Does anyone know of (tested?) exercises for developing visual mental imagery from scratch?
Warning: Anecdote, personal experience!
I used to have occasional super-vivid “waking dreams”, as well as regular dreams, but it was otherwise almost impossible for me to think in terms of images instead of words. Then I had a friend adopt me as his art student. I never learned to draw, but I learned to take his line drawings and add color, then shading.
The process of learning to shade required me to learn to do more visualization than I used to, since I simply couldn’t model the correct lighting without having an internal model advanced enough to contain that nuance. It’s still weak visualization, since I can’t visualize line structures at all (I strongly suspect properly learning to draw would fix this, specifically focusing on taking a scene in front of me and capturing it), but I can visualize colors and shading just fine.
This suggests to me that practice works just fine, and that learning to draw / color / shade will specifically push you to do exactly this, depending on what sort of visualizations you want.
I also found that if I spent 4+ hours continuously practicing, I’d spend at least a few minutes looking at the world and automatically analyzing it in terms of shadow and light and color, which was very helpful for mapping this skill on to reality. So, the occasional obsessive day once you’ve got the basic knack might help :)
Warning: Anecdote, personal experience!
I used to have occasional super-vivid “waking dreams”, as well as regular dreams, but it was otherwise almost impossible for me to think in terms of images instead of words. Then I had a friend adopt me as his art student. I never learned to draw, but I learned to take his line drawings and add color, then shading.
The process of learning to shade required me to learn to do more visualization than I used to, since I simply couldn’t model the correct lighting without having an internal model advanced enough to contain that nuance. It’s still weak visualization, since I can’t visualize line structures at all (I strongly suspect properly learning to draw would fix this, specifically focusing on taking a scene in front of me and capturing it), but I can visualize colors and shading just fine.
This suggests to me that practice works just fine, and that learning to draw / color / shade will specifically push you to do exactly this, depending on what sort of visualizations you want.
I also found that if I spent 4+ hours continuously practicing, I’d spend at least a few minutes looking at the world and automatically analyzing it in terms of shadow and light and color, which was very helpful for mapping this skill on to reality. So, the occasional obsessive day once you’ve got the basic knack might help :)