How to Train Yourself to Visualize Anything (6 Simple Tips & Habits)

Mental imagery is a very cool skill - it basically gives you your own personal whiteboard/television to visually play out whatever thoughts you feel the need to play - whether it be a sequence of chess moves, a solution idea for a difficult problem, or something completely unrelated.

This video covers why it's so cool and what you can do to get better at it.

yes, i am proud of this thumbnail

Sources (not exhaustive, and also not really used much):

Music (in order; in a loop):

Local Forecast - Slower by Kevin MacLeod
License: [yt dislikes this link, removed]

Sunset On Terra by HYBRID V (Creative Commons License)

Sthlm Sunset by Ehrling
(not exactly sure how to credit, the link is dead)

Dreams by Bensound

This Is For You (Prod. by Lukrembo)

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - hook
01:04 Intro - why it's so useful
02:18 About me
03:11 The tips (video structure)
03:27 Tip 1 (short-term)
04:48 Tip 2 (short-term)
05:52 Tip 3 (short-term)
06:40 Tip 4 (long-term)
07:35 Tip 5 (long-term)
08:37 Tip 6 (long-term)
09:32 Conclusion

[kam]

Studied maths, started programming professionally, have aphantasia. I wish I could experience just a glimpse of what someone with a logical mind with great visualisation skills experiences. I tend to do a lot of work in my head, even compared to people who can visualise well, but when it comes to keeping track of things like chess pieces or shapes of graphs I'm hopeless :(

[vaanya]

short term:

1. focus on the particulars at first (short term memory is limited)
2. think in 3D (expand, distort images/shift POVs)
3. work with physical objects - *vocalise the visualised*

long term:

4. gradual TRANSITION from physical to mental imagery
5. LOOK DEEP: explore, recognise, edit, expand
6. PRACTICE SPEED- time constraints, recall

[surf]

Need part 2 - explain your process of building a model of a programming problem into your brain, and describe how you mentally hold and organize the info in your head (what does it look like, and how are the different constituents of the problem organized, where are they placed in your mind etc). Lets really dig into this.

[nauka]

Also tips on memory retention/space hack for limited short term memory: Make it simple. Do chunking, chunk things with patterns, declutter, pattern, and familiarize the stuff you're trying to visualize. Reading books but having it visualized also helps with visualization/mental image. Just visualize daily, and make it simple and fun!

[vymague]

As an older guy, I got into the board game Go/Baduk during the pandemic. I used a problem book series for kids. It starts with simple 1-move capturing problems, the basic rules of the game. But after going through a few books, took ~1-2 months, my ability to visualize longer sequence of moves, like 10+ moves, improved drastically. The image is very clear on my head that it's kinda scary. I didn't use the board, I did everything on my head. Even though I was just doing comparatively easy problems for beginners, it actually allows me to solve much harder problems too. Because I can visualize and hold things in memory quite clearly. I'm not sure my point of sharing it. I guess, just try it. Perhaps with a chess book, like try to solve the problems in your head. Playing blindfold or (re)playing a whole game in your head perhaps can be very difficult to achieve, but attaining obvious improvement in your visualization ability is very doable imo.

edit: Looks like youtube filtered/hid my replies below. They're nothing important though.

[PaulMacklinAmazing]

I trained as an artist and have been working in 2-D and 3D all my life. There’s absolutely no doubt that you can develop the skill of thinking and expressing yourself in multiple dimensions and you do it by learning to see, imagine and draw and learning to sculpt in either a physical or digital world. The skills used in learning to draw are so transferable to other things which require you to manage and manipulate complex ideas in your imagination. Yours is a fantastic video, bravo!

[greenguythegreen]

Proffesional animator here and also an aphantasiac and among other professional artists i have met people with it. And i have come to the conclusion that it is actually cureable if you are familiar with the apple scale then i would say that i have moved from a 5 to a 4 and i know a painter that went from seeing nothing to seeing entire highly rendered full colour full texture scenes through training. For the past month i have been doing imagination training/meditaion and i have made solid progress already. Another key note is that probably the most skilled artist of our time kim Jung gi spent 2 years in military service where he could not draw and in his words he spent almost all of it drawing in his head and studying various objects.

[iqurram]

bro this is information overload. there's so much information coming at once.

