How to Train Yourself to Visualize Anything (6 Simple Tips & Habits)

hi so you've probably seen some examples of something like this it's mate next move on that board chess Grandmaster is playing entire games without even being able to see the board and what's worse they can do up to dozens of games at a time and you compare that to like the average person and you wonder how the hell is that even remotely possible and one conclusion is that these guys aren't human and another more reasonable conclusion is that they've had a lot of practice and I mean a lot of practice and it all boils down to one thing being able to visualize the boards in their head because if you can see the board in your head without actually having to see the board then you can basically see the board and the same goes for other things if you can easily visualize whatever you're trying to think about your brain has access to a personal model of that information that it can play around with and experiment on for example these chess players can take the boards in their head and make moves on them to see how good those moves are having that board information ready for access in their head is very convenient for trying variations and this kind of mental imagery has a lot to do with imagination it's not strictly the same thing but they're very related to each other so if you're more familiar with imagination which you probably are you can basically consider mental imagery to be the same thing at least in this context and this skill is extraordinarily useful I'll be using chess as my primary example throughout because imagery shows up a lot there for example you can use the play games blindfolded or play out different sequences of moves to find out what your best move is but this goes Way Beyond chess it can be everywhere for example problem solving if you can visualize your solution without having to draw things out you can try out so many more ideas because you can see if your solution is going to work without even having to write it out and it works in general too if you can visualize scenarios in your head you can simulate how things will happen in real life without needing them to actually happen this is good for stuff like decision making and in general your brain is much faster than your hands so the more you can do completely inside your head the faster you can think about things especially because you're able to reason a lot faster that way and expanding your mental capacity for imagery lets you reason about more complex ideas and take on larger ideas at a time instead of being limited by the space in your own mind and being forced to draw something out having most information readily available in your head makes it very easy for your brain to access and think about it also gives your unconscious mind access to that information and your unconscious mind is very powerful and mental imagery lets you not only see the information but also feel it because it's all embedded into your brain it'll be accessible to your senses and intuition and it'll just make more sense to you and if you can visualize how something is going to happen truly in your mind you can simulate virtually anything and play out any scenario you want which is quite nice so something I'm legally obligated to do in every video is prove that you can trust me so who am I and well relevant to this video I'm one of the world's best competitive programmers competitive programming is problem solving visualization shows up a lot there you often have graphs or formulas or lists of numbers that you have to manipulate and think about visually and I've gotten quite good at visualizing I can read a problem create a mental model of it in my head and never have to look at the problem statement again and I can do this for multiple problems at a time similar to how chess Pros can maintain multiple games in their heads in fact surprisingly I even have some chess Vision where I can think about boards abstractly in my head and I've never practiced chess so the stuff I've done to myself with competitive programming also helped my visualization everywhere so what I'm saying is I have the skills that I'm trying to help you get and that didn't just start off with them I got them through experience and practice and I'm going to take this knowledge that I've gained over the years and dump it all on you so you can get good visualization too hope you enjoy so let's talk about how to get better at this there are six tips total the first three are short term tips that means for a given task how can you short-term optimize your thinking to make the most out of the visualization skills you already have and the other three are long term that means what kind of practice and training can you do to permanently improve your visualization skills and the first tip is to focus on what's important that is don't try to visualize too much at once because this visualization makes you through your short-term memory but we don't really have much of that like try to imagine a square of nine dots and of course don't look at the screen while you do it but that's easy enough right because nine is small now try a hundred you can kind of focus on the middle or maybe the edges but it's nearly impossible to focus on the whole thing at once and that's right a million this is just straight up impossible no matter how big your brain is so there's a fundamental limit to how much you can take on at a time and your mind's eye works like you're normalized you usually focus on some particular thing and everything else Fades into the background even with 9 you'll tend to focus on a single dot in particular or a small group of dots but not the whole thing unless they're like close enough together but it's hard to make that happen mentally because you're the one that's generating out the image it's not like they're laid out for you you can only generate so much at a time and you can expand the size of your mental picture with enough practice but you'll have to acknowledge that it's going to be limited no matter what so you don't have to have the whole picture in your head just focus on whatever part you currently need to think about focus on only a few dots at a time that will make the process a lot simpler and if you need the big picture you can mentally search through the entire image for important parts and how the parts connect for example with the chessboard you can scan the mental board for other pieces that might affect the squares you're considering but it's very difficult and takes a lot of experience to view the whole thing at once especially if you're relatively new don't try to do that just keep your focus on the part that's most important to you another thing to remember is that your brain is capable of thinking in 3D it's easy to forget that because basically everything we see is 2D and the image you see will be a 2d view of a 3D image but it's still a 3D object in your head so take advantage of that instead of trying to see a 10 times 10 square of dots in 2D let's try to imagine a 5 by 5 by 4 prism and suddenly you have a much more compact way of representing all the dots at once it's still not going to work for a million but tricks like these increase your mental capacity and let you imagine more with the same amount of space so you're basically increasing the size and scope of your image for free and most images given to us are in 2D but we can make them more interesting by