Creative visualization

Creative visualization is the cognitive process of purposefully generating visual mental imagery, with eyes open or closed, simulating or recreating visual perception, in order to maintain, inspect, and transform those images, consequently modifying their associated emotions or feelings, with intent to experience a subsequent beneficial physiological, psychological, or social effect, such as expediting the healing of wounds to the body, minimizing physical pain, alleviating psychological pain including anxiety, sadness, and low mood, improving self-esteem or self-confidence, and enhancing the capacity to cope when interacting with others. Creative visualization is the cognitive process of purposefully generating visual mental imagery, with eyes open or closed, simulating or recreating visual perception, in order to maintain, inspect, and transform those images, consequently modifying their associated emotions or feelings, with intent to experience a subsequent beneficial physiological, psychological, or social effect, such as expediting the healing of wounds to the body, minimizing physical pain, alleviating psychological pain including anxiety, sadness, and low mood, improving self-esteem or self-confidence, and enhancing the capacity to cope when interacting with others. The notion of a 'mind's eye' goes back at least to Cicero's reference to mentis oculi during his discussion of the orator's appropriate use of simile. In this discussion, Cicero observed that allusions to 'the Syrtis of his patrimony' and 'the Charybdis of his possessions' involved similes that were 'too far-fetched'; and he advised the orator to, instead, just speak of 'the rock' and 'the gulf' (respectively) — on the grounds that, 'The eyes of the mind are more easily directed to those objects which we have seen, than to those which we have only heard.' The concept of 'the mind's eye' first appeared in English in Chaucer's (c.1387) Man of Law's Tale in his Canterbury Tales, where he tells us that one of the three men dwelling in a castle was blind, and could only see with 'the eyes of his mind'—namely, those eyes 'with which all men see after they have become blind.'. The brain is capable of creating other types of mental imagery, in addition to visual images, simulating or recreating perceptual experience across all sensory modalities, including auditory imagery of sounds, gustatory imagery of tastes, olfactory imagery of smells, motor imagery of movements, and haptic imagery of touch, incorporating texture, temperature, and pressure. Notwithstanding the ability to generate mental images across sensory modalities, the term 'creative visualization' signifies the process by which a person generates and processes visual mental imagery specifically. However, creative visualization is closely related to, and is often considered as one part of, guided imagery. In guided imagery, a trained practitioner or teacher helps a participant or patient to evoke and generate mental images that simulate or re-create the sensory perception of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, movements, and touch, as well as imaginative or mental content that the participating subject experiences as defying conventional sensory categories. Nonetheless, visual and auditory mental images are reported as being the most frequently experienced by people ordinarily, in controlled experiments, and when participating in guided imagery, with visual images remaining the most extensively researched and documented in scientific literature. All mental imagery, including the visual images generated through creative visualization, can precipitate or be associated with strong emotions or feelings.