It seems logical that being good at visualization would help one with with ESP (e.g. § Remote Viewing), but is that so?
# Pros
- If one is able to easily see images in their head, they might be better at catching weak psychic images.
- Clear and stable imaginary images can allow one to distinguish psychic info more easily.
- Imaginary dowsing
- On psiarcade.org, there is a find-the-hidden-picture game where there is one card among the five that has a picture on the other side. A hit is scored if you guess correctly, and there are 10 trials per round.
- I tried ‘imaginary dowsing’, where I tried to visualize the five cards laying down and holding a pendulum over every card starting from the left, with the intention that if the pendulum goes over the card with the image, it will start moving and jumping sporadically.
- Due to me having a low-to-average visualization ability, it was hard to control the visualization. The cards often faded out of focus or started moving away on their own. Sometimes I’d also doubt myself like ‘did the pendulum just move or not’, and then it would start moving above every card or none. My attempts were just hovering
- But at my 3rd or 4th attempt, I was very relaxed and the visualization was especially clear. I could visualize all five cards and the pendulum, and very calmly move the pendulum over the cards without losing my focus, and it would be very calm one moment and then jump when it went over a card, instead of the more ambiguous visuals I got previously. This round, I got 5 out of 10 trials correct (p < 0.03).
- Glowing cards
- I was trying a game where there are 10 cards laid out on the table, all of them from a red suit except one black card. The task was to find where the black card was.
- My strategy here was to try to visualize the layout of the cards and ask my subconscious to make the black card glow up.
- It was hard to keep all the 10 cards in their place. The glow would also be unstable and move around, often glowing up multiple cards at once.
- Again, once the visualization was more stable, so was the glow, and this time it was correct as well.
- These experiences tell me that strong visualization can definitely help in some cases of ESP or intuition.
- Imaginary dowsing
# Cons
- Having a good visualization could contribute to more noise in your brain, since strong visualization ability could make your imagination overtake actual psychic data.
- A person without a good visualization ability could be better able to distinguish imagination and psychic data, since psychic imagery often comes in a surprisingly strong flash of visuals that will leave you surprised.
- Counter: Good visualization might make you catch more of these flashes.
# Research
- https://www.spr.ac.uk/research/current-research-projects “Dr Lance Storm will conduct a study of imagery-cultivation impact on phenomenological and paranormal experience.”