Ian Robertson - Opening the Minds Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See

Opening the Minds Eye

ALSO BY IAN ROBERTSON

Mind Sculpture: Unlocking Your Brains Untapped Potential

How Images and Language Teach Us How to See

IAN ROBERTSON

St. Martins Press New York

OPENING THE MINDS EYE . Copyright 2002 by Ian Robertson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robertson, Ian H.

Opening the minds eye : how images and language teach us how to see / Ian Robertson. 1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: The minds eye. London : Bantam, 2002.

ISBN 0-312-30657-1

1. Imagery (Psychology) 2. Visualization. I. Title.

BF367 .R63 2003

153.3'2dc21

2002151155

First published in Great Britain in 2002 under the title The Minds Eye by Bantam Press.

First U.S. Edition: March 2003

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents, Anne and John Robertson, with love and thanks

... and also to my dear Fiona, my children, Deirdre, Ruairi, and Niall, and my brother, Jim

My sincere thanks to Sally Gaminara and Simon Thorogood of Transworld Publishers for their help and enthusiasm while writing this book, and also to my agent Felicity Bryan and her assistant Michele Topham. Without the coal fires, scalding coffee, and consoling rock buns of Bewleys Caf in Westmoreland Street in Dublin, I would not have survived the early morning prework writing sessions there that produced this book.

The Vividness of Visual Imagery questionnaire in Child by Lorna Selfe (1977), page 17, by permission of the publisher Academie Press. Reproduction of the croquet figure on page 76 is by permission of Psychonomic Society Publications, Memory and Cognition, Vol. 16, part 3.

Opening the Minds Eye

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

Theres a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the childrens day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves

Western societies have largely lost the ability to think in images rather than words. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book. In his poem The Cool Web, Robert Graves makes the point very elegantly, and as youll see if you read on, modern neuroscience backs him up.

Take a moment to think about the last time you ate an apple. When was it? Where were you? What kind of apple was it? It is likely that, as you did this, you relied on both words and images. But for many of you the images would have been pretty bloodless, and you probably re-created that event to a great extent with wordsOh, I think it was on Sunday, and I was in the kitchen after lunch... it was a red apple.

Now try to recall this event in a quite different way. Close your eyes and try to see the apple in your minds eye. Try to visualize its color, the blemishes on its skinthe tilt of the stalk. Now imagine feeling the appleits texture, little indentations, the odd bruise, the sheer hard, smooth roundness of it. Try to taste it next. Imagine its waxy, brittle skin yielding to your teeth, the sweet, acidy juices flowing over your tongue, the dissolving of the flesh into soft flakes, and the sensation of swallowing. Finally, hear the applethe juicy crunch as you break it with your teeth, the sound of your own chewing inside your head.

Visualizing eating an apple in this way is very different from remembering it casually as an event. Its as different as someone telling you about the taste of some exotic tropical fruit compared with tasting it yourself. Yet it is the nature of words that they tend to transform experiences into a rather bloodless code that can starve our brains of the rich images that wordless imagining can evoke.

Its artificial, of course, to separate words and images like this. Poems like The Cool Web work precisely because the words trigger images as well as other word-thoughts. Yet most of us, most of the timeat work, home, watching TV, reading newspapers, studying, sitting in a traffic jamdont think in images nearly enough. Why should we? Language is the great achievement of evolutionan essential ingredient in what makes human beings unique on the planet. But there are costs to the way we have grown dependent on the spoken and written word.

Imagery consists of the mental sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and other bodily sensations that we can re-create with incredible vividness in that private, infinite universe within our skulls. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe and it has the most incredible abilities, some of whichlike imageryare underused.

Imagery is important, but in Western culture, language is king. In school we steadily wrap our childrens brains in the cool web of languageit would be terrible if we didnt, but there is a cost to everything. By neglecting imagery we risk the withering of a whole set of quite remarkable mental capacities. In this book I will give you the scientific evidence to back up these arguments, but I will also give you many exercises in imagery to try out. These exercises are designed to illustrate how the minds eye works and to help you assess how well you can use it and what effects using it can have on your mind and body.

Children think mostly in images before word-dominated school clouds their minds eye. Thats why this book begins where Robert Gravess poem beginswith the childs mind and its sometimes joyful, sometimes terrifying, image-filled world, untamed by words. Why do most of us lose this powerful way of thinking as we grow up? And why is it we remember so little from before the age of four?

One consequence of the clouding over of the minds eye is that we only see a fraction of what is before our eyes. Most of the time we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what our brains expect rather than the sensations themselves. Much modern art tries to shock or surprise us out of these image-clouding mental habits into seeing more purely with the minds eye, uncluttered by well-worn categories and labels. When we cultivate imagery and visualization in the minds eye, we use parts of our brain that are not triggered by verbal thoughts. But the moment we speak or think in words, we sabotage this power of the minds eye. Ill show you in , for example, how self-professed but amateur wine connoisseurs cant tell wines apart if they talk about the wine while drinking it, but they can if they stay silent and let the taste imagery linger in their mind, unfettered by words.