[sszn]

Initially, I thought that this was something that I would struggle getting to grips with since the primary example was chess, but as a musician I noticed a massive parallel in how the logic carries over for learning a song (especially since I learn by ear). Working out note by note, then bar by bar, line by line, imagining the shape of the music, recognising/applying patterns etc. Nice vid man :)

[Thiole]

I have aphantasia, I've made personal progress on this front. If you're curious I am open to discussing this topic since I can always learn more. For context, I got up to the point of being able to visualize on a small scale, about a 0.75 on the 1-5 scale. After I'd say 20 minutes of intense warm ups. And could maintain it for about 5 minutes before needing to rest and do the warm up period all over again. To me, it felt like more trouble than it was worth. But it was an interesting experiment into my psyche.

[The_Upper_Hand]

One of the good exercises that I personally use is writing in my brain I just visualise words I hear and write down things that are important and I also wrote down math problems that are to solved mentally down in my head, this method of writing can help you with remembering things and learning new things like new languages, programming languages etc

[guardian_of_lucidity]

I've been trying to pick up blindfold Chess for 3 months now and been going about it differently, using Pokemon images representing each square. Most of files a and e are water pokemon, b and f are mostly grass, c and g fire, d and h are pokemon that start with same letter, so there is a logic behind it to aid retrieval. Cutting the board into 4 quarters, Gen 1 pokemon on bottom left quarter (Q1), Gen 2 for Q2, Gen 3 for Q3, and Gen 4 for Q4. Bottom row of each Q are legendary Pokemon, and above it are the 3 starter Pokemon and their evolutions. Then I came up with 20 something stories linking all the pokemon for each diagonal. So far I can tell you if a square is black or white, what squares are diagonally connected, and of course what pokemon belongs to each square. I can memorize a sequence of moves in exact order but can't actively keep track of possible attacks or defending pieces, basically keeping track of where all the pieces are. So my method has it's limitations. Thanks for this video going to solve the final problems I'm having to making blindfold Chess a reality for me.

[pulsarhappy]

I think the biggest missing advice is to practice on something that is directly useful for you.

Because then you will be able to leverage your new found power, which will:
- make you practice without even realizing
- but most importantly it will keep you motivated

[robertmitchel]

Speaking as a mnemonist of 2 decades, this is the best video of learning to visualize I have seen. Great job. Consider creating a training course.

[vuejs]

one of the smartest people on youtube. This is what I came here for! Outstanding sir

[dewanpretorius]

I think a useful concept is that it's easy to visualize smaller concepts, and the amount of concepts that can be viewed at once is limited (but trainable). But by learning the smaller ones first and then building bigger concepts with those, it makes it easier/ possible to think of much bigger things. i.e. you can't really think of 100 dots but you can think 9 groups of nine with an extra 9 and 1 on the side. This is why I think practice is so important and starting small is maybe not just easier, but may even be better ("establishing the fundamentals").

tdlr: if you want to visualize something large, build it out of smaller, more well established concepts.
(i.e.build a "concept pyramid": a lot of concepts linking to a single visualization through layering)

[EvanBurnetteMusic]

If visualizing is difficult for you, I would recommend a small whiteboard for quickly sketching out data and going through problems by hand. If you're not worried about getting first place it's fast enough to gain intuition. Sometimes I wake up in the wee hours of the morning where there's less visual stimulus in the environment and I'm able to visualize problems much more deeply in my mind, sometimes a problem from yesterday becomes as vivid as the dreams I have, and I can see the solution clearly. In a competitive setting I've only been able to solve 2/4 weekly contest problems in the 1&1/2 hour time limit. Sometimes I'm able to solve the third one in an extra hour or two. So maybe I can level up with some of the techniques you recommend

[MasterBrain]

🥳 Colin your channel is underrated. You are a fuc***ng genius 💯💯 No one talking about that. Thank you to share your knowledge with us. 👍👍👍

[braveheart]

I've been getting into some hemi sync meditation but having never been much of a visual thinker i struggle with the visualization bits, this helps, cheers bro !

[katrad]

Due to Aphantasia, you made me realize that I have Auditory visualization. Therefore your video has helped explain
My brain
And
Why i offen reley on
Imagination to figure out how to get through life.
Excellent thanks.