Week 1 Day 3

Visual Short Term Memory Training

These are the settings that I found work best for me right now, in terms of being doable while offering a decent level of challenge:

Focus Visualisation

To start with, I tried using a photo of my family that I happen to have on my desk, taken in front of a "green screen" at Seaworld last year, the background filled in with a significant amount of detail. I tried this for around 4 minutes, but was getting nowhere. I suspect two reasons for this:

• The photo was TOO personal - I kept filling in the details of my family members' faces as I expect them to look (what I normally see in my mind's eye when I think of them), rather than as they actually are in the photo.
• The ridiculous amount of detail - with essentially no real context (fake images photoshopped in behind a real image) was probably just a really bad pick to start with.

I then used the following image, and spent around 3 minutes on it at which point my eyes started to hurt too much so I left it there. 

I found I had much more success with this image. At first I wasn't really sure what to do with it... but then as I started focussing on the different areas of the image, I found myself creating links to my existing memories  - e.g. the close-up grass in the bottom right corner reminds me of the hills the Teletubbies would roll down; the tree-surrounded, grassed area higher up on the right reminded my of the cemetery where my grandfather is buried (not actually sure why - it doesn't actually look a lot like it); the cloud at the top left became a velociraptor; the snippet of ocean on the left associated with Robbie Williams singing "Beyond the Sea"; the tree in the centre made me think of a tree in a TV ad for ancestry.com.au. 

I think the next step could have been to link these together into a short story or animation, but it didn't actually occur to me to do that until writing this.

Create Visual Markers for Abstract Stuff

Did this for around 5 minutes, although that did include a bit of figuring out what it was I was supposed to actually be doing. It seemed obvious at first, but then I started wondering what this exercise was training. Reading any word that I know the meaning of, no matter how abstract it is, I have no trouble creating a vivid image in my mind to represent it. For example "assail" - I immediately imagine a guy hitting a woman (no idea why those genders) with the mast and sail from a ship. So I'm not sure whether I am particularly natural at creating markers for abstract words, or missing the point of this exercise? I guess even if I find it easy already, I can still improve this skill with practice.