that I became aware of reading an article on Ithkuil, an invented language, that was on here a little while ago) is "deconcentration of attention". There's a simple website at http://deconcentration-of-attention.com/, which happens to talk about its applications to software engineering. It's somewhat similar to meditation, and focuses on harnessing the parallelism of the subconscious mind to think more non-linearly.

It seems pretty out-there, and I'm not sure if anybody has really had any success with it, but just reading the exercises is quite intriguing to me (e.g. try to hear "red" in your head, visualize "red" without the word, and then try to feel "red" without visualizing it). Another exercise I thought of after reading the page (and which is quite hard for me, it turns out), is to count in your head without subconsciously speaking/hearing the numbers.

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