I have never sat down and done an intense visualization exercise on just one thing. Like imagining myself in some made up room, feeling the furniture I am on, noticing the doorways, ceiling, the sounds and temperature, more and more detail, etc. Has anyone practiced this kind of idle visualization, merely for the point of building the skill of more clear visualization? How often, and for how long? Did it help?
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The memory palace method is this. This really help, and it create intense daydreams with practice. Visualization can be useful to change your fears, remembering past things, lucid dream inducing, etc.
Giordano Bruno has said to its followers that your mnemonics could become so intense, that they can become real, and starts controlling you 
. See how mnemonics can alter totally the plasticity of your brain. Hypnotherapy is nothing but altered mnemonics + visualization. Unfortunately, psychology have ignored this until now.
But is it helpful to hold practice sessions in this way?
It is helpful to remember past events in you life.
But if you interest is using this for memory, just practice the memory palace method.
It’s just so hard to do. Really difficult things tend to be the smartest things to do. For a short while, I was training myself to memorize decks while retaining the images of all of the previous images in the background. Now that’s hard and very tiring, but after say, a year or so, shouldn’t a person should be able to retain the deck order better? It would be as if they would have less need to review, since they already got to stare at the image for so long; not to mention the extra connections that it would make. I talked to Boris about this. I just assumed that for someone who has been using 52 loci at a time for a decade would certainly have the images retained in the background. His response was “Never. Neither in memorization nor review.” Hmm, can’t help but think that skill would make anyone better. Wow, so nobody here actually does exercises to hone their visualization abilities specifically…?
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Hey there. You wrote a message asking about my poetry memorizing on a challenges thread. It’s connected with this thread, so I thought I’d discuss both there.
I have given quite a bit of thought recently to visualization and ways of making it more powerful. It matters for me because I am using paintings to remember poetry, and i have found that the paintings fade quite quickly. Here’s my basic technique in a nutshell:
I find a book of paintings (300-500 prints – the big art books are the best and color prints are better than black and white). Then I work through the paintings from the start, placing lines of poetry onto images within the paintings. I’ve been moving toward a standard 8 loci per painting. The trick is to come up with good associations between images within the paintings and the words of the poetry. As a quick example, there’s a painting called “Cupid and Psyche” by Francois Gerard. It happened to be the painting that I was using to memorize a few lines from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Whitman. There’s a passage in the poem, “Who knows but I am enjoying this / Who knows for all the distance but I am as good as looking at you now for all you cannot see me.”
I’ve got Psyche “enjoying this” (Cupid’s hand on her breast) and there’s a wonderful space between his other hand and the back of her head (“for all the distance”) and then she is “looking at you now” (looking at the viewer" and Cupid cannot see me (the viewer) because his eyes are closed.
That’s an example of the sort of coincidence that makes this fun, best case scenario matching up of image and word. A lot of the time it doesn’t work that well, though, and it’s hard to keep the images vivid.
So I have been trying to work on creating a separate system for making the paintings vivid in my mind, keeping the colors and the proportion firm fixed.
I had the same trouble when I tried to memorize chess games a few months back. I thought I could visualize the entire board with the pieces spaced out right if I worked at it, but I never could. Then I ran across a chess book which was trying to teach students to memorize chess positions, and the writer said that students shouldn’t try to create a mirror image of the board and pieces, that visualization doesn’t work that way. Instead, remember segments of the board, 4-to-9 squares at a time and try to keep in mind how the relationships among the pieces change as the game progresses.
I find it very difficult to create vivid visualizations. It’s more schematic for me. I’m trying to work on heightening colors and fine-tuning my inner sense of spatial proportions, but it’s hard and I’m not sure the mind works that way.
I’m really interesting in talking more about this, but I don’t want to write a novel here.
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That’s a very interesting idea. I added it to the top of the Artificial Memory Palaces page in the wiki.
Do you have a list of paintings that you find work well?
EDIT: I added a new wiki page for listing ideas of paintings/drawings/sculptures that people could start with.
Everyone is interested in new techniques, so feel free to make posts as long as you want. 
Besides the forum, every user also gets a blog and access to edit the wiki. (I can create wiki-editing accounts on request.)
Hi Josh Good day!
I would like just to share what I have been doing for this past few years I would like to request to add this on memory places. I have been using objects as memory places. I use different objects as many as I can then, I arrange them alphabetically or by continuity. for instance, let say you have a spoon what do you think comes to mind? fork, right next, to that knife, right. next, plate and so on. then what I do; I give them stops or points; so lets, say spoon it has five to six points to me defending on what kind of spoon you have in mind or object you already got association with. next, what I do I just associate the images I wanted to remember, let say balloon; chair; gloves;pants and shoes. then I attach those images to the spoon I make the parts bigger let say I attach balloon to the tip of the spoon next, chair to the convex part of the spoon next gloves to the middle of the spoon and so on. sometimes I make them move or give them actions. to remember some other objects I would like to attach to the spoon like fork and knife and plate I just link those objects together and I attach the first object which is the spoon to a loci to make it last for a very long time. I review it a couple of times to cement the whole things together and don’t get mix up as the down side of the linking method.
There, I thinki that is all I hope I am able to add something to our community.
You have a wonderful day ahead of you.
Mike/ Philippines
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Interesting idea. I’ve split your comment off into a new thread, since I think this will be an interesting discussion, but slightly different from the posts above. I’ll reply in the other thread.
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