Welcome to a whole new world where you can’t do some fundamental form of thinking most people can.
Theres also people apparently that don’t have an inner monologue and can’t hear words in their mind either. I truly can’t understand how that works. It’s way more foreign of a concept than not being able to visualize. But maybe that’s just because I’ve never been able to do it so I don’t know what I’m missing.
The people that can’t do either are truly frightening. What’s going on up there?
I had absolutely debilitating insomnia for my entire life. In the last couple of years I discovered something interesting. I’ve got a condition called aphantasia which means that I cannot see any images in my mind. For my whole life I heard the phrase counting sheep and thought it was a metaphor. Just like. Thinking about sheep since visualizing wasn’t something that I thought people could do.
Anyway, in researching about the condition I found an article online for an exercise where you can work on trying to visualize something. Basically you close your eyes and use the flashing remnants of vision to try to force a shape to exist. Sometimes you need to push on your closed eyes and a little pressure will cause some patterns to appear. You’re supposed to do this exercise while talking to someone outloud. Even if it’s just making a recording. The article I read said you must say it out loud or you will fall asleep. Me having never fallen asleep in my life without hours of concerted effort completely ignored this warning and much to my surprise it absolutely made me fall asleep within minutes.
Ever since then I’ve been able to use this technique to fall asleep every night. It’s like my mind finally learned how to do it. Most of the time I don’t even need to do these exercises any more.
That being said I was so pleased with this side effect I never even tried the say it out loud to try to improve mental images and I still can’t see anything in my minds eye. But being able to sleep every night without fail is a freaking miracle. So I highly recommend giving it a shot.
Here is the original instructions I found on it. https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/
Lol. Iphones came out just shy of decades ago in 2007, and there were portable phones even in the 80s. Though admittedly they didn’t play audio for you back then. But I had a non smart candybar phone in the late 90s early 2000s with a built in media player I loaded phrases into for various trips.
I was in Japan for a while a few decades ago and I would often just get on a train and go somewhere to see what I’d run into. I didn’t speak any Japanese but I did have some phrases down and a bunch more saved on my phone I could listen to repeatedly and just try to mimic them. Anyway I get turned around and it is getting late, I need to get back on a train so I can head back to where I’m staying for the night, so I ask a random guy in Japanese if he speaks English. He says yes well enough so I explain my situation and ask for direction to the nearest line that’ll get me home.
He proceeds to speak in what he must have thought was English for a solid 5 minutes. I couldn’t understand a single word he said. He pointed in basically every direction at one point or another during the monologue. And I didn’t want to be rude so I listened politely and just planned on thanking him and asking someone else if I could find anyone. But at the end of this huge long gesturing play he was putting on he said in the clearest English with absolutely no accent. “are you picking up what I’m laying down” I’d never heard that phrase before at that time and was absolutely floored. He even nailed the L in laying. I legitimately think even to this day that i was being pranked.
I asked some expat friends who had been living in Japan for a long while and they said there were tons of English phrase books and that was just probably a phrase he practiced a lot. But it was so surreal that every other utterance was so obviously not English.
I thanked the guy and found someone else who literally took me to the station themselves. But it is one of the strongest memories I have from my time there.
I’m glad to see that the La Croix methods are catching on
It’s been about a year or so. You shouldn’t have to constantly apply pressure. When I first started I just kind of took whatever was there and tried to pretend it was a specific thing then hold that thought then as it morphed and changed just quickly identified a new thing and held that thing as long as possible. I think the article calls it image streaming. Then when all the sparks fade from pressure maybe do it again.