Except from: http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm
"The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined." Albert Einstein
Image Streaming promotes whole brain functioning and therefore increases brain capacity for the creative process. This technique was created by Dr. Win Wenger and his Project Renaissance. He has also written a book titled "How To Increase Your Intelligence."
Doing this exercise will open up the higher cortical brain areas and allow you to become aware of your "inner witness."
The theory here is that if you are speaking aloud an experience that you are witnessing in your mind, with your eyes closed, you are actually causing the brain to make neural connections cross-hemispherically that were previously not there. In fact, most people never combine these two abilities, that of speaking while the eyes are closed in a process of visualization. Thus, the language centres on the front left brain are never cross-linked to the optical centres on the back right brain.
This technique accomplishes that neural linking. It is also important to use a tape recorder or a live person to speak these imaginings to. Listening to your own voice record your experience is a beneficial part of the process. If practiced for about 20 minutes each day, for at least three weeks, you will notice a marked improvement in your ability to process information. Your ability to visualize will also be strengthened.
Image Streaming Technique
- 1. Sit comfortably with eyes closed.
- 2. It is best to have a live person to speak to. But if this is not possible have a tape recorder in front of you. Describe into this tape recorder every minute detail of what you are experiencing. If you are having a fantasy, describe it aloud. If you see something, describe everything about it - its shape, color, etc. If you feel a physical sensation, describe everything about it. Even if these images are nonsensical to you, verbally describe everything about them.
- 3. If you sense a smell describe it. If you are hearing anything in this picturing process describe it aloud.
- 4. Continue this description of your inner experience for approximately twenty minutes.
The focus of this exercise is to use your verbal language skills simultaneous to using your optical visualization skills. New pathways of thought will be created in the brain. By creating these new neural connections you will greatly aid your creative potential
Less than two percent of our brains are involved in conscious thinking and experiencing. This two percent associates — we consciously think — in words. I say "sky" and you think or say "blue"; I say "table" and your response is likely to be "cloth" or "leg." Most of the time when you try considering to puzzle out some concern or question, you usually subvocalize in words.
In contrast, some eighty to ninety percent of your brain associates in sensory images instead — forty to forty-five times more of your brain by volume than the parts of your brain which do your conscious, verbal thinking.
Where, then, is the greater part of your intelligence to be found? — In that two percent or in that eighty-plus percent?
Not only by the amount of brain involved. Our conscious verbal brain is trained down by the speed of the language we speak, to go much slower and more ploddingly compared with the rest of our brain. Most of the rest of our cerebral cortex, topmost region of our brain, communicates point-to-point some ten thousand times faster than do the conscious verbal parts. The main, limbic, brain associates and communicates some ten thousand times faster than does most of the cortex — ten thousand times ten thousand — ten MILLION — times faster than does your conscious verbal mind.
Even more important, only a tiny part of our memory and experience are directly accessible to conscious remembering and use — and THAT access only by heavily edited executive summaries. Most of us expend huge effort and attention to trying to store in more highly retrievable form certain portions of experience (both in and out of school), and usually "lose" or "forget" most of that anyway.
In contrast, all or very nearly all of the experiences we've ever had, conscious or unconscious, are still in our living memory, highly accessible to our unconscious sorting and associating (and still coloring our thoughts, perceptions and choices even though we are consciously unaware of them).
Everything cited to this point is well-known, verifiable fact, long familiar to science after centuries of disciplined research into mind and brain. Also widely acknowledged these past several decades is the finding and observation that apparently every conscious thought and perception and action is preceded by relevant unconscious — "pre-conscious" — brain functions.
Image-Streaming
Learn it now—your most powerful mode
of thinking and perceiving
by Win Wenger, Ph.D. http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm
