Re: Inability to visualize

[Anonymous]

I’m pretty sure I have a math disorder, so that’s difficult for me to answer. I was talking about it with my husband last night, and I think many things are just a static memory (if that’s the right term, fixed in time). I know the number three looks like a bum turned sideways – adding a little humour here, but I need to get to the bottom of this 🙄 Numbers don’t really mean anything to me, they are things that I have to manipulate.

I think my schooling started to deteriorate when education moved from memorizing and repeating what the teacher wanted to hear, to conceptualizing and whatever else came next. I coasted through school but I can’t remember anything I learned.

I was reading a bit more online, mental imagery seems to be the more common term, but it’s hard to find stuff because when you use that as a keyboard, all you get are flakey sites promoting learning how to visualize yourself at a sport. Studies show that’s effective, more effective than actually practicing the sport, but if you can’t do the visualization in the first place, where do you start?

Apparently people do have differing degrees of vividness of visualizations, it’s connected to the early visual cortex of the brain (basically that area is stimulated whether you are thinking of or doing the activity) and can be objectively measured according to one study. But that doesn’t help me relate it to myself and my specific brain disorders (sleep, learning, ADHD).

Scattybird, the visualizations I’m supposed to be doing are dynamic (not fixed), not familiar places, people or events, and they are complex and get more complex and longer.

I’d like to know what my problem is, who else has it, how I can work with it to improve it (ie no meds), or should I just give up?

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