I’ve been a music teacher for a decade and a serious classical pianist. One thing I found over time was that for me, music is kinetic. When I listen to classical music, I feel vastly more engaged and connected to it if I can sit in my chair and conduct it (creatively, not like a metronomic baton-waver), or dance to it, and try to also express the emotion on my face. It helps me gain a spatial sense of the music. After I’d gotten lots of practice at that, I was eventually able to get the same effect with smaller and smaller movements, until finally I could go there without having to actually move. If you try it, I’d be curious to hear if it works for you.
It takes a conscious act of will to engage my visual imagination while reading, and I can easily go many months of intensive daily study without hardly activating it at all (which is NOT good). When I do engage it, though, one change I notice is that I no longer hear the words in my head, and I don’t experience the sort of locked-on stare at the text that happens when I’m not using my imagination. It’s like my eyes are resting more softly on the text, and I’m not making a conscious effort to hear every word, but rather am 75% focused on constructing a mental image or movie in my mind.
Once I get started, a lot of the movie/image just extends itself via intuition; I quickly start to realize that parts of the text are things I’m already picturing and thus can skim past, others are irrelevant to the mental movie, and others are meant to add or change something in the movie.
I’ve been a music teacher for a decade and a serious classical pianist. One thing I found over time was that for me, music is kinetic. When I listen to classical music, I feel vastly more engaged and connected to it if I can sit in my chair and conduct it (creatively, not like a metronomic baton-waver), or dance to it, and try to also express the emotion on my face. It helps me gain a spatial sense of the music. After I’d gotten lots of practice at that, I was eventually able to get the same effect with smaller and smaller movements, until finally I could go there without having to actually move. If you try it, I’d be curious to hear if it works for you.
It takes a conscious act of will to engage my visual imagination while reading, and I can easily go many months of intensive daily study without hardly activating it at all (which is NOT good). When I do engage it, though, one change I notice is that I no longer hear the words in my head, and I don’t experience the sort of locked-on stare at the text that happens when I’m not using my imagination. It’s like my eyes are resting more softly on the text, and I’m not making a conscious effort to hear every word, but rather am 75% focused on constructing a mental image or movie in my mind.
Once I get started, a lot of the movie/image just extends itself via intuition; I quickly start to realize that parts of the text are things I’m already picturing and thus can skim past, others are irrelevant to the mental movie, and others are meant to add or change something in the movie.