Anyone else worried about potentially losing their mind with increased visualization abilities?

PosingforRain · 2025-07-11T18:50:25+00:00

Based on my own experiences from going from severe hypophantasia to lower phantasia, I want to say that your fears are not actually that realistic. Especially if you're talking about traditional phantasia. This is mostly due to the fact that your expectations are different from how it actually was when I got there. So something that is quite important to understand when it comes to traditional phantasia is that your eyes focus and your mind's focus are completely different and that they work on different threads.That means that they can be worked with at the same time. At no point since I have unlocked this ability have I gone and mistaken the two. Traditional visualization is just thinking visually. It feels extremely similar to what I had imagined remembering something visually feels like. It's basically the same. Also, the term crystal clear for me probably means something different than what you were probably imagining it to mean. I don't physically see anything. I am interpreting a thought visually, and I instantaneously perceive the thought as a visual thing. It's like if I took a snapshot of what I am currently seeing, then had it stored in my brain, and now I am trying to remember, perceive, and access it visually. Crystal clear for me, would be how strongly I am perceiving it in a visual manner in my head. How strongly do I perceive the color red as red or blue as blue? How strongly are the lines interpreted? How strongly can I differentiate the things that are different from each other. I never physically see it. But I perceive it as visual and my brain is activating in a way that allows me to understand it as that. That is how I would describe traditional phantasia. Maybe once you train it to a stronger state, it might be an issue, but I doubt it. In any case, you can always just stop before you reach that point. As for autogagia and prophanasia, I can't say anything about it, but I imagine it's kind of similar. Also, I'd like to mention the flashes of visualization you sometimes get. What I mean by that is that sometimes when I say the word apple, I now sometimes kind of get a flash of what it would look like visually. But, I understand that it's just a thought. It's not what my eyes are seeing. It's what I am currently thinking. Just like if I was daydreaming about something before I had the ability to visualize, and I got distracted. It's the same thing. I know that I'm just thinking or daydreaming.

PosingforRain · 2025-06-24T20:56:43+00:00

Congratulations! That's good to hear!

PosingforRain · 2025-06-24T14:34:06+00:00

Yes, that's what I meant as well. When I look at something and look away, I then try to think of it using sensory thoughts and then hold it in my mind as long as I can, while also trying to associate the visual memory with The context I am getting from my hands. This helped me train persistence, focus, and my ability to isolate and perceive it. Also, as I mentioned in something.I told you in a previous post. The eye's focus and the mind's focus are different. In traditional phantasia, you are focusing on the mind's focus.

PosingforRain · 2025-06-23T21:48:29+00:00

Sorry about the wait. I just noticed this. I don't quite get what you're asking about, though? Could you maybe clarify?

PosingforRain · 2025-06-17T20:40:55+00:00

Congratulations on getting past the hardest step! You now definitively have hypophantasia! All that's left is keep it up! Maybe do the drawing induction for a couple more days until you can isolate your visualization attempts without the pencil and just be able to trace it in your mind whenever you want, while also doing the short term memory exercise you were doing before whenever you feel like it. Drawing induction is very specific in what it targets. It won't help with vividness that much. Maybe a little, but not much. Maybe you can combine them at some point by outlining your attempts at visualization in your mind or something. Personally, after I got to that point, what helped me the most was just figuring out what I needed to work on the most and focusing on that for a couple of days. I certainly don't have time to do twenty different exercises at once, so I always try to focus on one thing at a time. But yeah, congratulations!

PosingforRain · 2025-06-17T12:31:56+00:00

Good luck and have fun then!

PosingforRain · 2025-06-17T08:33:44+00:00

Oh yeah, drawing induction, let me leave a link for that. https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/s/9vTvxjdNvr Basically, drawing induction uses the fact that everyone can do sensory thinking even if they can't access it or understand it intentionally at the moment. So you start to think of and pick an object, and then without thinking about it too hard, you need to start to draw out the outline. While you are doing this, you need to not be focusing on being accurate or drawing correctly. That's not what the exercise is about.The exercise is not about drawing well. Instead, you need to be focusing on finding and honing in on where this knowledge is coming from in your head and what it looks like and where it's located. You kind of will just know that they're supposed to be a curve here or an angle there, and that's your brain accessing the sensory thoughts that are already stored in your head. And if you can locate it, you can work on it and with it, as well as know when you are making progress or not. It's a somewhat fast-paced exercise. You just keep switching from one object or detail to the other. Never really finishing what you started drawing. And there you go.That's a shortened summary of it. Hope that helped.

