site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2051 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 29, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Has anyone significantly increased their capacity to visualize? Like after practice inner visualizations are clearer, richer, and full of finer details?

I’ve been doing these perfect nurturer meditations that involve visualization, and they’ve been really great—and I’ve found the more I set the scene the more impactful they are. I hypothesize that with advanced visualization skills I could “practice” a variety of activities in my mind’s eye and use it to get better at a bunch of things; I’m just wondering if visualization is a tractable and trainable skill.

The ArtOfMemory forum has really good posts on this. I think what can be helpful is “feasting->fasting” process: fill up your cognition with beautiful imagery you see in the world; dwell on paintings, then test yourself with spaced repetition to see if you can recall; explore novel environments with good visual stimuli. This increases visual memory growth. Then enter a “fasting” period where you no longer take in much new visual stimuli and instead only focus on your intended visualization process.

perfect nurturer meditations

Elaborate

Elaborate

You can find a collection of them here (https://attachmentrepair.com/meditation-library/?_sft_techniques=perfect-nurturer-reinforcement).

The perfect nurturer meditation is an attachment theory associated visualization technique to facilitate secure attachment by reparenting yourself through some combination of imagining an ideal "parent" figure and applying their guidance and care to memories or composite memories (applying some form of emotional memory reconsolidation in the process).

It was based on Buddhist deity yoga.

Yes, greatly, but while I’m sure something I did contributed to the change have no idea why it happened!

I think it is. I used to have almost total aphantasia. I had to start very simply, trying to see a line or a box or a number faintly, while meditating. Started counting breaths by trying to see the number of the breath from 1-10 and starting over. Had to strain to make it appear at all. I think the training helped. I stopped keeping track of this (in)ability after a while, but later when I tried IPF/perfect nurturer, I was able to do it to a large enough degree that I could benefit from it. And I found, like you did, that the stronger the imagination is, the more impactful the attachment reconditioning/trauma repair meditation would be.

Wow, that's interesting. I have limited imaginative capabilities, but not to the point of aphantasia. Mostly, when I think, I see words in my head almost like this site, and I feel punctuation and formatting, italics make me want to lean and semicolons make me feel a slight thump. Images are hard to muster, and even when they appear they tend to flash away or fade into blackness.

I have two thoughts:

  1. My limited imagination makes reading fiction hard, especially fiction with lots of descriptions, which gives me a headache and I lose track of my place. I find it much easier to read nonfiction or fiction where the main point is dialogue or monologue. Do you think your aphantasia affected your ability to read fiction like this?
  2. It's weirdly easier for me to imagine things after I wake up, possibly a similar phenomenon to hypnagogic hallucinations. Do you notice anything like that?

Wow, that's radically text-first. It's definitely aural prior to text for me, though I definitely do appreciate having spellings, so text plays a role too.

  1. Yes it was probably harder to effectively read fiction while my visualization was wrecked. But sometimes I could probably "know" the scene by seeing it on a subconscious level even if not consciously at all. Possibly related issue: my working memory was worse at that time too.

  2. Yes.

This post just made me realize I have aphantasia and I spoke to my partner what she can imagine and then did the apple test.

I was aware of the term but never bothered to investigate. And I'm seemingly affected. What a wild ride.

I have to admit, I don't quite get the apple test. I don't even need to close my eyes, I can imagine a perfect image of an apple with open eyes. I can rotate it, look at little imperfections in detail, cut it open, do whatever. The same goes for just about anything that can be imagined. But it happens on a secondary plane to my normal eyesight, a third eye so to speak. If I close my eyes, I see nothing more than I do with open eyes. I would personally say I have excellent 3d imagination, but going by the test literally would lead to the conclusion that I have aphantasia?

I’m in the same boat as you, description-wise. Neither of us have aphantasia, the literal description is just poor.

This is interesting to me. What do you have in your head when you imagine a person you knew as a child? Do you not see them in your mind's eye in any way?

It's mostly the concept or a random narrative involving the person. Probably not even a real memory.

When I tried to explain a room we both know then I can iterate around the room clockwise and say the big items in the room but at no point do I have any visuals generated. Being very much influenced by LLM: I can generate an itemization of furniture, but merely because I have a spreadsheet I can go through, but it's all generated on the fly but when my eyes are closed it's just blank.

My partner, based on the red apple test, also doesn't have strong visualization skills. What I noticed is that when my eyes are open I can at some level generate images based on the visual stimuli that is currently present.

Again influenced by AI: Like that Google thing from years back that saw dogs everywhere. But not that obvious and it's still not really visually present but somehow I can get closer to a "visual feel" that way.

What's funny is that I'm partial on the conspiracy train that other people may have the same stimuli but are just making up being able to see and they just claim to be able to see something in their mind's eye. I could fake a detailed red apple and invent blemishes and such. They wouldn't be stable over a period of time because there is no actual "visual" reference but I don't know if the non-aphantasiacs have a stable reference. My wife says her blurry red apple morphs.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats