Personal Blogs

Here's something I wrote a few years back and had forgotten about. It's an experiment you can try anywhere, when you have a few spare moments.

Equipment

Your imagination.

A stopwatch (or phone app or you can just count seconds: one hundred, one hundred-and-one, one hundred-and-two, one hundred-and-three… or get someone else to do it for you).

Background

There is no background, you must imagine it.

Preparation

Have your stopwatch (or phone app, or mental counter or helper) handy to start and stop without needing to look at it (you’ll see why shortly). Then:

READ THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW before starting the experiment.

Because for most of the time your eyes need to be closed tight shut.

I had to rehearse it myself. It’s not that hard but a dry run helps with starting and stopping the timer without breaking concentration.

Instructions

Shut your eyes and think of an elephant.

Your elephant is facing directly toward you. Picture its eyes, tusks, greyness, sturdy legs, big flapping ears.

Are you ready? Do you hold a solid four-ton elephant in your imagination?

Rehearsal

Now you must rotate your elephant.

Your mind alone must do the heavy lifting (or in this case heavy rotating). Think of yourself as using the power of thought to act on the imaginary elephant, which you have to heft round so it is now facing away from you, so you see its bum and tail.

1. Ready steady go! Mentally rotate elephant.

2. When elephant in correct orientation stop timer.

3. Open eyes and write down time.

Experiment

Now that you have conducted the rehearsal:

1. Repeat the same procedure, that is record how long you take to turn the elephant so it goes from facing you to facing away from you.

2. Do it again but with this variation: now you have to mentally rotate the elephant full circle so that at the end it looks toward you again, and note the time as before.

Results

If you are like me you find that rotating the imaginary elephant takes time! Something is happening inside your head that is like physically manipulating an object, even though there is no real object. And a full rotation of my elephant takes about – guess what – twice as long as a half-rotation. It varies but usually I take about 6 s for a half rotation, 12 for a whole turn.

Conclusion

This is not of course a rigorous scientific experiment. But it does suggest that when we move mental objects we base the imaginary movement on experience of shifting real things. There is a considerable body of research on this, involving much better experimental designs that leaves little room for doubt. Shepard and Metzler were the pioneers (scroll down to find their article).

And did you rotate your elephant to the left or right? I didn’t say which to do. Are you are left or right handed? I’d be interested if you could post a comment to tell me the two things, so we can see if there is a connection.

And does the size of an imaginary animal matter? What if you try to mentally rotate a blue whale, about 50 times bigger by weight than an elephant? Or a human, about 50 times smaller?