A couple of months ago, I posted about my own experiences using visualization and how I was not really able to picture things in my mind’s eye as clearly as one might hope. If you missed that post, you can find it HERE. I didn’t think that much more about the topic until I was confronted by a fellow shooter and friend Al Wagner at a recent shoot.
Al said something to me to the affect of “I can’t believe you wrote that post! You mean you can’t see images clearly in your mind?”. I knew what I had to do! When I got home that night, I started researching books on visualization. Thanks to Amazon, I had this one in my hands within a day or two:
In the book, Bill Bodri presents several cases of the effective use of visualization by some very prominent individuals such as Nikola Tesla (who would actually design complex machines solely in his brain to exacting tolerances), Seymour Cray (father of the super-computer), Steven Hawkins, Actor Will Smith (I wonder if he visualized the now-infamous slap?), Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wade Boggs, and countless others.
He also provides some basic ideas of what should be possible. For example, he explains that we should be able to close our eyes and visualize a square. Those that are more skilled may be able to convert the square into a 3D cube and then rotate it, change the color, make it larger or smaller. Those is this latter group may also be able to open their eyes and project a square around an object in the real world (or in our case, a target moving across the real terrain). Later (on pages 42 and 43), he goes into more details about how to learn how to visualize. He acknowledges the following on P43:
“At first, you are likely to get zero results… but don’t give up. … after a few weeks you will start to see shapes and pictures just as you want although they might not be clear or stable. After several months of daily practice, you will start to become able to create vivid, controllable scenes as if you were a movie director…”
So, I dutifully began to practice a few times a day. I started by studying a clay target (did you know a white flyer standard clay has 150 dimples?) in detail.
I would look at it intently for a minute or so and then close my eyes hoping to see some image of the clay in my mind. When nothing appeared, I would repeat this over and over. After a few weeks, every time I would close my eyes, I would see the same result (the inside of my eyelids in splendid darkness…).
Why was I not able to see the clay in my mind like the book and Al said I should? I asked my friend google!
In a word – the reason is because of a little- known aspect of the human condition known as “Aphantasia” – or as AJ Larner defines in his Dictionary of Neurological Signs,” the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one’s mind”. I started reading more from different sources – Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary if you are inclined to use Wiki. There are even on-line tests you can do to see where you fall on the spectrum between Aphantasia and Hyperphantasia (highly functioning visual mental imaging). I did some rudimentary tests with my friend Al. I am no expert on the topic, but I think he is leaning more to the “Hyper” side with his ability to project images from his brain onto the physical world. In the extreme case, those with hyperphantasia may blur the lines of reality in terms of what they imagine and what is really in the physical world. There have been relatively few studies on Aphantasia. I suggest reading the Wikipedia article to get more of the short history if you have interest. What is clear though, is that there is a certain percentage of us that really don’t have the ability to clearly see visual representations in our mind’s eye – even if we have the ability to see similar images during dreams. It is not considered an affliction, but more of a difference in functioning.
Another interesting component of aphantasia is that those who experience this condition also seem to lack a sense of personal biography. I have often remarked to my wife that I tend to quite easily forget painful or difficult times from my past. Those memories seem to fade very easily. It has been theorized that those type of episodic memories are reliant on visual representations to be properly stored for later vibrant retrieval. This may also help to explain why I have been pretty successful in my use of the Muse meditation system when it comes to clearing my mind – images in my head are not competing for my attention! Every cloud does seem to have a silver lining.
As is probably pretty evident from this post, I have become intrigued by this topic as it hits home on a personal level for me and my quest for peak performance in my shooting as well as in life. Visualization is such a hot topic in sport psychology. It never occurred to me just how much variability there could be in how individual athletes would be able to implement these skills (and a little disappointing to grasp that I may never be able to achieve the same kind of success with visualization that a person such as Al can!). I have taken it upon myself to ask friends, relatives, and fellow shooters what they experience in their mind’s eye. What I have learned so far is that I am not alone in my lack of abilities! I will try to summarize more about the anecdotal evidence I uncover and post about it in the future.
In the meantime, feel free to contact my if you want to share your particular story. I would love to hear it!
If you are interested in Bill Bodri’s book, here is the amazon link (also note that he talks a lot about qi (life force energy) – a word my wife and I often use in our bananagrams games as it is a great way to use the letter “Q”!):