expanding them to 3D because you can look at your mental images from different angles and literally drag around your mental camera to view things in a different way for example with chess for recognizing stuff like Rooks or Bishops attacking you can line your mental camera up with their line of sight so you can see where they attack and this is tedious initially but as you get faster this process will happen automatically and it's a useful thing to do because it lets you take advantage of the picture you have and get as much information out of it as possible without needing more mental space for a bigger picture another thing you can do is work alongside physical images it's fine to draw stuff out sometimes or reference the thing you're trying to mentally visualize especially if you don't have as much experience you don't have to live solely in the mental world use the physical thing you're trying to visualize either a drawing of the thing itself to guide your visualization allow yourself to work with it if you can create the whole thing mentally that's great but even if you can't you can still mentally consider variations or moves or details or whatever you're trying to do you can take the physical image and mentally expand on it for example in chess you can look at the board and draw arrows to keep track of the moves you did physically but at the same time you can mentally imagine the board with the pieces you moved and use that information to figure out how to move next in a similar vein when trying to visualize you can verbally say what you're thinking about I do this very often sometimes not on purpose but it helps your brain work through the details and stay focused on the picture in those details so now we can do long-term tips for practicing visualization and permanently getting better at it so especially when you're new to this it can help a lot to gradually transition from physical to mental images rather than jumping into the whole mental image at once for example you can start with a drawing or picture and don't try to take in the whole thing at once just do what you can mentally visualize it one piece at a time gradually move parts of the image from the Physical Realm into your mind and make sure they stay there by testing yourself to see if you're still able to visualize them after a bit of time and as you do it for longer try to do more at a time let yourself look at the physical image less because the less you rely on the physical image the better so get more strict over time especially you can try to construct the image partially or entirely in your mind and just skip the drawing entirely and after doing this for long enough you'll be able to do it without needing the physical image at all you'll also be able to fit more in your head and get more so-called mental bandwidth because you're gradually absorbing more and more information into your mental image in some sense you're literally expanding your brain another thing is to explore and reflect on the images you create to make sure they're good or fix them if they aren't for example look deeply into your images look for what's vague and unclear and figure out why figure out what you're missing figure out what went wrong when you try to create the image for example maybe your image is missing color maybe it's missing a part maybe it's just completely wrong you should figure that out then after reflecting explore the image try to expand on those details and patch up the holes in your image you can even Explore the things that are already more clear to you just make sure those details still work out too and gradually go into more and more detail about your image if you do this often enough you'll naturally get better at finding these details and you'll be able to create more complex images without even trying since you'll be used to it and when exploring it also helps to say out loud what you're currently thinking of as that forces you to have a clear enough picture to be able to transfer information from your brain to your voice by reflecting you'll also be able to recognize the issues with your visualization process and you'll be able to fix them and stop whatever is causing the images to be unclear so by the end of it you'll be good at recognizing details in your visualization process won't have any issues meaning you'll be able to create full and elaborate images sounds good right and finally you should take some time to focus on speed because fast mental imagery is huge the whole point of doing this is that it's faster than having to draw things out physically so if your brain is slow it defeats the point and the faster you can reason the faster you can reason so your thinking will be more efficient start by giving yourself time constraints if you're trying to visualize a particular image give yourself a short amount of time to scan the image you're trying to visualize don't worry about details don't worry about going in depth get as much of the big picture as possible in a short time and then recreate it and try to scan your mental image as quickly as possible too recall as much of the picture as possible practice going through your image and looking into the details and expanding on it and try to do all of that in a short amount of time in general just practice doing the imagery process quickly see how elaborate of an image you can create and explore in for example 60 seconds see how quickly you can go through the more fine-grained details because speed will come over time as you get better but you can practice this specifically too and that will let you get faster faster and yeah that's roughly all I have to say I'm not really going to talk about IQ in this one because my opinion is the same maybe intelligence can influence your rate of improvement but everyone is still capable of improving so the only thing you can do is try your best you can either not try and get nothing done or try and make the most out of what you have and there does exist a subset of people with Fantasia meaning you physically can't visualize stuff in your mind's eyes blind if so I'm sorry I don't think there's much I can do for you that's like the one exception of my take on inherent ability but if you do have the ability to visualize then you also have the ability to improve it so do so as for the validity of this video it's backed by experience logic and maybe a study or two nothing particularly fancy but my goal is at every Point makes sense to you and seems reasonable hopefully I've accomplished that there also exists some fancy name techniques that can help with visualization too I make no claims about those so just use them if you want this video is designed as more general advice to go over the fundamentals of visualization so it of course doesn't cover everything I also don't think you have to spend that much time doing this maybe a few minutes a day practicing intense visualization should be enough and with that said that should be everything so that's all goodbye

Channel: Colin Galen

Views: 382,829

Keywords: mental imagery and visualization, mental imagery cognitive psychology, visualization, imagination, mental math, imagery, mental visualization, how to picture things in head, how to picture things in mind, aphantasia, how to visualize, tips, psychology, learning, how to learn, learn to visualize, how to learn to visualize, shrek, meme

Id: p4xFVJTyJZg

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2023