Training like Tesla: An Experiment of the Mind

Hmm, this is very interesting inde... Squirrel! ;-)

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If you've dreamed of a video game, or you know where things are in your bedroom without looking, or you can draw something, you're probably using visual memory, even if it's not overly detailed. You can probably train yourself to recall more detail if you observe things more closely. Remember the brain is great at compressing - there's no shame in remembering the important parts instead of just a raw photograph.

I certainly don't remember things photographically, but if I memorize a piece of music from a printed version, for example, for a while I'll remember roughly where on the page I would be at any point. But after practicing from memory without the printed version, this spatial memory will fade away.

> "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?"

Well, for me imagining a tiger is basically recalling what it's like to look at a tiger (or picture of a tiger). I can have a photo of a tiger right in front of me, and know it's a tiger, yet not know how many stripes it has without counting. I might also not notice how the back paws look if I'm focusing on the front paws. Same thing when it's in my head (except less consistent, since it's just a memory).

> how do you know what position to put the stick figure in -- akimbo, Thinker?

This is no different from other senses. If I tell you to imagine the smell of soup, do you smell minestrone or pho? (Have you cooked those dishes? When you smell soup, can you tell what spices are in it?) If I tell you to imagine the sound of a violin, is it a six year old scratching away or Yehudi Menuhin playing a Beethoven concerto? (Depending on your musical training/listening habits, you may be able to imagine a concerto all the way through, or maybe just fragments of it?)

The interesting thing is, at one point I thought, like you, that I couldn't think visually. I tried practicing it, and either that worked or I adjusted my definition of visual thinking (or a bit of both), because I definitely consider myself at least partly a visual thinker now, and it's difficult to imagine it any other way. I've noticed that my visualization ability is sensitive to how much sleep I get though.

If you can think of chocolate, but not how it tastes, how it feels in your mouth, what a square looks like, what sound it makes when you bite into it ... maybe you just need to pay more attention the next time you eat chocolate :) And my ability to imagine other things - like music or food - depends strongly on how much time I spend on such things.

This is pretty much precisely how I think. If I'm considering a complex issue, be it engineering or otherwise, I effectively stop seeing through my eyes and instead maintain a visual image, either literal or abstract, of that which I'm considering. It's very "intuitive", and can be applied to anything from relativity to simple mechanics to mathematics. Anything which can be boiled down to logical symbology, which is to say, practically anything.

I can happily spend hours on end staring into the middle distance entirely engrossed in a labyrinth of thought - although this can get me odd looks on trains, as a frequent side effect is wild gesticulation, as though manipulating invisible objects.

I've always thought in this fashion - it's not something "learned", rather more a byproduct of a hyperactive imagination, and probably has something to do with the fact that television, magazines, and anything visual were outright verboten in my childhood, the only entertainment available being books. You learn to visualise stories or described situations, and when reading, I don't see words on a page, rather an immersive cinematic view of the text at hand.

All of that said, it landed me in hot water throughout my studies, as when you look at a physics or maths problem and write down the answer without any intermediate computation, one tends to be accused of cheating.

On the note of memory - I have a poor episodic memory (struggle to recall what I did three days ago) but can recall abstract facts with facility, as its just a question of looking at the right mental image.