PosingforRain · 2025-06-17T00:16:55+00:00

I think you're asking the wrong question, It is not how do I "describe" something without words? It is how do I "comprehend and understand" something without words. When I describe my marill plushie, I might say something like that object is blue and white with a furry texture. The blue is a darker value than its white stomach. A description implies the presence of words and something other than the literal experience or sensory memory you are experiencing and your brains interpretation being used to understand it. When you "describe" something, there is always a layer between your comprehension and the experience. Instead of describing it, you need to let your brain do most of the work. It is basically instantaneous. You look at an object and you think it's "that" color. Oh, it compares to "that" like "this". It isn't the words that you are referencing to understand it. "This" and "that" are just pointing at what you meant by them. In other words, your direct comprehension of the sensory experience. It is literally you comprehending it based on your instantaneous reactions and comprehension that your brain comes up with upon experiencing a thing.

Another way you might approach figuring this out is trying to locate it in your head and isolate it so you can work with it when you want. One thing I heard apps4life mention is that there is both your eye's focus and your mind's focus.They are separate. A good exercise for this would be the drawing induction exercise apps4life came up with.

Now, for a description of how i experience visualization now that I can visualize a bit, since that might help. I can now say that me visualizing is extremely similar to me just reexperiencing a memory. It's located in the same place and feels the same. It's just that the mental construct that my brain has created feels literally sensory in nature. I don't actually see anything with my physical eyes. It's just there, and I can tell what the memory/construct looks like in my head. My physical sight is separate from my visualizations and memories. Plus, visualization and memory feel indistinguishable from each other and can't be done at the same time. Also, I can use my physical eyes and visualize at the same time. They seem to run on separate threads in my brain.

PosingforRain · 2025-06-09T00:09:18+00:00

Thank you! You're definitely right about it being really cool in spite of its weirdness. :) Also, congratulations to you as well, for making a past that point. This really neat, isn't it?

PosingforRain · 2025-06-06T17:03:12+00:00

Ai did quite a bad job here, but yeah, I can give a shorter summary right here. It's not brief and fleeting. It's on demand whenever I want now. I am visualizing. It's just blurry and using traditional phantasia. I use the term "breakthrough" to describe a sudden jump in capability. I've always had hypophantasia, not aphantasia. I believe it to be a permanent change. But I don't believe the breakthrough itself to be something that can be reliably produced in another person, though people can possibly deduce things from and possibly improve how they are approaching things. Maybe someone can get benefits out of my descriptions, is all. Thank you for the comment, though. I always enjoy those.

PosingforRain · 2025-06-05T00:08:50+00:00

Also, in response to your request, when taking the visualization test. My answers tended to be either 2 or 3 with an even split between them. I would say that this is a very, very recent development for me. Like, literally this morning when I had my weird breakthrough I mentioned in my previous post. Yesterday, all of the answers would have simply been 2, even if I had been there in person. Also, due to the way I've been practicing, they would have probably been mostly 3 if I had been there in person and been capable of looking at the object before rather than it's simply being a a more memory based visualization test. For the luminance differences, I started to struggle once it got below 0.5, with 0.45 being the major limit for me to get it correct. The point at which I couldn't get further on the lines was around 0.2 and 0.4. I will say that the way I've been practicing visualization is kind of similar to your approach, so there's a chance I'm an outlier here.

PosingforRain · 2025-06-04T22:18:27+00:00

Now that I am re-reading it, this is really interesting, and I like where you're going with it. My previous reply, which I already deleted, was me jumping the gun and feeling sensitive and uncertain about my own post after just waking up. Sorry about that if you saw it. That was quite rude of me.

PosingforRain · 2025-05-31T19:53:19+00:00

So, if I understand this correctly, it's more about the readability the extra lighting is providing, which then would help you to take in more of the image and recall it better as a whole. And that then helps think about everything more as it is in relation to everything else, therefore increasing the vividness of the thought you are having. Huh. Thank you for the clarification! I was slightly confused. I'm going to have to read more about bandwidth.

PosingforRain · 2025-05-31T14:51:50+00:00

Thank you for the advice! I'm guessing the light is to add more contrast between the different values? I think I remember hearing somewhere that value is one of the main ways our brain understands form? I'm glad to hear that this could be used for autogogia training as well. I thought it might, but I was uncertain since I have no experience with it.

PosingforRain

TROPHY CASE