THE ARMCHAIR DREAMER

A study reveals that self-guided positive emotional imagery training has great potential to improve the everyday emotional well-being overcoming negative emotions. “The close relationship between the human imagery system and our emotions can cause deep emotional perturbations”, said Dr. Svetla Velikova of Smartbrain in Norway.

Read the full story here:

http://www.indiatimes.com/health/buzz/fedup-of-all-the-negativity-around-you-you-can-actually-train-your-brain-to-escape-from-all-the-chaos-275392.html

Cultivating a ‘memory palace’ can make long-lasting improvements to recall, say scientists, suggesting many of us have untapped memory reserves A Sherlock-like ability to put a name to a face and other prodigious feats of memory are likely to be mostly down to hours of training and using the right mnemonic techniques.

Read More – Here — Source: Ancient technique can dramatically improve memory, research suggests | Science | The Guardian

“The more an athlete can image the entire package, the better it’s going to be,” said Nicole Detling, a sports psychologist with the United States Olympic team. This is, more than ever, a multisensory endeavor, which is why the term “imagery” is now often preferred to “visualization.”

Read more…

Source: Olympians Use Imagery as Mental Training – The New York Times

You’ve been there countless times:

-enjoyed pizza
-felt a cooling breeze
-heard the sounds of a cafe
-saw your favorite vacation spot
-smelled a warm drink

We don’t need to know anymore. We don’t need to go anywhere or ask for help. We’ve got it in us. Evoking sensory memory, one-by-one is much easier and more pleasurable than you first think. It also can be done in found moments. We don’t need long imagination sessions because these experiences are not buried deep.

Reminder: This is a visualization exercise, but you are not limited to the visual.  This will become very apparent, and you will know it after you have worked with non-visual sense memories for awhile. Smells, tastes, sounds, and touch memories will really pop and be as powerful as visual memories.

The Steps

1. Decide on what sensory experience you want to call up.  It doesn’t have to anything special, just something you like, are curious about or need to know better.
2. Pick a sense you want to explore in memory. You will probably find you have a favored sense; I like sound memories first, followed by taste memories.
3. Switch gears mentally and go into your memory. You know how to do this.
4. Pull up a memory where the target sense is very active or can be very active. We may have a general memory where we know we had a sense at work, so we may need to zoom in on that sense in that scene to get the vividness we want.

General goal

Find a sensory experience and make it as vivid in your mind/heart/body as possible. Get it real.

To get good and to get it feeling real, you will need to practice this a few times a day for a few weeks. Just a couple of minutes per practice session. Enjoy.