Vision in my head

[franceslievens]

Ever since I was a kid I used to remember things because I visualised them in my head. I have never done this consciously as part of some mnemonic trick. I just did it. Song lyrics were black and white abstract figures, and by recalling these figures I was able to sing complete songs of which my sister (three years older than me) could hardly remember the chorus.

But that's only a small story to tell. A big part of my everyday life is so strongly visualised that I didn't realise I did this until recently. Since I learned the names of the months, the days of the weeks, the hours of the day, I have visualised these inside my head. I have this built-in, black and white, three-dimensional calendar, I use whenever someone wants to make an appointment. It looks a bit like iCal, but better, because this one has a decade-view as well, and because of the black and white and the 3D (it folds after a decade) I get a quick overview of time-lapses. Over time I have become so handy in using this, that when a date is mentioned I will immediately put it on the appropriate place in my virtual calendar – noticing when doing this how long ago something has happened and in which period of that year.

I had been conscious of the existence of a year-view in my head before. It's very much based upon the schoolyear with rifts between the different parts of the year made by Christmas break, Easter break and Summer holidays. When I started studying I wondered whether I would be able to keep that visualisation of the schoolyear when I started working. Working people have less breaks. Why would I need a visual representation of the schoolyear then, I wondered. Maybe the whole thing is the reason I'm working as a teacher nowadays.

And then there's calculus, which I do in exact the same way as searching for dates in my brain. I visualise numbers to subtract and add up. I didn't even realise this until trying to explain something to a kid at school. Now I wonder: is there anyone else with strange visuals inside their head – and this without added substances?

Comments

[comava.livejournal.com]

That sounds so impressive! I have trouble even imagining how such mental visuals would work. It seems like it'd be an awful lot of effort to keep track of what happened when, and to be able to remember everything.

(Although I do try to keep track of things as well, I'm meticulous in writing in my paper journal but that's partly because I'm well aware that my memory fails me for such things. I don't want to forget and it's so much fun to read old entries and reminisce.)

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really work in that way. I do forget loads of stuff, it's just when I'm working with dates and times in my head, that I have this mental picture of it, a representation of what time looks like as it were. It is true that the picture is a bit more elaborate where it concerns the almost three decades I've lived, and is much more vague on everything that predates my first memories.

I've also got a written journal. I wish I could be so meticulous with it, but it's more a means of writing down impressions I can't get out of my system otherwise than a log of what I've been doing.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I wish I had a calendar like that in my head - I've got absolutely no concept of weeks and months and need a paper calendar to find out whether a given date is next week or the week after that. Mental arithmetic is definitely not my strongpoint!

Strangely enough, I'm sort of okay at remembering what I did in which year, but there are no calendar visuals attached to this. I wonder whether you could either 'teach' this to someone or 'teach' it to yourself. It would be very handy!

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Mental arithmetic isn't my strongpoint either, but that's because I never bothered about it. I'm quite accurate, but am horribly slow, because I hardly need it.

I haven't consciously "taught" myself this strategy, but I have consciously elaborated on it, e.g. when I realised you could find out correct dates for next week's days by adding seven to today's date I started implementing that.
I don't know if anyone would find this thing handy. It does remind me of people remembering elaborate lists by placing all items on them inside their house and then retrieving them afterwards. This is a well-known mnemonic trick that gets taught to people. But there are indeed people who think up that mnemonic trick by themselves.

I do find renaissance mental systems very interesting, probably because I use one myself.