Boost Your Imagination
by Odds BodkinTry this to test your Mind's Eye strength. Visualize a snowy mountain peak and hold it in your imagination until the image fizzles out.
How long did you hold the mountain's image? A couple of seconds? Ten seconds? A minute maybe? You've just informally tested your Mind's Eye stamina. The longer you held the image, of course, the greater your stamina.
Now, try this quick retest. Imagine you are riding in a helicopter, and it is flying around the same snowy mountain peak. Try to move through the picture, imagining details — outcrops, cols, various rock faces, avalanches. Fly over the mountain. Zoom in close.
How long did you hold it this time? If you are like many people, you will have shown marked improvement. The image projects itself for a longer time. And therein lies a secret to becoming a better storyteller for your children: Imagination thrives on motion. It grooves when it moves. The more like a movie your act of imagining is, the longer you can sustain it, work with it, and find new ideas radiating from it. And that will make you a better storyteller.
In fact, the Mind's Eye is a lot like the human eye when it comes to this motion business. Since the Seventies, perceptual psychologists have known that our eyes jiggle constantly. These oscillations are called saccadic motion and without them people would go blind with their eyes wide open. That's right. If your eyes aren't free to jiggle, you can't see.
Psychologists discovered this by holding people's eyeballs still with little clamps. I know it sounds like something from a Marilyn Manson video, but actually, it was done painlessly, on volunteers, and the results were astonishing. Subjects immediately go blind.Their visual field turns to gray. But, take the clamps off and — voila! The world reappears.
The Mind's Eye is similar. Without motion, your imaginary world disappears. At least a little more quickly. So give it a try. Who knows, if nothing else, you may end up with a good story about a helicopter crash on a mountain peak, and how the survivors, sliding down the slopes, avoided avalanches by keeping their eyes wide open. And moving.
